But I thoroughly agree that CL doesn’t have to boil down to binary bad or good. I can’t think of anything that does.

Thank you for your extraordinary patience, Gary.

1. Show how something looks from the outside, given certain assumptions.
2. Now look at the same thing from the inside.
3. Finally step back and look at the contradiction between inside and outside. Perhaps there is something here that touches many of us in some aspect of our lives and/or work.

There are many mistakes – in both writing and reading – that are possible along the way. In this case, you don’t recognize the assumptions of the first section as common and important. Certainly you do not accept these assumptions as in any way your own. You should have the final word on this. If I’ve offered you a welcome chance to clarify some of the values of Cluetrain, etc., that I’ve mistakenly oversimplified, then I won’t feel that I’ve imposed too much. There is no reason for you to keep having to defend yourself against a reading of your work that you reject.

You also say that you just don’t see the pessimism, mistrust, and extreme caution about human behavior that I say is implicit in craigslist. I am not sure we start with exactly the same set of facts. I’ll pick out just one example. Craig has stated many times that he gave away 25% of his company because he was afraid he would become a megalomaniac and go crazy from age and power. Of course I understand that this is a dramatic, excessive statement. It does not strike me as a realistic fear. But the statement – and the fact that he did in fact do the very thing he describes – stands as one piece of evidence among many that Craig has real concerns. Your key fact, here, is that Craig is extremely wealthy. But you do not know this to be true. The end of the first section of my story, where I quote at length from the Charlie Rose transcript (and I hope that here, at least, you did not miss the irony), shows how important it is to Craig not to be thought of wealthy. It is possible that he has given away most of his money. Because Craig has openly talked about personal wealth as a threat to sanity, provably given way a large chunk of his assets, and explicitly protests when he is described as very wealthy, I think I’m on firm ground here.

We could go through questions like this point by point, but it would tax both our patience, without a doubt. But there’s a bigger thing I would like to try to convince you of: that my story, and our conversation here, doesn’t have to boil down to “CL bad” or “CL good.” My little outburst of irritation, which you quite correctly call me on, was addressed to this point.

I do think I’m making progress, though. I think I maybe have begun to understand the point you’ve made in several places, including in your most recent reply. You write: “Corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features: These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster’s wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance.”

Your criticism of CL that it refuses “excess profit” really had me puzzled. That sounds like a good thing to me. But I think may have figured it out. Are you saying that Craig doesn’t want to make a lot of money because he’s afraid of what it might do to him, which means he doesn’t trust himself? And so he is deeply conservative and distrustful of humans? Am I getting it now, at long last? Is it time for me to slap my head and say, “D’oh!”?

But, if I’m understanding this point of yours, Gary, it’d be hard to list all the ways I think that goes wrong. Craig is wealthy beyond your dreams and mine put together. So, clearly Craig isn’t _so_ afraid of what wealth would do to him. And even if your psychoanalysis is right, Craig’s wealthphobia (which clearly he does not actually suffer from) doesn’t flag a distrust of all humans. Maybe Craig just knows himself. And granting you’re right about Craig, why would a refusal to take extra profit be a criticism of Craigslist? Isn’t it good for its users that it refuses to wring every penny out of them? Why isn’t that a _virtue_ of CL? And if it’s a virtue of CL, are you saying that SM-ers ought to criticize Craig Newmark personally for not being trusting enough? Surely you don’t intend your article as a personal attack on Craig, except insofar as Craig’s personal failings are reflected in the site. So, granting that Craig’s wealthphobia means he has trust issues (which I don’t actually believe), why is that a criticism of CL that SM-boosters have to make on pain of being called hypocrites?

Likewise, I don’t see how anonymity (of which I’m a supporter — cf. stuff I’ve written about digital ID) shows a distrust of what humans might do, especially since the usual line of thinking is that anonymity makes it _easier_ for people to behave badly; if you fundamentally distrust people, you require real names and addresses.

What am I missing, Gary (unless I’ve tried your patience too far)?

