“Funny thing about Craig,” she said. “She” being the creative head of a noteworthy boutique agency. “What he invented has helped so many people get laid. Just not him.” She laughed, took a sip of her drink and insofar as possible made me feel a little bit better about Craig Newmark, the aforementioned and also the creator of something so stupid it makes you sick to think about: Craigslist.
An online classified ad dealie, Craigslist was something that Newmark kicked off in 1996, after years of laboring as a programmer, systems and software engineer. One who, very specifically, just wanted a place where he could let friends know about… things. The now-married Newmark maybe only dimly imagined then that one of those things that friends might want to know about had everything to do with knowing precisely who shared the same kinks as you. And where they might be.
“The idea that you could advertise for, and perhaps find people to communicate with, and even have sex with, on the world wide web? I immediately went on-line…” said a mother of three, and an attorney in a failing marriage to a Silicon Valley CEO. She later described it as “giving candy to a kid” and went deep into the dance finding men, singular, to have sex with, as well as men, plural, to have sex with all at the same time. Just good ol’ fashioned adult fun. That your husband never need find out about.
Now never mind that Newmark’s totally legal usurpation of classified ad dollars did a good job of decimating weekly news magazines, the old must make way for the new and that’s just, somehow, how things go. But in an effort to regain those dollars publisher and journalist Jim Larkin, in 2004, and already sitting on top of the $400 million New Times enterprise that included New Times, SF Weekly, the Village Voice for starters, decided to strike back. In doing so, he created Backpage.
[T]here’s always that chapter that you inevitably get to when humans are involved and which you can comfortably call, “ruining it for everyone.”
Running through all of their properties, Backpage was both a printed and online marketplace for just about everything. Especially if by “everything” you mean people who shared the same kinks as you. Of course, there’s always that chapter that you inevitably get to when humans are involved and which you can comfortably call, “ruining it for everyone.”
Because no sooner had those who were interested in getting their adult ya-ya’s off, got them off, did there emerge those whose business was the selling of ya-ya’s. Sex work, an honorable profession, if done honorably, also crowbarred its way in and with it came predatory bottom feeders who were running underage offers of ya-ya getting. And with it, not incorrect descriptions of it as “child sex trafficking.”
While Newmark, in a bit of eerie and early prescience, yanked out all of the “Casual Connections” pages and invitations to kink on Craigslist, Larkin did no such thing.
“Jim was a big free speech guy,” said an attorney friend of Larkin and his family. “And from his point of view, sort of like Facebook, he believed he was just providing a platform.” A platform he was not especially interested in policing. It seemed like he believed it wasn’t his business.
And it just about wasn’t. Right up until he was shut down by the Department of Justice. The year was 2015. Three years later the chickens came home to roost and the FBI finally arrested Larkin on charges of facilitating prostitution, money laundering, and conspiracy. Larkin was pleading not guilty, and in short order the FBI began taking it all. First Backpage and then just about everything Larkin owned.
Larkin, whose papers had been critical of Republicans who had held sway in Arizona, may not have understood that “they” were out for blood. There were trials, mistrials, the government using the phrase “child sex trafficking” in court so many times that they had to be cautioned because, in fact, no one was facing any suchlike charge.
So, Larkin’s third trial was set for last week. It would not, however, have its start as Larkin, having had enough, got in his car, and drove off a bit before shooting himself in the head.
Which is to say: he’s now dead.
They could run their businesses, and since their bodies are their businesses, they could keep both safe, by using yet another layer of anti-crazy-killer filter.
He’s dead, and kink? It’s going nowhere. Having human urges met halfway by gaggles of others who were also laboring under the gently held illusion that perhaps they were all alone out there in a wide world of “normal” people, “we” would not budge from what had been discovered. While “normal” might be the average, none of us perceives ourselves as being average or all that normal really.
Despite political insistence on some sort of stabilizing normality both sides of the spectrum are laden with examples of swingers swinging, threesomes, foursomes, partner swapping, polyamory and everything else that while making you feel in some small measure like a bad assed “outlaw” is really just the stuff that people have done, are doing and will always be doing.
Those interested in stabilizing normality, or justifiably not interested at all in destabilizing abnormality, under which sex crimes against children would fall, believe that it’s better to over correct, versus under correcting. Sex workers themselves, the adult variety, were not interested in having either Craigslist or Backpage go away. They could run their businesses, and since their bodies are their businesses, they could keep both safe, by using yet another layer of anti-crazy-killer filter.
“We tried to get them to listen to us,” said Nikki, a 50-year-old sex worker who solved two problems when she found herself suddenly both broke and divorced. “But there had to be a better way of stopping the bad actors without punishing us honest brokers.” The powers that be didn’t and didn’t listen and in throwing the baby out with the bath water, they did very little to stop child sex trafficking which, according to Nikki, continues unabated.
None of which at all should surprise anyone within eyeshot of what’s just been written. In fact, what’s most surprising about humans is how little they actually manage to surprise those of us paying attention. You know that expression, “should have seen it coming”?
Well, that’s us, all the time, and every moment of every day.
And still Larkin is dead, and still the government trial against his estate and co-defendants will continue, and we still find ways to serve our kinks and kids, our treasures, are still routinely treated like garbage, and if this were a simulation we’d all be leaving one star reviews for it because it’s so, thoroughly…dull. In how it doesn’t change, that is, how much it remains exactly the same.
To a certain degree then we’d have to guess that Larkin didn’t kill himself because things had “gotten” bad but more that maybe, just…well, things would/could never be good. Or interesting. We eroticize our falsehoods, call them virtues and, in the end, do what the hell we want anyway. So, why not check out?
“I did it once,” said the attorney whose unofficial Craigslist hook up spree may have topped out at 80 partners during a two year period, as well as an eventual divorce from her CEO husband. “You never know: I might just do it again.”
You see? The “how” is not at all or never ever the issue, and the “why” is an almost-ignored afterthought. Though the reality of it is, and remains, this: we are primates and nothing foreign to us should be foreign to us.
So do what though wilt. As long as it is legal. Tell “them” I said it’s OK!
OK…here’s a big letter A…announcement…if you’ve already pre-ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon? Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
You will now not get the book until OCTOBER 12, 2023.
There was some screw up, though it should be noted that it was not MY screw up. But there are a lot of moving parts in getting this monster out. In any case this is not about blame. It’s just an announcement.
So that’s the bad/drag news.
The GOOD news? Feral House is STILL planning on special, SEXY giveaways to accompany the book. Which you should STILL do the right thing and pre-order right now if you haven’t already done so.