<nettime> re: AOL and TW [artlore, henwood]

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

artlore <artlore@sirius.com>
          Re: <nettime> AOL/TW: The Same Old Media Colossus
Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com>
          Re[2]: <nettime> AOL loves TIMEWARNER (4x)

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Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 12:41:59 -0700
From: artlore <artlore@sirius.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> AOL/TW: The Same Old Media Colossus

Doug Henwood wrote:


>In strict economic terms, it's hard to find any merit in the merger 
>of AOL and Time Warner. Neither produces much terribly compelling 
>media content, and their union is unlikely to change that.

There is a split between on the one hand the sheer, or is it virtual?,
economic power of a new company with twice or more the market cap of the
individual companies, and what on the other hand will surely be a new
organization twice as slow and stupid as the individual companies were.

And what of the technology? AOl's "purchase" of Time/Warner is a
content/infrastructure grab with supposedly AOl wielding the networking and
technology savvy. AOL's purchase of Netscape was much more depressing, the
death of anything interesting the Netscape may have eventually done with
technology. Clearly it was the death of Mozilla.org and the open source
browser project.

Netscape was already confused before AOL, with floundering unfinished
products, no sense of what to do. I can only imagine how confused they are
now, with clueless AOL managers.  Just imagine the bullshit merger meetings
people will have to sit through when this merger goes through; it won't be
pretty. Large mergers are really barely controlled disasters, so appealing
to the capital structure that the resultant mess seems well worth it.


>But maybe this new-old media colossus will produce an unintended 
>benefit: It could force people to return to Earth. The intellectual 
>byproduct of the bull market has been some wild mythmaking about 
>weightlessness and liberation from the constraints of the material 
>world. To listen to some enthusiasts, you'd think the triumph of the 
>Internet will bring an the end of poverty and oppression. It won't.

>I'm tempted to hope that running AOL through traditional valuation 
>models might prick the financial bubble, and with it, the 
>intellectual bubble. But maybe I'm being too irrationally exuberant.

Don't hold your breath. With their even greater capitalization, they'll
surely keep gobbling up other things, postponing any "return to earth,"
secure in a mega-market-cap cloud city, with every pension fund, many
mutual funds, and most "diversified portfolios" relying on them for daily
rain. They'll just be the weather at that point.

Cheers,

Ed Phillips

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Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2000 14:16:09 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com>
Subject: Re[2]: <nettime> AOL loves TIMEWARNER (4x)

David Casacuberta wrote:

>I agree about the danger that this merger implies and I also think
>that we should write an open letter about it.

I don't quite get this. Time Warner sucks out loud, and AOL sucks out 
loud. What is so dangerous about the union of two awful entities like 
these? Please explain. It's not like Sly Stallone is buying the 
Baffler, or anything.

Doug


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