David Foster Wallace

In a New Yorker profile of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Ken Auletta takes a close look at the new AOL and its big project, Patch.com, the hyper-local journalism site that hired more than 900 reporters in 2010. Patch is in an integral part of Armstrong’s energetic reinvention of AOL as a content producer, an effort that also recently produced a complete redesign of the AOL homepage.

In an odd twist, Auletta compares Armstrong’s goals at AOL to a vision of the Internet set out way back in 1996 by David Foster Wallace, who noted:

There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99 percent of them are shit, and it’s too much work to do triage to decide. So it’s very clear, very soon there’s gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers… Because otherwise we’re gonna spend 95 percent of our time body-surfing through shit.

But was Wallace right about the Internet? Sure, there are gatekeepers today—AOL among them—but, Auletta speculates, “young Internet users don’t require AOL elves to help them navigate the Internet. Older users who do need guides are not the people most advertisers want to reach.” The result for AOL is deep uncertainty and a potential crash. According to Auletta, “As AOL struggles with old stuff, its competitors are pushing ahead with new stuff.”