NEW IN PIRATE WIRES: A Eulogy for Dial-Up Earlier this week, AOL said it was killing dial-up internet. And the feeling for many is bittersweet. In this piece for Pirate Wires, Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) — best known for his book Friendly Ambitious Nerd, and for essays about that ethos — eulogizes the end of an era, and what’s worth remembering. RIP AOL. RIP the sound of beeps and boops. RIP the under-optimized internet that once was. Full piece below 👇 ──────────────────── AOL — originally known as America Online — has announced that it will be discontinuing dial-up Internet on the 30th of September, 2025. Cue saving-private-ryan-aging.gif for millions of millennials mourning the end of an era, which was marked by optimism, wonder, and a genuine novelty and weirdness that may never be replicated. As her creaking, beeping bones are laid to rest, let’s take a moment to reflect on the life and times of Our Lady of Connectivity, aka dial-up internet as delivered to us by AOL. At the turn of the millennium, when the Backstreet Boys released their hit album Millennium, AOL was an absolute juggernaut, serving dialup internet access to over 20,000,000 people. (To put this into perspective, it wouldn’t be until 2014 that Millennium the album reached 12,000,000 U.S. sales.) In 1998, AOL casually bought Netscape for $4.2 billion. Two years later, it would acquire Time Warner for $168 billion. By 2003, the bubble burst, and the merged AOL Time Warner reported a $98.7 billion loss, the largest corporate loss in recorded history at the time. The advent of broadband quickly made dial-up undesirable, and AOL was left holding a very large bag full of gaping holes. In 2015, AOL was bought by Verizon for $4.4 billion — after you adjust for inflation, it means that AOL was acquired for less than AOL had acquired Netscape. But in the early days, dial-up was something special. The sound of dial-up internet, in my lifetime, once represented the fantastic world of the New Frontier, cyberspace. Its mysterious beeps, boops, and whirring static felt otherworldly. They were the literal sounds of our modems reaching out across a yawning chasm, into the uncharted, reaching for connection. You felt this sense of wonder in the metaphors used to name early internet browsers, like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Even the term “internet browser” now feels dated — what, exactly, do we browse? Where once the web was an infinite, Escherian library of wonders and curiosities, now most people’s experience has been reduced to scrolling through feeds that are curated for them by faceless algorithms. We were explorers and navigators once. We used to be logged off by default, the Internet wasn’t a filter perpetually laid over our lives. Going online was a deliberate choice to cross the threshold, to initiate that sacred sequence of beeps and static, to “dial-up.” Once you were there, on the World Wide Web, you knew your time was limited. Maybe someone needed to make a call, maybe your allotted hours were running out. It wasn’t free, either. Not a flat monthly fee, but a by-minute, or if you were lucky, hourly fee. This created a distinct atmosphere: in early chatrooms and forums, people didn’t feel like they were just “users.” They were fellow travelers on the frontier, tying up the phone lines. Not everything was over-optimized in the dial-up era of the Internet. People were new to making money online and so, making money was rare. Most people didn’t even consider it. You’d find genuine pockets of the strange almost everywhere you turned. But sometimes, you’d hit a dead end. This meant that not every adventure onto the web bore fruit, and this was a good thing. You could be bored online — falling into webrings of half-finished personal landing pages or dead chatrooms. That it took work to find the good stuff was a filtering mechanism. But the whole Internet was a filtering mechanism back then: websites, forums, chatrooms, multi-user dungeons, all of these things existed because there were people who cared enough to build, populate, and maintain them. It can be hard to explain to younger people raised in a “late stage” media environment. But there was passion here, once. Dial-up taught a generation to troubleshoot, to wait, to appreciate connection. It’s a pattern that’s played out with all sorts of technologies over the years. In the early years, the gadgets are still somewhat temperamental. If you wanted to use the technology, you’d quite probably have to learn how the parts work, what cables go where, what buttons to press in what order. As the technology matures, all those details get abstracted away, and “it just works.” This convenience is double-edged: while it’s less troublesome in the short run, in the long run it leads to a decline of fluency with the tech. Kids these days tend to expect internet connection to be a simple matter of connecting to “The Wifi,” an omnipresent entity like The Force in the Star Wars universe. And who are we to judge? We don’t expect to change the tubes in our television sets, and many of us have forgotten how to drive a stick shift. When you look at the histories of technologies, there’s often something bittersweet about it. They’re often made by optimists who want to make the world a better place. Many attempts fail. When some attempts succeed, they often have repercussions far beyond anything that was originally imagined. Telegrams lived and died in the span of a single long life, and now “Telegram” just means a messaging app. Dialup internet feels similar. These technologies become a part of our collective cultural DNA. Not entirely forgotten but yet, not the same as it once was. Soon the sound of dialup will be a curious relic of the past, like the telegram. The waves of time crash on the shores of reality, every moment precious and fleeting and making and unmaking. There’s some solace in knowing that we’re all part of a greater cycle. The era of dialup was over quite a while before this final nail in the coffin, but it will live on — partially as a nostalgic memory, partially as fragments of cultural norms that shaped how we think about connection itself. “Dial-Up Internet, beloved connector of millions and herald of the digital age, passed away peacefully on September 30th, 2025, at the age of 30. She is survived by broadband, fiber optic, and countless memories of a simpler, stranger time when the internet was still a place you went to, not a thing that followed you everywhere.” —Visakan Veerasamy