John Ficarra was the editor of Mad magazine from 1985 to 2018.
On Tuesday, conservative commentator Mark Levin took to X to rail against AOL. It seems he was locked out of his email and spent “literally the entire day” trying to get someone at the company to unlock his account.
As you might suspect, the comments were anything but kind. Most mocked him for being a techno-troglodyte, a sad, aging boomer stuck in the land of dial-up modems and shiny AOL CDs offering 600 hours of free service. “It could be a problem with your browser,” one commenter replied. “When was the last time you updated Netscape?”
There was also this helpful gem: “Did you make sure nobody else in the house was using the landline?”
Others derisively lumped AOL Mail with such bygone technologies as Ask Jeeves, Blockbuster (Be kind, rewind), CompuServe and BlackBerrys.
Even the guy who used to announce “You’ve got mail!” every time you signed on took a hit or two. (His name was Elwood Edwards. He died two years ago, and a part of me is happy he isn’t around to see his beloved company so savagely trashed on X.)
Full disclosure: I was an employee at Time Warner in 2001 when America Online Inc. acquired TW in a $183 billion merger. To this day, this merger is considered the worst in history. By 2002, AOL Time Warner was reporting a net loss of $98 billion, some of which came from my 401(k) and the retirement plans of my fellow workers.
Nonetheless, I rise today in defense of AOL.
I’ve been using AOL Mail for a very long time. How long? I was able to get an account with my full name, without having to follow it with the year I was born, or the year my kid was born, or the number of the house I lived in growing up.
Why have I stayed? Why haven’t I kicked AOL to the curb in favor of the likes of Gmail? Nostalgia, I guess. I’m a sentimental old fool. In this fast-paced world of breaking news and IM’ing, logging on to AOL reminds me of the days when I would dial up my account and then go make a sandwich or paint the spare room, the piercing sound of the screeching modem comforting me that I was just moments — sometimes hundreds of moments — away from connecting to the information superhighway, the World Wide Web!
I’m man enough to admit that I miss the little yellow man scampering across the screen, visually announcing that I was finally connected, enabling me to check my Buddy List and see which of my friends were also online so I could immediately contact and annoy them.
But those swell days are gone, and AOL is nothing like the company it was in its nascent days. For one thing, the welcome screen has been completely retooled, now reminiscent of a design that was wildly popular around 2010.
Log on to AOL, and before you even get to your emails, you’re greeted with important news and information you just can’t find anywhere else. For example, the company behind a favorite bath mat just dropped something new that “people are obsessed with,” and there is a plethora of Christmas gifts I can purchase for my son-in-law, all for under $10! (I’ll probably still wait for the sale.)
Click on email, and dozens of messages instantly await, some even from people I know, but most from people who want to be my friend by helping me refinance my mortgage, claim unused Medicare benefits or increase my sexual prowess.
Writing an email on AOL has never been easier! AOL offers a staggering seven different fonts, from nearly illegible 8-point Modern to 36-point Lucida Console, perfect for communicating with your legally blind relatives.
Sure, there are still some glitches to be worked out, such as how when you cut and paste from a Word doc, AOL changes the font and formatting, making your email virtually indecipherable to the person you’re sending it to. And how an email you’ve spent the last hour composing sometimes just disappears, never to be seen again.
But these are minor inconveniences to be expected with any new technology. I’m sure Bending Spoons, the Italian tech company that currently owns AOL, is hard at work trying to solve these pesky problems.
So let the naysayers have their day. I, along with 30 million other active users, am sticking with AOL! It’s a great company that achieved something that, until today, I thought was impossible. It proved that Mark Levin and I have something in common: an active AOL account — except mine still works.
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