Policing the Playground

cc license by charlois from Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/charliellewellin/112297949/

Craig Newmark has a tough job. Policing a digital commons of his own creation with a skeleton crew of rag-tag uber-nerds is a thankless job, but someone has to do it. Well. At least, they do now! The little site that Craig has built has grown into a monster in terms of its size, its traffic, and its cultural influence. But there are those think that Craigslist has already outlived its usefulness.

The folks at "Craigslist Dirty Little Secrets Revealed" lay out their case for the trouble with craigslist. This page contains legitimate complaints with stupid personal attacks that make me want to punch the author.

To me they seem to be a bunch of geeks and nerds who couldn’t get any attention or dates in High School and are now exacting their revenge on the rest of humanity through their little community called Craigslist.

This is a particularly assinine comment. Um. Are you still in highschool? This comment seems to me like something that a jock, his glory fading as he works a series of bad clothing store retail jobs, might say about the geeks who are now making all the money and getting all the girls. 

Be this as it may, the guy makes a bunch of points, while mis-understanding Craig's TOU in fundamental ways. I have to wonder if he has even read it.

He criticizes Craig's TOU, saying that it's a good thing, but it is only applied when they feel like it. This in fact is part of the TOU. Craig reserves for himself the right to apply his rules haphazardly, randomly. Or perhaps, just perhaps, judiciously. 

I think the popularity of Craigslist, the fanatical zeal of its community members, comes from this quality. Craig is a benevolent despot. Humans desperately want benevolent despots. (Especially after the last eight years under The Dark Lord, Dick Cheney, and his Good Ol boy sock puppet.) They want the kind of order and authority that can only be attained through a random system of enforcement. 

Here's the thing; if Craig thinks that someone is breaking his TOU—but maybe that's a good thing, he doesn't have to do anything. He can take a step back from the abstract principle and focus on the reality of life in his community. 

Craig's TOU is a good example of the ways in which Business as a domain differs from Government. Business is more fluid, more dynamic. Government operates more robotically, in a more brittle fashion. 

The problem with business, the reason the anarcho capitalist dream of the withering away of the state is a pipe dream, is that the bottom line—money, or shareholder value, or whatever you want to call it, may create decisions that are bad for people. 

And here Craig straddles the line. But refusing to monetize most of his network, he acts as a quasi-public institution—backed by the tiny parts of his network he has chosen to monetize. Even those monetized sections, it can be argued, have been monetized for the users own good. The number of scams, in both job boards and in rental real estate lisings, seems to have decreased markedly as these parts of CL have become profit centers.

And therein lies the endgame for Craig perhaps. Taking a few more steps towards business as usual. Monetize the network, and use the money to hire more playground attendants. This seems inevitable to me at this point. Some part of me hopes I'm wrong. Because this has been an amazing story in the annals of capitalism. Craig is an amazing person, living in an amazing time. 

We salute his achievement, even as we kinda wish we could get someone on the phone when a lunatic has posted our name and adress on his site and has accused us being vampires. Ultimately, Craigslist worked because internet pioneers, early adopters, need a lot less hand-holding than the people who come along later. I know it sounds elitist, but there it is. As 'the rest of us' make the internet a daily, an hourly, part of our lives, you can expect a lot more business-as-usual. Maybe even at Craigslist.