Columbus Day Letter to the Editors: It isn't Craig's fault
Craig Newmark superimposed onto a Currier and Ives print of Columbus landing at San Salvador.
Today is Columbus Day. I’m a big fan of the guy and have always liked to celebrate the holiday for that reason, as well as the defacto Italian celebration that has linked up to it. I also like to celebrate Leif Erikson Day, which is October 9 – earlier than Columbus, since he got to the Americas a few hundred years earlier, but that’s another story.
Columbus is a spectacular figure in history with an amazing, multifaceted story. He is brilliant, yet mistaken. He is courageous and inventive, frustrated and foolhardy, loved and reviled. There can be no doubt that Columbus, whether you consider him as a man or a symbol of an age, changed the world.
There are many who argue that Columbus is not one to celebrate. Either as a man or a symbol, he is blamed for the genocide of the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere. It is true that within decades of European contact, the native populations of the Americas were perishing from contact to disease and being worked to death as slaves. I’ve studied this extensively as an anthropologist and nautical archaeologist who looked at the diaspora.
So what about Craigslist and newspapers? I once made a quip that got requoted, shortened and retweeted over the years that compared Craig Newmark to Columbus. The quote goes something like this:
Many blame Craig for the death of Newspapers, just as many blame Columbus for Amerindian genocide… but the reality is, when the culutre with the cannons and ships meets the one with bows and arrows and canoes, it doesn’t matter who got there first. The canoes have to adapt or they’re history.
Yes, it is harsh. That’s what history and nature and competition are: harsh. Things aren’t for better or worse, they just are.
Societies with primitive technology aren’t backward, they just never had a need to advance technology to deal with challenges in their matrix. Sharks, for example are primitive animals in this classic definition of the term: they evolved early and were so good at what they did, they didn’t need to evolve more. They’ve held their niche as undisputed champion predators for ages.
And so did Native Americans. They fought each other like crazy, enslaved each other and had brutal rituals in cultures that endured over millennia with very minimal technological advancement. But their adaptations were balanced with their environment and everyone existed fine, more or less. Until the day the big ships landed.
This is kind of like newspapers. They did what they did for centuries, subtly getting better at printing and distributing, but the game was basically the same and the market was balanced in their favor – the big tribes finally won monopolies in their territories and all was black and white and read all over. Until the day the computer nerds arrived.
It isn’t Craig’s fault, so stop blaming him. He had a good idea… the world wasn’t flat and he stumbled onto something amazing, and a huge community followed him. He may or may not have been first, but he was successful and he has become a symbol of an age. The culture with the advanced technology came, and the culture with the older technology now has to adapt to the new world order, or else.
It doesn’t matter who got there first. In the end, it never really does. It is what happens after that really matters: How you figure out how to live together, because things are never, ever going to go back to how they were.
