<nettime> A historical perspective on AOL Time Warner in 30 seconds

[Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca>]

A historical perspective on AOL Time Warner in 30 seconds

In many ways, the current economic development (with the AOL Time Warner
merger as the latest event) is strikingly similar to what happened in the
late 19th century in the US. A bit more than one hundred years ago, a new
market of unprecedented size had been created  by the opening of borders
(after the end of the civil war 1865). New communication technologies (the
telegraph (1844), the train, the telephone (1876), later the automobile and
the radio) allowed integrate this enormous space into a single economy and
shift the dominant mode of production from local small scale manufacturing
to new national economies of scale.

At first, there was wild, chaotic cutthroat competition which, around the
turn of the century, was resolved by the creation of what was then called
'trusts': huge mega-corporations that dominated entire industrial sectors.
Centering around the development of railroads, new industrial and service
enterprises emerged (steel: Carnegie, oil: Rockefeller, electricity:
Edison/General Electronic, finance: Morgan, telephone: Bell). In the early
days, they dominated the political landscape almost completely. Corruption,
even in the highest offices, was rampant.  Labour conflicts were fierce.
One of the best accounts of this is still Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle
(1906) [1]

It took decades to break the stronghold the trusts. In 1911 the most
mysterious and powerful of all trusts, Rockefeller's Standard Oil, was
broken up into independent companies (many of which are now merging again,
e.g. Exxon and Mobil [2]), greatly enriching Rockefeller and the other
shareholders.

Ultimately, it was the Great Depression and the Second World War which
catapulted the government on center stage as the ultimate arbiter in nearly
all economic and social conflicts (New Deal, Welfare State) .

There is no indication that history will repeat itself, nor should
analogies in some areas cover over the differences in others, but the
current development appears to follow a logic that has very little to do
with a "new" economy.


[1] http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Sinclair/TheJungle/
[2] http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/issue/23_98b/printed/int/wb/ovbz0523_1.htm


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  Les faits sont faits. http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder


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