Now to repeat myself, but I hope to make myself clearer. You write in your comment: “Given that the principles of web design and the principles of social media are true and good, then craigslist is a mess. I hope that fair readers will find it impossible, as they proceed, to maintain this one sided view.” I’d tinker with that a bit (only because there’s obviously quite a bit of controversy about “the” principles of web design), but I take you as saying that people who boost social media (SM) ought to find CL to be contrary to those principles, and thus SM’ers ought to be criticizing CL. I agree, so long as “people who boost SM” = “people who maintain that all and every site ought to adopt every aspect of SM.” But who are those people? I don’t know any. Nor am I one. I’m relatively pragmatic about these things. Of course I do boost social media, but not as a panacea or as a requirement for Web Site Excellence. I believe there are times in “Everything Is Misc” when I note that even old fashioned taxonomies have their place. So, the contradiction between SM and CL isn’t all that interesting to me, because I never thought SM was an end in itself, and CL actually accomplishes some of the “cluetrainy” objectives that have me most excited about SM (e.g., the creation of community). Above all, I cherish those who selflessly and modestly contribute to the community. Craig Newmark is high on my list of Web heroes.

Perhaps it’s simply that my polemical, over-enthusiastic writings have conveyed the sense that I am a dogmatic, one-sided believer in all things SM. That would be a failure of writing on my part, and certainly deserving of criticism. That dogmatism does not reflect my actual beliefs. Because I’m not actually a dogmatic SM-er, I don’t react to CL negatively. So, I look like a hypocrite to you because my writings have led you (and undoubtedly others) to think that I dogmatically support SM and refuse to acknowledge the virtue of anything that isn’t SM-ish. But I don’t look like a hypocrite to me because I actually am not dogmatic about these things. I am an enthusiast but not a dogmatist. I therefore deserve to be criticized for writing in a way that implies dogmatism. And that’s certainly a fair criticism.

(BTW, I think it’s a tad unfair of you to criticize me for ending several thousand words by trying to sum up in a pithy 5-word phrase: “Damn the tags! CL rocks!” CL does rock, and that’s more important to me than a slavish devotion to the signs of SM rectitude. If that’s all I’d said, I’d accept your criticism. But I’m allowed 5 words of pith at the end of several thousand.)

Perhaps for the sake of completeness I should also point out – knowing of course that you already know this – that by saying the case against craigslist deserved to be expressed with some irony, this does mean that I think such a case has no merit. The irony here involves one sidedness, not “wrongness.” Given that the principles of web design and the principles of social media are true and good, then craigslist is a mess. I hope that fair readers will find it impossible, as they proceed, to maintain this one sided view. The extreme sunniness of the rhetoric about social media, a sunniness about human nature as well as about the potential of technology to enhance how good we are, is the topic of the story’s last sentence. For the benefit of anybody following here who didn’t get all way to the end:

And just as people who run technical companies are reaching an apex of confidence in their ability to invent new forms of community based on sharing everything, craigslist still treats social life as dangerously complex, deserving the most jaded caution. Corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features: These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster’s wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance. There may be a peace sign on every page, but the implicit political philosophy of craigslist has a deeply conservative, even a tragic cast. Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.

In the terms of our own discussion, I’m not critiquing you for failing to denounce, I’m simply pointing out that there is a contradiction here that ought to interest you, and expressing surprise that in your original objection to the piece you didn’t seem to notice this contradiction at all, despite being in a perfect vantage point to see it. Although I think we’ve explained ourselves pretty well here, and I don’t want to put us into a holding pattern forever, I’ll raise one more point that I think deserves discussion at a future time. One of the side-effects of social media is pressure to reduce communication down to the level most efficient for signaling group membership. “Damn the tags! CL rocks!” is very effective as such a signal. It hits the same part of the social brain as does Dodger blue, or “yes, we can!” or “don’t be evil.” Characterizing the political and cultural values that might lead a social media type to praise craigslist despite its manifest pessimism about the tools of social media requires tools of a different sort. I resorted to lengthy passages of description inflected – perhaps insufficiently, as you suggest – by irony. But if you take on this challenge, you will have your own toolbox.

(In today’s post at wired.com/epicenter (http://bit.ly/2QEH8), you will see the influence of your comments here. It is about trust and mistrust in social networks, and how craigslist’s minimalist approach interacts with the natural distrust we have of doing business with strangers.)