Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised

**Tyler Cowen** (0:04)
Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.
Craig, hello, welcome.

**Craig Newmark** (0:30)
Good to meet you.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:31)
As founder of Craigslist, I have a very simple question for you. Why does it seem as if web page design has just gotten worse for 30 years running?

**Craig Newmark** (0:41)
In my ignorance, when I first put up the first Craigslist site, I just kept it simple knowing I have no design skills, except simplicity and speed is a design criterion, and people haven't gotten the message. I've seen designers do some very attractive work that no one has asked for, and I appreciate it. And since I relinquished any management control of Craigslist in 2000, Jim Buckmaster has kept the design clean. Sometimes I like seeing, oh, fancy design, but as a general rule, I just want to get the thing done.
On any site, I want to get the thing done and get on with my life.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:20)
And how do you stop them from adding bells and whistles and making it complicated?

**Craig Newmark** (1:25)
Them at Craigslist, no need. Jim is committed.
Throughout the whole world, I just struggle like anyone else. Like when I want to cancel a streaming service, it is never straightforward.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:39)
But what then was wrong with the 1990s web? Because people did move away from it. There's now so many walled gardens, so many complex websites. I react with horror when I have to buy a ticket and then upload it into an app, and it feels it could all be simpler.
Why didn't things stay with where they were? What's your account of that?

**Craig Newmark** (1:58)
The big problem is that people to do successful sites, as time went on, had to compete more and more.
That meant they had to attract a venture capital, I guess, who made more and more demands of them, where people had to extract whatever dollars they could out of their site. And then, I guess, that began a process of what Corey Doctorow calls en-shitification. He captured the process much better than I just articulated it. He's also a bit of a hero of mine in that he's more articulate about our rights online. He's also braver than I am because he's okay with putting a target on his own back. Oh, and he writes good novels.

**Tyler Cowen** (2:41)
I have a question. This is from GPT, and I quote, Your biggest decisions all look subtractive. You monetized as little as possible, stepped aside as CEO, kept doing customer service, and now in philanthropy, you prefer to fund people and get out of the way. What are you subtracting from yourself that other founders are addicted to? Pretty good at GPT, isn't it?

**Craig Newmark** (3:03)
Yeah, that's a valid perspective. I think of it differently, mostly because as I age and have grown a decrepit, I've realized my limitations and that I'm not good at things. I realize that accidentally, I've built networks of networks, and it's the networks of networks that get stuff done.
Sometimes I can find network builders who can do the stuff I want to on my behalf, and they get it done.
The best examples, Blue Star Families for Military Families, Bob Woodruff Foundation for Bets. And so I'm not subtracting things. I'm just becoming much more effective overall by sharing power and money. That seems to be working. Also by building networks of networks, that's a kind of, just in the past week or two, I've realized that's the most effective form of estate planning I'm doing because as I've become elderly, I have to wonder how my work is going to survive me and that I could create Craig GPT or I could just come back and haunt people for due diligence purposes. But the networks of networks have a life of their own.

**Tyler Cowen** (4:20)
What is scarce in your life then? You're giving away money, right? You don't have to run the company on a day-to-day basis.
We'd all like more years to live. But what is it that if you had more of it, you could be more effective with?

**Craig Newmark** (4:33)
I guess, ideally, I would have more social skills, meaning some.

**Tyler Cowen** (4:39)
But we're simulating social skills just fine here, right?

**Craig Newmark** (4:41)
That's the phrase I use. At least on my part, what looks like social skills is just fakery. I can do it for short amounts of time, maybe 90 minutes. And I've given up, though, on actually accumulating social skills, getting better at it.