You're finally free!

By "you," I mean anyone who has spent the last 19 years on hold, trying to cancel AOL.

AOL shut down its dial-up internet service on Tuesday, and if you just heard a garbled, screeching sound in your head, congratulations: you’re old enough to remember.

I was definitely an AOL dial-up customer back in the day. We all were, really. At its peak, AOL had more than 20 million users—which in the late 1990s basically meant everyone who was anyone online.

You remember the sound. That drowning-robot cacophony of computerized tones as the modem tried to connect through your phone line. And then, if you were lucky and nobody picked up the landline downstairs, you’d hear it: “Welcome! You’ve Got Mail!”

That chipper, vaguely mechanical voice became so iconic it inspired a Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romantic comedy.

Imagine Netflix greenlighting a movie today called “Push Notification.”

My brother lived with me during the dial-up years, and his outgoing voicemail message used to say, “We’re either on the phone, or on the Intanet.”

The Intanet.

I used to tease him for that accent; we’re from Rhode Island but we don’t usually drop our R’s like that. But, honestly? He wasn’t wrong. We really were either on the phone or on the Intanet, because you genuinely couldn’t do both at the same time.

Here’s a fun bit of trivia: Cyber Monday exists because of AOL-style dial-up.

After Black Friday, all those people whose only access to high-speed internet was at work would return to their offices the following Monday and finally be able to shop online without waiting 45 minutes for a single page to load. Thus, a shopping holiday was born.

Now dial-up has gone the way of 8-track tapes and actual film in cameras—relics of a bygone era that younger people will never experience firsthand.

AOL itself merged with Time Warner in 2000 in what was then the largest corporate deal in history, valued at $350 billion.

By 2021, it sold for $5 billion. I’m not going to claim to be the best businessperson ever, but I don’t think that’s good.

But here’s my favorite part of the AOL story: the original cancel culture.

Long before that term meant something else entirely, in 2006, a guy named Vincent Ferrari called AOL to cancel his service.

He was subjected to a Kafkaesque nightmare of a customer service rep refusing to let him go. The rep kept asking why he wanted to cancel, what he didn’t like, what AOL could do differently—everything except actually canceling the account.

Vincent recorded the whole thing and it went viral. (If you enable images, you should be able to see the link below this line.)

According to recent Census data, about 163,000 people in the U.S. still rely on dial-up internet, mostly in rural or remote areas where broadband isn’t available or is prohibitively expensive. But only a few thousand of those were still AOL customers.

Which brings me to my final thought: Somewhere out there, I wonder if there’s someone who was unable to cancel their dialup, and who finally succeeded—because AOL dial-up simply ceased to exist.

Congratulations, whoever you are. You’re finally free.

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7 other things worth knowing

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slammed “fat generals” and diversity initiatives during a rare gathering of top U.S. military commanders, and warned that they should resign if they do not support his agenda. Afterward, President Trump floated the idea of using deployments to U.S. cities as “training grounds for our military.” The remarks by Hegseth, a former Fox News personality, and Trump, a former reality television star, had a made-for-TV element to them after nearly all U.S. generals and admirals were summoned on short notice to the event. (Reuters)

• The White House declared an imminent government shutdown as of 12:01 a.m. this morning, after the Senate failed to pass a spending bill to keep federal agencies funded through Nov. 21. Democrats and Republicans each blamed the other. (Fox News)

• About 22 million Americans who get health insurance via the Affordable Care Act marketplace will see their premiums more than double (114%) in 2026, according to an analysis published Tuesday by KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group, because government subsidies are set to expire. Democrats say this is the main issue holding up a deal to avert or end the government shutdown. (CNBC)

• House Republican leaders refused to swear in a Democrat from Arizona who won a special election, and who would become the 218th and final “yes” vote needed to force a vote on releasing the “Epstein files.” Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva won in a landslide in the race to replace her father, who had held the seat but died earlier this year. (The Hill)

• American comedians are defending their decisions to play in Saudi Arabia. “So what, they have slaves?” asked Tim Dillon in a podcast segment that led to his firing from the festival. “They’re paying me enough money to look the other way.” Pete Davidson offered a similar take, acknowledging that people have asked him why, given his father’s death on 9/11, he would take a paycheck from the Saudi government. (The Guardian)

• Charlie Javice, 33, the founder of a startup company called “Frank” that promised to revolutionize the way college students apply for financial aid, was sentenced Monday to more than seven years in prison for cheating JPMorgan Chase out of $175 million by greatly exaggerating how many students it served. Javice made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. (CNN)

• The skateboard that Tony Hawk used to make history in 1999 has sold for a record-breaking $1.15 million, according to a statement from Julien’s Auctions. The deck, called the Birdhouse “Falcon 2,” was used by Hawk to land the first-ever 900 trick — a 2-and-a-half-turn trick few skateboarders dare to try — at the 1999 San Francisco X Games. (Mississippi Daily Journal)

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