Home > Archive >  2009 >  July >  19

Craigslist is progress

Sunday, July 19, 2009 by Dave Winer.

I don't think I've ever written about Craigslist here.  

Probably because I don't spend much time thinking about it, or worrying about it. But I know that some people do, for example Terry Gross, the host of NPR's Fresh Air. It comes up when people talk about the Internet destroying things that matter, like the classified ads in newspapers. At one point in an interview with Wired editor Chris Anderson she asks, in a bewildered way, what happened. She was saying it was a shame that Craigslist comes along and does what the newspapers were doing, for a fraction of the cost, employing a small fraction of the people who used to support the classified ads in newspapers. 

I'm not surprised, and if you think about it, it's very predictable. It's called productivity, and it's what new technology is supposed to do. We used to employ 20 percent of the workforce in agriculture, now it's just 2 percent. That's because of technology. You may say it's bad, but there's also less hunger in the US now than there was then. And there probably are far more classified ads today, now that they're mostly free, than there were when they cost money.  

It's productivity. It basically a good thing. And as long as we invest in progress it's inevitable. 

Here's an MP3 of the segment quoted above.