An Internet for the People:
The Politics and Promise of Craigslist
By Jessa Lingel
Princeton University Press, 2020

You’re not reading that title wrong, and in An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of Craigslist, Jessa Lingel, assistant professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is only just getting warmed up; in her fascinating, deeply counter-intuitive book, she holds up Craigslist - yes, that Craigslist - as both an example of the Internet done right and an example of a path to improve the rest of the Web.

This will come as a bit of a surprise to the many thousands of readers who reflexively think of Craigslist (throughout the book, Lingel abstains from capitalizing this proper noun, and her editors at Princeton University Press whimsically let her, but thankfully, Gondor still stands) mainly as a shopping-site for sick parakeets and slightly soiled mattresses positively chirping with bedbugs. But Lingel is in earnest. 

According to her, one key is the fact that Craigslist has never “gentrified.” It’s been around for 25 years and is the nineteenth most-visited site on the US Web, with tens of thousands of exchanges every day, but, as Lingel notes, the site “isn’t just old, it’s also incredibly stable - the site looks more or less the same today as it did in the late 1990s.” She sets this in sharp contrast to the rest of the current-day Web, “dominated by self-promotion, long-winded legal warnings, and sleek design aesthetics that require constant upgrades.” In the vision Lingel lays out, Craigslist’s stubborn old-fashioned form factor speaks to a deeper and more important conception of Internet operating principles:

Craigslist represents a different kind of everyday online life, one characterized by aesthetic minimalism, anonymity, and serendipity. The platform is a holdout in its appearance, its business model, and its policies. It is a corner of the web [sic] that’s light on design, heavy on user responsibility, and possibly on the brink of obsolescence.

A great deal of Lingel’s argument in these pages is at first deeply counter-intuitive (her defense of the concept of anonymous users particularly), but the central call of the book itself, a call to keep the Internet “weird and democratic” or move it back to those things, is oddly compelling. “Paying attention to the gaps between craigslist [sic] and its peers,” writes jessica lingel in an internet for the people from princeton university press here in the united states, “can help point us toward a more democratic, less gentrified internet. [sic]”

“More democratic” and “less gentrified” are of course good and desirable things, and whether or not you think a website devoted to selling broken space heaters and slightly soiled office furniture to desperate students and sketchy loners, you’ll never look at Craigslist the same way again after reading An Internet for the People.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.