Jessa Lingel

How we lost control of the internet--and how to win it back. The internet has become a battleground. Although it was unlikely to live up to the hype and hopes of the 1990s, only the most skeptical cynics could have predicted the World Wide Web as we know it today: commercial, isolating, and full of, even fueled by, bias. This was not inevitable. The Gentrification of the Internet argues that much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it. Jessa Lingel uses the politics and debates of gentrification to diagnose the massive, systemic problems blighting our contemporary internet: erosions of privacy and individual ownership, small businesses wiped out by wealthy corporations, the ubiquitous paywall. But there are still steps we can take to reclaim the heady possibilities of the early internet. Lingel outlines actions that internet activists and everyday users can take to defend and secure more protections for the individual and to carve out more spaces of freedom for the people--not businesses--online.

How to Reclaim Our Digital Freedom

The Gentrification of the Internet

"This book argues that craigslist issues a quiet challenge to the corporate norms that have become dominant in the twenty-first century web. More than a window to the world's ephemera, craigslist is an increasingly lonely outpost in a hyper-corporate web. It is the internet un-gentrified, representing an older ideological orientation of online politics, one that stresses technological simplicity, collectivism, and locality. Flawed and ever on the brink of obsolescence, it provides a model of how democracy can work - most of the time for most people - online. The first part of the book provides historical context for understanding craigslist, describing craigslist's transformation from an email list to a massively popular online marketplace and examining the development of classified and personal ads through the arrival of the digital age. Lingel also examines craigslist's legal history, looking at the company's battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and exploring what the company's defenses in the courtroom reveal about the platform's politics. The second part of the book explores how people use craigslist in everyday life, and the publics and politics that emerge from their daily online interactions. One chapter draws on interviews with craigslist users to examine the relationships between people and things in craigslist's secondary marketplace. Another looks at how jobs are advertised and filled on craigslist, and the shifting norms and associated class biases that result from craigslist job-seeking practices. Lastly, Lingel examines the problems that are created and solved as people buy and sell, find jobs and gigs, connect to, exploit, and protect each other on craigslist, showing how the community negotiates, establishes, and polices rules and norms. By looking at the politics and promises of craigslist, Lingel concludes, we can also reflect on how the web has evolved, how it has stayed the same, what we might want to protect and what we should think about changing when it comes to everyday life online"--

The Politics and Promise of Craigslist

An Internet for the People

How craigslist champions openness, democracy, and other vanishing principles of the early web Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn't profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love—and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web. Drawing on interviews with craigslist insiders and ordinary users, Jessa Lingel looks at the site's history and values, showing how it has mostly stayed the same while the web around it has become more commercial and far less open. She examines craigslist's legal history, describing the company's courtroom battles over issues of freedom of expression and data privacy, and explains the importance of locality in the social relationships fostered by the site. More than an online garage sale, job board, or dating site, craigslist holds vital lessons for the rest of the web. It is a website that values user privacy over profits, ease of use over slick design, and an ethos of the early web that might just hold the key to a more open, transparent, and democratic internet.

The Politics and Promise of craigslist

How countercultural communities have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of digital technology use. Whether by accidental keystroke or deliberate tinkering, technology is often used in ways that are unintended and unimagined by its designers and inventors. In this book, Jessa Lingel offers an account of digital technology use that looks beyond Silicon Valley and college dropouts-turned-entrepreneurs. Instead, Lingel tells stories from the margins of countercultural communities that have made the Internet meet their needs, subverting established norms of how digital technologies should be used. Lingel presents three case studies that contrast the imagined uses of the web to its lived and often messy practicalities. She examines a social media platform (developed long before Facebook) for body modification enthusiasts, with early web experiments in blogging, community, wikis, online dating, and podcasts; a network of communication technologies (both analog and digital) developed by a local community of punk rockers to manage information about underground shows; and the use of Facebook and Instagram for both promotional and community purposes by Brooklyn drag queens. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Lingel explores issues of alterity and community, inclusivity and exclusivity, secrecy and surveillance, and anonymity and self-promotion. By examining online life in terms of countercultural communities, Lingel argues that looking at outsider experiences helps us to imagine new uses and possibilities for the tools and platforms we use in everyday life.

Jessa Lingel

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