“AOL thought people wanted a curated menu of content picked and produced by professionals. But the internet is most alluring and addictive when it's open and chaotic and a little out of control. That's why the companies that ended up running the internet mostly provided the infrastructure. They built the stages and we filled them.”

…meant for just one person. AOL bet that the internet was essentially social, and they were right. You can still feel this in the architecture of the internet today. Reddit is just a large-scale version of forums. Discord is just a private chat room. 30 years later, the thing that keeps us online is the thing that AOL Disc sold us, the ability to find each other. The other half they got wrong. AOL thought people wanted a curated menu of content picked and produced by professionals. But the internet is most alluring and addictive when it's open and chaotic and a little out of control. That's why the companies that ended up running the internet mostly provided the infrastructure. They built the stages and we filled them. As I was writing the story, another massive corporate merger is front page news. And again, in this case, one half of the merger is Warner Brothers, this time being consumed by Paramount Skydance, an $81 billion merger that's owned in part by the Ellisons and American Business Dynasty and the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. What we do know are deal dollar amounts…