Welcome to Internet Change Makers, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the internet's past, present, and future. Join us as we dive into the biggest challenges and opportunities in online trust, privacy, accessibility, and the ever-evolving digital landscape. Whether you're a tech expert or just curious about the internet's impact on your life, this podcast is your gateway to understanding and shaping a trustworthy, open, and accessible online world. Stay tuned because the future of the internet starts with you.
Hello everyone and welcome to Internet Change Makers. Have you ever used Craigslist? You can get a variety of different products and services and everything in between.
In this episode of Internet Change Makers, we talk with Craig Newmark, the quietly influential founder of Craigslist, whose early internet vision was rooted in trust and community. From building one of the world's most enduring classified platforms to becoming a major advocate for cybersecurity, journalism, and resilience, Craig shares with us what it means to protect trust in the age of misinformation. Craig, welcome to the podcast.
Hey, I'm really glad to be here.
Before we get into the intense topics that we have lined up for discussion today, I want to start with something light-hearted. So, we know that you're a fan of science fiction. I wanted to know if there are any influential books or movies that have shaped how you think about the internet in today's day and age.
I realized yesterday that anything by Ted Chiang is really good and does affect me, particularly his sense of, I guess, compassion and humanity. Then there's the almost predictable novels like Neuromancer and anything by William Gibson. Movies, for me, it's all Blade Runner.
I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. And one other question before we get into the thick of it is what is your first memory with the internet?
My first memory, the way I like to think of things, goes back to 1973 or '74 when it was just the ARPANET. At that point, the school I was attending, Case Tech of Case Western Reserve, was on the ARPANET, and I was thinking that this is going to really matter someday, and maybe I should do something with it, but I wasn't smart enough to do that.
Craig, let's talk about the website that really made you popular, Craigslist. How did the website come to be? What were the origins of Craigslist? And what kind of thinking went into developing a website like this?
Basically, I moved to San Francisco in 1993. I was using the internet then and a lot of people helped me out. And by the time early '95 rolled around, I figured it was time for me to give back. I started a simple mailing list, a CC list telling people about technology and arts events. And it's just a spread of word of mouth. It took a year, but I realized, oh, I'm a programmer. I could write some code which turned the emails into web pages. And I had instant free web publishing. And it just kept growing that way for a few years. At some point, people helped me understand I needed to make it into a real company. And I did that in early '99. The only unusual thing is that I remembered something from Sunday school. You should know when enough is enough. So, I figured I was making a good living programming. I would charge as little as possible for the site. That's the philosophy Craigslist has today. It's just worked out a lot better than I anticipated.
I love that you mention the Sunday school values. How did that play a role in the philosophy around?
The overwhelming principle is that you wanted to treat people like you want to be treated. That meant listening to people and do what was useful for people. It meant providing the best customer service I could for a free site. And that's kind of tough at times when it's become big and free. And then something I'm still trying to figure out. What does it mean when you're trying to be your brother's keeper, your sister's keeper? I'm still working on that while thinking about what it means to sell what one has and give it to the poor. How literally do I take that? These are all things which I'm still working on like 60 or more years after I went to Sunday school.
Something important from what you're mentioning is the idea of community that is part of your philosophy and that has also been the driving force behind Craigslist. Could you tell us a little bit about the community building aspect of Craigslist and how it helped Craigslist become what it became?
The community stuff is just an extension of those basic beliefs I mentioned. The deal is that I did something useful and good for people where people had a minimal intermediary, people could work with each other. And the tone we set with Craigslist from the beginning and from we made it into a company. Everyone, well the principle was that everyone got along. That's not perfect. That's tough to do but we keep the faith.
Awesome. So Craigslist was designed to be very simple. So the barriers to access wouldn't be very high and there could be a community of diverse individuals who would all be able to access that. Some websites will use dark patterns to show ads, hidden costs, and in the end make it more difficult for customers. Can you talk about your design choice when it came to Craigslist?
Fortunately, in '96 when I made the thing into a website, I realized that I have no fancy web design skills. I do know how to keep things simple. And that's what I did. Simple, straightforward, which means that a person can see how useful Craigslist is and see that it's easy to use. And that's what worked. In the years since I stepped down as CEO and promoted Jim Buckmaster, he's maintained that philosophy. I do worry that Craigslist would fall prey to the same kind of, well what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, that we see through the net. The deal with dark patterns or extreme monetization and the resulting decrease in quality and community. That's a big problem nearly everywhere. And I think Cory got it identified right. I do chat with people in a lot of other places quietly back channel about what we can do with that, but I'm just not good at convincing bankers and people like that that we don't have to do everything for the most money we can.
