An Internet for the People

The Politics and Promise of craigslist

Jessa Lingel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691235615, 9780691188904
• eBook ISBN: 9780691199887
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Social Sciences

How craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web

Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn't profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love—and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web.

Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site's history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist's legal history, describing the company's courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet.

Part I

What exactly is craigslist and where did it come from? What technologies did it disrupt and what happens when its politics are challenged? The chapters in part I provide background on how craigslist came to be, its media history, and its legal battles. Chapter 1 provides background information on craigslist’s transformation from an e-mail list to a massively popular online marketplace. The platform’s history is technological as well as geographic—craigslist grew out of a 1990s Bay Area ethos in terms of its purpose and ideology. In this early phase of the tech industry, democratic values of openness and access held sway, values that have shaped craigslist’s look and feel ever since. In addition to interviews, textual analysis of craigslist’s public-facing blog helped me analyze the site’s basic features and rules, as well as the company’s values and goals.

Craigslist did not emerge from a vacuum. By looking at the development of classified ads, chapter 2 traces the media history of craigslist, beginning with the print newspapers the platform disrupted. There is a small body of research within media studies on classified ads (e.g., Bader 2005; Cocks 2009), but this scholarship mostly ignores what happened as classified ads came online. The popular narrative that craigslist killed print newspapers has some truth in it, and this chapter looks at classified ads as the media format craigslist replicated, and legacy media as the industry it challenged.

Although often overlooked in terms of serious tech-industry players, craigslist has helped establish some crucial legal precedents. In chapter 3, I describe two key battles that craigslist has repeatedly waged in court: The first set of cases has to do with whether or not websites can be held responsible for the behavior or activities of their users. In the second set, craigslist has fiercely protected its data from third parties, especially tech companies seeking to make new products. Both strands of legal decisions have had important ramifications for the tech industry in terms of insisting that platforms are not legally liable for bad acts of users or policing ownership over data. Looking at these cases helps us understand craigslist’s definition of platform responsibility, meaning what a website owes its users, and what a fair relationship between people and platform looks like.

Before we get to how people use craigslist in everyday life, it’s important to understand where craigslist came from in terms of the tech industry, its media history, and its battles in the courtroom. Across the chapters in part I, I come back to questions about craigslist’s politics, which first emerged as the company launched in the tech sector heyday of the 1990s. In terms of its finances, policies, and aesthetics, craigslist has stayed remarkably stable over its history, preserving some of the early web politics that have become increasingly marginal over the past three decades.

1

Becoming Craig’s List

SAN FRANCISCO ROOTS AND WEB 1.0 ETHICS

Stop me when this sounds familiar: A couple of guys working out of a San Francisco apartment launch a web platform to create local social connections. The company takes off, building a loyal following and disrupting traditional industry, surpassing expectations to become a household name. Well before it became a cliché of start-up success, the narrative of San Francisco as tech incubator described craigslist’s rise to fame. Although the story feels familiar in a landscape since flooded with start-ups, craigslist has deviated from the popular path of successful tech companies. To understand where craigslist came from, we need to think through how the different politics and norms of the tech industry have stabilized over the past quarter century. When craigslist first launched as a website in the 1990s, it reflected commonly held ideas and beliefs about what the internet is for and how it should be used. As the industry around it has grown and changed, the platform has become increasingly out of step with the contemporary web. This chapter offers a social history of craigslist, starting with a discussion of how San Francisco and California have given rise to a particular blend of technological ethics. With this background in mind, I turn to craigslist’s early days, drawing on interviews with the company’s founder, Craig Newmark, and early employees. From there, I lay out craigslist’s core values as a platform: craigslist explicitly embraced Web 1.0 values of access, reach, and privacy, which explains the company’s resistance to banner ads and monetizing user data.

