Couple to AOL: Stop searching for spammer’s gold

“A small-town New England couple says AOL’s search for a spammer’s gold on their property must be stopped.”

Years ago, back when AOL was just starting out, I read a book called “Aristoi”. It was about humanity in the far future where nano-tech gave everyone immortality and you could exist in a virtual world and the real world at the same time. It is a very good book.

Anyway, the highest level one could achieve in this sci-fi world was an “Ariste”. These people were the elite. Mega-brains… with talents unmatched amongst humanity. So, AOL became available in my town I jumped on. I had been with Quantum Link when I had my Commodore 64 so I figured AOL would be cool as there were no local online services were available. We’re talking pre-web here, folks.

I tried a couple of screen names that were taken (of course)… I got the typical error. “This screen name is already in use… please try again.” Or some such thing as that. I decided to try the name “Ariste”.

Wrong decision…

I was immediately greeted with a stern, bright red warning that I did not have any kind of Administrator access and I was going to be disconnected from the system immediately. And, I was. I was able to dial right back in and try a few more user-names until I hit one that wasn’t taken. But, it sure does seem to me now that Steve Case had aspirations far beyond being an online contect provider back in the day.

Taking over some old couple’s land so they can dig for gold doesn’t surprise me one bit. Maybe they want to use the gold to make nanites…

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