View From a Height

AT&T, RIP

Rome has fallen, defeated by its offspring. It may be a few years before the symbols of Empire are sent east for good, but for now, the barbarians are inside the walls, doing their will.

I've always had a hard time romanticizing even the great corporations, but if ever there were a Rome, it was AT&T. It grew up like Rome, squashing competitors in their cradles. At one point, it was the biggest company in the world. And it owned virtually the entire phone system, from your mouthpiece to your friend's earpiece. You didn't own your phone, you leased it. But the system, rollerskates and all, worked.

Then, it kinda stopped working so well. AT&T got a little fat, and a little arrogant, and sometime in the 50s, people started referring to "the damn phone company," and it wasn't so much fun to walk over to your neighbors' to call when your service went out. Nichols & May did a side-splitting, roll-on-the-floor-laughing sketch about trying to get a number from Information, and losing your dime(!) in the process. (It occurs to me now that this comedy sketch is probably completely incomprehensible to anyone born after 1985.)

My mom starting running the scissors through the old computer punchcard bill you had to return with your check, just to make the people at the damn Phone Company enter the numbers by hand.

It didn't help. As AT&T entered the Late Imperial Phase, it started to get more rigid, more arrogant. It tried to protect what it couldn't, and then it actually felt a little relieved when the Baby Bells broke away (or were broken away, really). After all, hadn't long distance subsidized local service for years?

They never did find a model that worked, even as they entered new markets. They even went through a little Justinian revival, reconnecting with local phone service via cable until some judge put an end to that, too. But really, if AT&T wasn't AT&T any more, what was the point, anyway?

It's finally over. And yet, in another way, it's only starting.