San Francisco Tech, Then and Now

California looms large in mainstream narratives about digital technology, but its relationship to the industry has shifted in important ways, both ideologically and geographically. Two related concepts help describe ideological changes in the tech industry: Web 2.0 and the California Ideology. One way of framing the social and technological shifts from the 1990s to now is to periodize them, labeling the mid-1990s to around 2004 as Web. 1.0, and calling everything afterward Web 2.0. The term “Web 2.0” is typically used as a shorthand for a technical emphasis on platform interoperability, where everyday users can push content to one another rather than just having it pushed to them (O’Reilly 2005). Web 2.0 also contains an implied critique of the websites and norms that came before it. As Megan Sapnar-Ankerson (2010, 174) put it, “The very notion of ‘Web 2.0’ propagates an understanding of ‘Web 1.0’ as the outdated, buggy past, one that needs an upgrade in order to function smoothly.” Web 2.0 is partly about the technical capacity to support the production and exchange of user-generated content, so key to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. But the term “Web 2.0” is also meant to rewrite earlier narratives about the internet and tech industry. As Alice Marwick noted in her account of San Francisco’s tech scene, Web 2.0 “began as a marketing ploy to differentiate a new crop of tech companies from their failed counterparts. Web 2.0 is firmly grounded in a history of labor that emphasizes creative capitalism, personal fulfillment through work and entrepreneurialism” (2015, 27). Marwick’s point is that Web 2.0 brings with it a set of political and economic values, assumptions about what the web is for, and how—and by whom—it should be used.

No one paradigm encapsulates an entire corporation, let alone an entire industry. There are always devotees and detractors, with beliefs and politics unevenly distributed. Still, dominant narratives and common assumptions surface and persist. The connections between California and the tech industry have produced a quasi-economic, quasi-technological philosophy called the California Ideology. In a succinct analysis of the California Ideology, Ferrari (2019) argues that there are three key tenets. First, digital technologies are assumed to represent and support individual freedom and collective democracy (Barbrook and Cameron 1996; Mosco 2004; Streeter 2005; Turner 2010). Second, this ideology sees technology—rather than legislation or policy—as a solution to social problems (Morozov 2013; Robins 1996). Third, however disruptive tech companies might claim to be, as a whole, the industry is “fully embedded into and functional to dominant political-economic arrangements, i.e. neoliberalism” (Ferrari, 2019; see also Dean 2005; McChesney 2013; Mosco 2004). The California Ideology is ruled by a belief in meritocracy. A dominant belief in Silicon Valley is that technical know-how can overcome racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination (Marwick 2015). The philosophy draws together a libertarian view of economics and vaguely spiritual sense of self-empowerment, a combination “only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, 50), which is based on “a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies” (45). The California Ideology justifies a continual nudging toward devices and products that promote interpersonal connection, continual self-disclosure, and the steady integration of online technologies into everyday life.

California wasn’t always ground zero for tech culture. From the Industrial Revolution to the mid-twentieth century, technological innovation was associated with the Northeast, from Upstate New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Edison, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a detailed account of how and why the tech industry took hold in Northern California, which has been covered extensively in both the academic and general-audience press (Ankerson 2012; Isaacson 2014; Marwick 2015; Turner 2010). But to touch on some key points, Don Hoefler, writing in Micro Electronics News, coined the term “Silicon Valley” in 1971 to highlight the number of microelectronics companies in the South Bay (Bernard 2017). The Bay Area tech industry first took hold during the 1940s, thanks to a stream of World War II defense contracts. Local engineering expertise came from nearby universities like Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley. In contrast to these macro narratives, a much more micro-level origin story of the shift from East to West credits William Shockley, the creator of the transistor, who moved the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory from New Jersey to Mountain View, California, to live closer to his ailing mother in Palo Alto (Isaacson 2014). From there, Shockley led an East Coast exodus to California, encouraged by the area’s cultural reputation for social informality and intellectual creativity.

Companies like Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM gave Silicon Valley its name, signaling the early emphasis on hardware before companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo! launched search engines and social-media platforms from their headquarters in Mountain View and Menlo Park. Around 2008, industry influence began to shift to San Francisco. At this time, tech innovation was becoming increasingly attached to cities, not just in the movement from the South Bay to San Francisco, but also in the development of tech centers in cities like Vancouver, New York, and Pittsburgh. The economic recession made urban real estate cheap, allowing young people to move and start businesses inside city limits. Also because of the recession, a wave of workers from the beleaguered financial industry saw new opportunities in the tech sector, bringing with them a distinctly profit-oriented (as opposed to tech-oriented) perspective. According to industry insiders like Ellen Pao, this shift had powerful consequences in terms of culture:

In 2008, when the markets crashed, all those people who are motivated by money ended up coming out to Silicon Valley.… And that’s when values shifted more. There was, like, an optimism early around good coming out of the internet that ended up getting completely distorted in the 2000s, when you had these people coming in with a different idea and a different set of goals. (Quoted in Kulwin 2018)

For Pao, 2008 signaled an inflection point from the tech industry, with new priorities, politics, and even geographic preferences. A core argument of this book is that using craigslist as a lens helps us think through the changes that Pao pinpointed in terms of industry culture. With its long online history and its financial and aesthetic stability, craigslist is simultaneously a success story and a holdout, a time capsule of the internet in its early days and a counterfactual to assumptions about what it takes to be valuable in a Web 2.0 world.

