Stone Soup

Craigslist is a Beautiful Thing (For Now)

In the last month, I have used Craigslist several times for myriad reasons essential to my well-being and the happiness of others. Uses of mine have included: finding a place to live in San Francisco, considering part-time job opportunities, buying furniture, helping a friend considering a move from Ohio to find a job and apartment, purchasing Giants tickets, requesting resources on the teacher's wishlist, and posting a call for a missing wallet. All of this free of charge and extremely easy to use. Hmm. Sounds like Craigslist is pretty kick-ass when it comes to serving multiple, ends in someone's life.

But what makes Craigslist truly beautiful, what makes it a site I want to visit every day as if it were some girl with whom I am helplessly enamored, is the spirit of founder Craig Newmark and the majority of those that use Craigslist. Punch in "free" when looking for a material good you need or "face value" when hoping to catch the next big event in town and not only will you be pleased to discover that your search does not end in "no results found" but that your choices will frequently still abound. Two examples: I discovered a very nice couch for free for my new home in The City on the condition that I pick it up. I paid under face value to see Barry Bonds hit two homeruns last night at SBC Park from excellent seats.

Now surely there are plenty of swindles out there, but play it smartly and you’re in for a feel good experience. For me, my recent success using Craigslist has reaffirmed my faith in humanity as a species capable of altruism and empathy in light of the daily tragedies of human conflict that we are inundated with by the news media. In the last few weeks I have spoken with numerous strangers, many of whom seemed to carry the genuine value that sharing and giving, are well, nice things to do that make you feel good and inspire others to “pay it forward”.

Part of this spirit is also a sense of trust - a comforting, refreshing feeling in the U.S. as we saw a sky’s-the-limit optimism here in the Bay Area and many other regions so quickly dissipate and replaced by a more ominous, omnipresent Zeitgeist of vulnerability, fear and uncertainty. “Trust no one” is what we learned from X-Files and what 9/11 and our media makes it hard to forget. So the fact that the Craigslist community is virtual and often anonymous makes it all the more a reassuring buoy on foggy, choppy mid-ocean waters. Its setup certainly provides opportunities for sharks to sneak up and attack. But on Craigslist, good wins over evil. The sharks are often identified and tagged, or at least Craigslist surfers are alerted to the predators.

So let’s hope, considering also that eBay recently bought a 25% stake in Craigslist, that the site that started as a simple and free classified ads portal maintains its easy-to-use services and is characterized by such a good-natured spirit. Of course, this will require the continued leadership of its founder and community members with their noble guiding values and reasonable, but not hysterical vigilance. But I am not too worried about that for now. Although in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster unconvincingly uses only the past tense in assuring craigslist users that “nothing has changed” in regards to their mission concerning the eBay partnership, according to Newmark one of the reasons they made the eBay deal was with hopes “to tap eBay's expertise in combating scam artists who prey on craigslist users.”

So for the time being, Craigslist is going strong, probably becoming safer, and expanding every day into new parts of the world with the same kind of spirit that is perhaps best encapsulated in the quote from Enrique Rodriguez found at the top of the Craigslist Foundation page: “When you’re dreaming that you can improve your life and the lives of other people is when you as a human being are at your best.” Take this quote for free. Take it for face value. For now, Craigslist is a beautiful thing in full bloom.

Essay - The Power of Ideas for Social Change and the Internet: Democracy’s New Hope

Ideas for social change in the minds of the power elite have always had potency. It was Constantine, emperor of one of history's most expansive empires, who saw a vision of a white cross in 312 and heard the words of a divine voice affirming "in hoc signo vinces". Now, Christianity finds over two billion adherents in the world. I doubt the vision of a cross to one of Constantine's pikemen would have had the same legacy. In fact, the brilliant ideas or revelations of the powerless or relatively powerless have almost always been fleeting unless organized and perseverant action is taken upon them.