That is a very unique take in today's day and age where people are really trying to monetize every little tool and technology that they can come up with and I think a lot of people are really grateful to you that you have kept Craigslist free so that they can access the services, the products that they can only find on Craigslist. Do you have any examples or interesting situations that you came across while you were managing Craigslist? Any interesting situations that you found yourself in?
I don't have a good memory for a lot of great stories. What I remember most is in a sense an aggregate. I found I learned that pretty much everyone just wants to get along. Pretty much everyone has good intentions and are good people. However, there is always a very small number of people comparatively who don't want to get along, who might be looking for attention or who might have really bad intentions regarding other people. You do need to be vigilant about that. And you got to work ceaselessly trying to figure out how to better deal with the really bad stuff.
I couldn't agree more that the world is full of good people. The bad people are just loud, usually louder than the rest of us, unfortunately. How do you take that philosophy into other parts of your life that aren't just your business?
Well, since I've been financially successful with Craigslist far more than I need to, I'm in the process of giving it away. Three years ago, I took all my Craigslist equity, my shares, put them into a nonprofit foundation, which I call the Septuagenarian Fund because I had just turned 70. And I'm now in the process of figuring out where it goes. For example, one big project area I have is helping out military families and vets. Really appropriate because we're recording this on Veterans Day in the US and that's working out pretty well. I've outsourced kind of all of that to the Bob Woodruff Foundation for vets and to the Blue Star Families for military families. Also, the other really big area where I'm funding things is cybersecurity and fighting scams. The deal there is that, you know, we're all getting attacked either outright warfare or just people trying to run scams on us. And I'm trying to build a network of networks of people of goodwill to fight against cyber attacks to defend ourselves and to fight scams mostly by prevention. I recently realized that we need national mobilization to fight off cyber attacks. We need the same thing to fight scams. I'm calling that Take Nine via the site pause9.org which is about helping people get real about protecting themselves. It's an ongoing story. We've barely started getting started.
I think it's quite interesting that you know internet is a network of networks but to make sure that internet remains secure you need a network of a lot of people who will help secure the internet. How important do you think is that human dimension and human networks as opposed to technical solutions through cybersecurity?
Well, first you need people to genuinely commit to fighting for cybersecurity, for safety, and then you need people committed to really good customer service and to implement everything that makes sense to do the best job we can protecting each other. We often need human judgment to figure out when something really is a scam. But I do have hopes for people who are now training large language models to detect signs of scams in real time. That's actually a thing which is happening. But right now it's happening quietly. It's experimental. I have a lot to learn about it. And after I learn a lot about it, I have a feeling I won't talk much about it publicly because I don't want to spill the beans. I don't want to reveal anything that bad actors can use. But aside from that, I may get loud in terms of the whole network.
You mentioned your work with Pause Take Nine and it really seems to have a very similar no-frills approach that Craigslist also had that it's very practical. It gets down to business and it really helps people develop the skills that they would need to fight scams. Can you draw the line for us between Craigslist and your work there to your interest and now incredible philanthropy in cybersecurity and scams?
Well, I've retired from the company and I have close to zero role there. Beyond that, I figure I've been personally and professionally committed to scam fighting for over 25 years, and I'm trying to do everything we can to fight against it. Because I was attacked, both the company and I was personally attacked for fighting crime online, in particular scams. I've been pretty gun-shy about speaking up in this regards. And within the last couple months, I've realized that was a big mistake. I should have been vocal for years about fighting scams. I'm preparing to make up for lost time. Everything I do though is separate from the company. But I'm hoping that if the effort, the network of networks fighting scams gets some real solutions, I'm going to bring those solutions to the attention of everyone.
I think when we think of cybersecurity there are two sort of levels. One is where cyber criminals are directly targeting the civilian population through scams, phishing and so on. But there is this other dimension where cyber criminals are targeting critical infrastructure such as electrical grids or water purification systems that affect everyone's lives that people are really dependent on and simply cannot do without. So what is your take on the cyber crime threat and the potential harms of people targeting this critical infrastructure that is important to everyday life to national security and how is it that people can combat this dimension of cybersecurity threats?