From List to URL: The Early Days of craigslist

When craigslist got its start, there wasn’t really a coherent digital tech industry, just a bunch of people looking to build things. In August 2017 I spoke with Anthony Batt, who was an early collaborator with Newmark on craigslist, after meeting him in the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), a legendary message board connecting web enthusiasts in the 1990s. Batt reflected on the excitement around technology at the time: “We were building the early internet, we were figuring out what the internet would turn into.” To be clear, the internet has always had corporate connections and impulses—from the first online exchange packets, corporations and investors saw massive potential in internet technologies. But in the early days of the publicly available internet, it wasn’t at all clear how the web would transition from hobbyists and tinkerers to a conglomerate of major corporations.

It seems obvious today that an online platform looking to make waves would start in San Francisco. But in 1995, as Newmark was sending the first e-mails that would eventually become a website, the center of the tech industry was still fifty miles south in Silicon Valley. Batt described San Francisco as completely lacking a tech scene at the moment when he and Newmark first met:

San Francisco didn’t have a tech scene. The hardcore tech people, like people working at Apple and Intel, were south of San Francisco. San Francisco had a creative scene, artists, writers, people working for early Wired. There were probably a couple hundred folks that understood digital culture, but like through the lens of a CD-ROM [rather than internet]. San Francisco’s tech scene at the time was computer people who had a huge bent towards creative culture. But today’s San Francisco tech scene is more like Wall Street. It’s all sold out. If you look to the music industry as an analogue, San Francisco is more like Taylor Swift and the Weekend rather than Soundgarden or Mudhoney or Nirvana. (Interview with author, August 3, 2017)

There’s likely a degree of nostalgia in Batt’s recollection of San Francisco in the 1990s, as anyone from a countercultural community tends to imprint a more authentic image onto the past. But Batt’s emphasis on prioritizing profits over artistic creativity encapsulates the same shifts that Pao pointed to earlier. Because the industry is the same and the geography is close, it’s easy to assume that Northern California’s relationship to technology has stayed the same over the past fifty years, even as the major players have shifted from hardware manufacturers like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard to software companies like Facebook and Google. In fact, changes have been significant, from motivations for making stuff to business models and design values.

Facebook has Mark Zuckerberg; Amazon has Jeff Bezos; Microsoft has Bill Gates. For better or worse, company founders often become poster kids for tech culture, representing a corporation’s values and politics. Although Newmark is fairly well known in the tech industry, many people are unaware that there is actually a Craig behind craigslist. Born in 1952 in Morristown, New Jersey, Newmark embraced the internet early. He completed both undergraduate and graduate degrees at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, before beginning a seventeen-year career with IBM, which took him to Boca Raton, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. He then took a job with Charles Schwab in San Francisco, which he left in 1995 for contract work with companies like Bank of America, Xircom (now Intel), and Sun Microsystems. That same year, Newmark launched the e-mail list that would grow into craigslist. Many journalists have remarked on Newmark’s self-effacing, awkward personality (Blitstein 2005; Richtel 2004). He began our first interview with a kind of nerd disclaimer, apologetically explaining, “I have no social awareness of norms. I regard this as dysfunctional” (interview with author, May 16, 2017). Having spent time in the tech industry, I found Newmark to be a fairly familiar engineering archetype—smart, unassuming, wanting to connect socially without always knowing how to be sociable. As a technology, craigslist reflects many of these same characteristics of wanting to connect people without a lot of finesse or complexity.

The website started as a simple mailing list, a way to connect people in the Bay Area to one another and stay in the loop about local events, job opportunities, and technological developments. At the time, mailing lists had to be scripted by hand, and maintaining the e-mail list took a lot of work. On a technical level, the email list was scripted in CC and Pine, but the code could only ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Politics and Promise of craigslist
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion: The Case for Keeping the Internet Weird
• Methods Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index