He was the last person I expected to see in a Gap ad. But there he was, staring up from the pages of Newsweek. Not some hip, young artist in a black t-shirt, or Ernest Hemingway in a photo appropriated by an ad director who never got past the first chapter of The Sun Also Rises, but a bland, lumpy-looking young executive, crouched on some vaguely postmodern piece of furniture, wearing khakis.
For many denizens of the Internet, AOL’s hip reputation in the real world is something of a mystery. To them, AOL is simply an overhyped, overpriced internet provider with cutesy graphics and onerous restrictions, and its users are not representatives of a cybersavvy, cutting-edge elite, but clueless “newbies” too stupid to find a better deal. Hatred of the company and its users runs surprisingly deep. Many on the net see an “aol.com” at the end of an E-mail address as evidence of ignorance, loutishness and worse.
Have the IQ of Bungcheese
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Like many Newsgroups devoted to the art of “flaming”–a sort of electronic cross between a parliamentary debate and a street brawl–alt.aol-sucks has its kooks, and group discussions often takes on a surrealistic air. A few regulars have been known to post surreptitiously from alternate accounts, posing as particularly obnoxious AOLers to provoke the others; perhaps hungry for attention, a few have even been known to indulge in elaborate flame wars with themselves. A few prankish hackers have also taken to distributing a program called AoHell, designed to help novice troublemakers disrupt life on AOL as much as possible; among other things, it has allowed them to generate credit card numbers that get them endless streams of free ten-hour trials.
Now plenty of things in the world that suck, from the Ebola virus to America’s Funniest Home Videos. And AOL isn’t the only on-line service to offer itself up as a conduit to the internet. Delphi, a provider based in Boston, has offered a rudimentary access for years. CompuServe and Prodigy both offer access to Usenet and some other features of the Internet. AOL isn’t even the most costly of the bunch–special features on CompuServe can run costs up to $22.80 per hour.
In his letters to members Cast talks often about “community.” To his critics this seems to be the sheerest hypocrisy–since, in their minds, AOL is one of the gravest threats the wider Net community has ever seen. But for many of AOL’s users Case’s words ring true. They’ve found a community of a sort in AOL–not only a simple, easy-to-use connection to on-line resources but a place to meet and chat with other “regular people” like themselves. All this has made AOL undeniably attractive to new users, and the service continues to grow at astonishing rates. Two years ago, AOL had only 300,000 members; today it has 3 million.
Ruppert has a point. For the true Internet afficionado, who typically has little interest in most of its non-Net offerings, AOL is not a good deal: it charges more than the typical local internet provider for services that are often slow and sometimes impossible to access. Anyone who has logged onto AOL in the last few months has faced busy signals or been disconnected or been unable to use even the most basic AOL features (“For some reason the host has failed to respond. Please continue”). At times E-mail, which is supposed to offer nearly instantaneous communication around the world, has been delayed for several days. And AOL responds slowly, if at all, to complaints. (When I complained about being unable to access Usenet newsgroups the help staff took five days to respond with a vaguely worded and useless reply.) AOL President Steve Case fills his official pronouncements with vague evasions, barely acknowledging the problems that everyone knows are there and offering nebulous assurances that they will soon be a thing of the past.
