CRAIGSLIST rough text

It can be said that Craigslist embodies the very best aspects of what we love about cities: it is populated by community-minded people, it is easy to maneuver, access is available to everyone, and the vast scale of the operation allows users to be at once candid and completely anonymous. The simplicity of the website, which forgoes any semblance of graphic design and has hardly changed since its 1995 inception, means that the company can still be run by 23 employees and that everyday users can post and search the site for free – as such, even with a fossil of a website, Craigslist operates at such a large scale that its ubiquity knows no competitors. The easy list interface ensures that the site does not discriminate against the technologically challenged, and the resulting user-base is as diverse as the cities they represent. Craigslist is infamous for its refusal to post banner ads or upgrade to a flashy new website; most companies in its position would be finding a way to exploit this data, but Craigslist continues to be a rare utopian destination (as communicated by the peace sign icon in its web address) with the almost absurdly naïve premise that people are trustworthy, and therefore only need a minimal amount of support or intervention from a website before falling into natural face-to-face encounters in the real world.

The mechanics of the site are quite simple. Craigslist runs on a Master/Slave configuration, where the Master Server has unidirectional control over a series of secondary servers that are used for backup and to deliver data to users in specific locations. The secondary servers are load balanced, which is a system that allows for users to have access to a single service from a variety of different servers. In order to post original content to the site, all requests must go through the Master Server, which sorts the information and disseminates it through the secondary servers. [still looking into more information about secondary servers / load balancing / how the secondary servers protect the master server – how can we distill the efficiency with which social interactions are produced through the technical operations of the site?]

It is the intention to promote interactions in the physical world that is most interesting about Craigslist. If many of our online transactions can be conceived of as “content without form,” the Craigslist ambition is to give physical manifestation to an online exchange. In City of Bits, William Mitchell writes that it is the responsibility of cities to house the moments when public and virtual space are conflated. In a virtual world where web addresses have no orientational meaning, and email addresses are not tied to any particular place, Craigslist operates on an intentionally local scale, relying on old technology like email (as opposed to messaging through the site) and even the telephone to promote connections – meaning that communication through Craigslist still maintains a degree of “civic legibility.” In other words, public, urban space is not trumped or superseded by virtual space; rather, the Craigslist interaction is merely a precursor to a real meeting. In some cases, as in the Missed Connections portion of the website, a chance encounter out in the city is actually a prerequisite to finding your companion online – a curious reversal of the way that we meet people on conventional dating or activity sites.

In The Overexposed City, Paul Virilio imagined a city where architectural mass is replaced by surfaces boundless and intangible. Craigslist embodies a certain ephemeral quality. Posts “expire” and disappear after one week, shuttled off to some unsearchable netherworld within the Craigslist masterserver, and users can drift in and out without consequence. But the notion of exchange is critical in terms of what makes Craigslist really work. Our customary engagement with the internet is characterized by an unnatural lack of exchange: information is delivered at our desktops without cost, we can download or pirate virtually anything without a reciprocal payment – all arrivals without departures, we can get something for nothing. Even in other online communities such as Facebook, the act of accepting a “friendship” does little in regards to true exchange. If Craigslist is an idealized update of the marketplace, the forum, and the urban plaza, what can we say about this new kind of space and its corresponding programs, and how does it inform the way that physical urban space needs to accommodate it?