The problem is that our free countries, the US in particular, is being targeted by our adversaries, military adversaries. They're preparing, if necessary, to be able to take down water supplies, to be able to take down power supplies, to interfere with transportation or food logistics. A lot of these things are in process right now. We don't know how bad it is. If you want to do some research, look up Volt Typhoon or Salt Typhoon. So, a lot of it's happening and I'm funding an effort called the Cyber Resilience Corps. A lot of it has to do with the Cyber Trust and the Franklin Project involved in helping protect the small water supply systems that run a great deal of the water infrastructure throughout the US. So I'm funding the people who are really good at leading big volunteer efforts. But part of this also is that if we help people do cybersecurity basics, well a lot of compromises of systems have to do with people not doing the basics. So, if we help educate the public in the hundreds of millions as to how to keep themselves safe, that'll ultimately help protect infrastructure and it'll help protect a lot of people against scams. The idea is that the people who work in infrastructure on an individual basis or a company basis have the same problems that we all do when it comes to keeping safe. You have to keep your login secure. You have to do what you can to avoid getting your systems compromised. You have to update your systems frequently and you have to do what's right to keep yourself protected and you have to learn how to extend that to help protect your company because you're protecting your job that way. The hard part for me personally may be that in talking about this frequently and loudly, I may wind up putting a lot of pressure on IT staffs at small infrastructure firms and that's going to really annoy a lot of IT people who are under-resourced and I just hope I don't piss them off too much.
I love that you mentioned that this is something that we need to be able to train people at on a large scale. It's a big problem and big problems usually need big smart teams to be able to make some headway. You have supported cybersecurity clinics at universities to train future cybersecurity defenders and that is one way that you have tried to scale cybersecurity knowledge around a population. What qualities do you believe the internet leaders in cybersecurity of tomorrow, what skills do they need beyond the technical? So you say that we don't want to piss off the IT folks too much. How do we make sure that cybersecurity leaders have skills beyond technical and what should those be?
Two big skill areas. Well, one, people have to know how to work with other people. You have to be able to collaborate with other people of goodwill and you have to be very willing to do that. And then you got to be much better about talking about it. That is, you need to get loud about what you're doing as long as you're not compromising yourself because you not only have to assure your community that you're doing something, but talking about it loudly helps motivate other people to look out for everyone else. It motivates other people to get the job done. So, we're talking about getting the word out and getting the word out in a way that promotes collaboration, just people working with each other because this is serious common good. It's kind of like World War II where everyone who could pitched in to help defend the country no matter what country we were talking about.
I think you point out a very important dimension of this which is talking about it because in case of cybersecurity a lot of times people especially people who are not technically knowledgeable they feel a sense of helplessness when they are confronted with cyber crime and talking about it is really a way to raise awareness and also educate people on the sort of menu of options that they have in responding to this. But another area where people are also starting to feel quite helpless about is how can they trust the information that they are receiving. There is a lot of misinformation and disinformation that's happening especially with the advent of these large language models which can just generate an insane amount of content in a blink of an eye. So how can we develop information ecosystems that people can rely on that people can trust and I think this is also connected to news and journalism where you need to identify the correct sources for information as well.
That's a really difficult painful and unsolved problem in general. The deal is that there are a lot of people in the world, a small tiny percentage of the population, but there are too many people who basically make their living by lying to other people. And the people who are good at that are typically much better than the people who want to tell the truth. I mean, I'm biased in this regards. Also, in Sunday school, I learned about the ninth commandment, which says, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness.' usually translated as thou shalt not lie, but I like the original better. And no one quite knows how to figure this out because it's just too profitable to engage in enshittification practices. The one great hope for our species, I feel, is Wikipedia. Wikipedia in terms of getting things right isn't perfect, but it's closer than anything else that the species has developed, is still evolving. It's still getting better. I appreciate when people find problems with it because you find a problem and then the editing community starts figuring out how to deal with it, even if it's a really tough problem and there are really tough problems. But I think Wikipedia has solved the problem worldwide of somehow getting people of goodwill to work with each other successfully. That's a problem when it comes to bad actors because bad actors don't want something like that to exist.
