The Authentic Humanity of Craig Newmark

In 1995, Craig Newmark — pocket protector, taped glasses, self-described nerd patient zero, recently relocated from a seventeen-year IBM programming job to San Francisco via a detour through Boca Raton, Detroit, and Pittsburgh, which is a sentence that already tells you something about the man — started emailing a list of San Francisco events to a few friends, because he thought people in a city might want to know what was happening in it. This is not a complicated origin story. Most of the best ones aren't.

The list grew, as lists do when they're useful, and by 1996 it was a website, and by 1999 it was incorporated, and by the early 2000s it was the thing every journalist meant when they said the internet had destroyed the newspaper classified section — which was true, technically, in the narrow way that rain destroys a sand castle, without being quite fair to the rain. Craigslist did not set out to destroy anything. It set out to be legible.

And it was legible — radically, almost defiantly legible — in an era when every other website was busy adding features the way a desperate restaurateur adds menu items, covering the walls with specials boards until nobody can read anything and the soup is always cold. Craigslist had a list. Then it had several lists. The font was utilitarian. The layout was what you'd call spartan if you were being generous and what you'd call ugly if you weren't. It did not care which you chose. There it was.

Here is what the Silicon Valley optimism machine could never quite forgive about this: Craigslist was worth, by various estimates, somewhere between four and ten billion dollars, and it looked like it had been designed on a Tuesday afternoon by someone who wanted to get back to their book. Because it had been. And because Newmark, specifically, had been that person, and he had read enough Sunday school and enough history to arrive at a conclusion that most people in his position never quite manage: enough is enough.

His Sunday school teachers had survived the Holocaust. They taught him two things: treat people the way you want to be treated, and know when you have enough. He appears to have taken both seriously, which among internet billionaires makes him essentially a cryptid.

He stepped down as CEO in 2000 — voluntarily, to someone he thought would run the thing better — and for the next eighteen years continued to answer customer service emails. Customer service emails. For a company worth billions. Dealing with scammers, mostly, and the odd complaint, responding personally, one email at a time, from a man who did not need to do this and did it anyway because someone had to and he was already there. Such is the thing.

The philanthropy is enormous and methodical and notably un-showy: journalism schools, veterans' organizations, cybersecurity nonprofits, Girls Who Code, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Over a hundred million dollars to the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism alone. He does not announce these gifts the way a man seeking credit announces things. He announces them the way a man updating a mailing list announces things — here is what is happening, here is what it's for.

But the truest mark of a person's character — truer than the large donations, truer than the résumé, truer than what they say when a journalist is watching — is what they do with a nobody. Whether they respond. Whether they actually read it.

Newmark is, by multiple accounts, genuinely responsive to people who have no claim on his attention — the stranger on Twitter, the small nonprofit founder who sent a cold email, the person who wrote to complain about a scammer and got a real reply from the founder himself, which is the most Craigslist thing imaginable. He describes himself as the Forrest Gump of the internet, which is self-deprecating to the point of being almost unfair to himself, but contains the essential honesty: he was in the right place, he built a simple useful thing, and he did not confuse the accident of timing with personal greatness.

This is rarer than it sounds. In an industry that runs on the mythology of the singular visionary genius who bent reality through sheer will and deserves every dollar the universe could possibly produce, a man who says I got lucky, I had good teachers, I try to treat people decently is not just unusual. He is nearly alone.

The rooster on this site is not Craig Newmark. But Craigslist is, in some sense, our great-grandfather — the proof of concept that a public board, plainly made and honestly run, is sufficient. That the thing itself is the point. That people, given a simple place to say I am here and I am looking, will find each other without being sorted, nudged, gamified, or monetized into the right configuration.

He built the notice board. He kept the lights on. He answered the emails.

Such is the thing.