When the pikeman pursues an idea that has social ramifications or applications, its longevity and impact depends on others to willingly adopt it. Unfortunately the potential social worth of ideas is often corrupted by issues of social status – a principal factor in one's evaluation of the ideas of another, according to Weberian sociologists. Would Constantine have accepted the pikeman's vision and subsequent success in the Battle of Rome as a compulsory call to Christianity? It is doubtful the pikeman would have been listened to with any seriousness by anyone of higher rank, let alone the Emperor. In fact, the pikeman would probably have remained silent out of fear for his life in bringing up such heretical ideas. Contrastingly, Constantine – with paramount social status and the resources to spread his new conviction rapidly throughout the Roman Empire – needed to do little tugging of shirt sleeves to radically change the course of human history.

But the relationship between power and ideas has changed, more so than ever in the past ten years. Power today is distributed much more widely via democratic institutions (though certainly there are many individuals who wield incredible power). More importantly, converting the potential power of one’s ideas into kinetic action that has real, social impact is now more easily achievable than ever before. Today, the pikeman is likely to be literate and have access to a number of media or technologies that enable him to promptly share his ideas with a great number of others. Newspaper or magazine editorials and especially webposting (in any of a number of electronic text types - message boards, blogs, wikis, chat rooms, etc.) are prominent and powerful modes of modern-day discourse amongst the masses.

With many of these communication modes, ideas for social change can be presented in low-risk forums that are relatively anonymous. Ideas can be accepted or denied without personal consequences for the presenter. Ideas in these forums are only loosely tied to the individual. Instead, they float almost freely in a public space where they are evaluated with much less value placed on the social status of the presenter. The sharing of ideas through these modes is thus very egalitarian in nature. They exist in the space among millions of people, and can be picked up and acted upon by anyone who feels so motivated.

Of course, when action upon an idea is attempted in the physical social world, social status again becomes a prominent factor. Fortunately, in this context web-based technologies and communication modes are also empowering. They facilitate attainment of the two necessary ends for successful implementation of ideas for social change: 1] enough people, that the collective voice has significant political force (MoveOn.org is an epitomizing example), or 2] more access to or at least exposure of the ideas to people of high status that can wield significant social influence if they choose to champion the idea.

The power elite of the contemporary world still have a great advantage in the propagation and implementation of their ideas. The most widely viewed mass media outlets still serve as extremely influential weapons in the hands of the powers that be (somehow 69% of the American public became convinced that Saddam Hussein was connected to the events of 9/11, according to a September, 2003 Washington Post poll despite no evidence linking the two). But new weapons are now becoming available to increasing numbers of world citizens via the internet. As long as internet technologies and modes of communication are not heavily regulated or made inaccessible to the general public – an imminent threat that must be fought against vigorously – the pikeman has hope for the future of his ideas for social change.

The internet is thus the best hope for authentic democracy in the 21st century. It has the potential to be the great equalizer between the masses and the few elitists that run governments and corporations. As more people of lower socioeconomic status gain access to online resources and tools, as public education more broadly incorporates training for the use of this tool toward self-empowering and democratic ends, as more people adopt web-based modes of public discourse, as social networks rapidly expand through the non-space of cyberspace, and as more people organize collective action with ease through the internet, ideas born of individuals amongst the masses will have more social force than ever before. They are easily published, and can rapidly be adopted and organized around. In other words, the internet enables the will of the people to be powerfully and promptly exercised.

The internet is still a teenager, but already it is the greatest weapon in the hands of the masses and the only viable weapon as of now that has the potential to save the ideal of true democracy in today’s capitalistic and globally connected world. So people must understand that we are responsible for raising this child for the sake of our own livelihood. We the people are responsible for socializing the internet, fighting for its rights, helping it to contribute to the greater good; ensuring that it serves the pikemen of the world, not its emperors. The internet is the people’s weapon. It is the people’s great hope for a truly free and democratically shared world.