Craigslist Censored: Adult Section Comes Down

You pretty much have to be running schoolgirls out of homeroom to get the Nagoya police to so much as glance in your direction, but Japanese prostitution is a very, very ugly place to be, and much of it is based on trafficking. I live two hundred feet from a "Korean aesthetic salon" which is open at three A.M. in the morning. One of the not-so-young ladies who works there has taken to sleeping on the bus bench across the street recently, in heat which has nearly sent me to the hospital twice. You may have heard that Japan has a storied relationship with its Korean immigrants. Those who do -- to use a nauseating euphemism -- the jobs Japanese girls won't do can expect neglect from polite society, because polite society knows that inquiring into her circumstances means they have to know what goes on in those walls, and they are very interested in keeping up the fiction that they do not know what goes on in those walls.

Or take the European experience. Amsterdam, city of lights, so much more sophisticated than the American puritans, perfectly legal thriving sex trade, right? It has been taken over by Russian mafia who are undercutting the locals via use of trafficked girls from Eastern Europe. You always have the option as a merchant of sex slaves to one-up what the "morally upright prostitutes" allow, safe in the knowledge that they will cover for you because an investigation into what you are doing harms their business interests. Society, meanwhile, has no great desire to actually police what happens inside of brothels, preferring to believe its sanity-saving fictions like "she wants to be there", "it is just sex between two consenting adults", and "no slaves live on my block."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/world/europe/24amsterdam.h...

Prostitution, legal or otherwise, is not pretty. It is based, root and branch, on exploitation. To the extent you think that legalizing it will end the exploitation, you believe something which is contrary to reality.

Priority one will be keeping it legal. Any bad press is aid to folks like me. There won't be any bad press, because there are no sex slaves in our industry, just like there are no incompetent teachers at public schools.

Casinos are billion+ dollar investments where regulation helps the client and being able to legitimately raise huge sums of capital lets you crush the mob. After decriminalization you can play in a seedy backroom with an unknown rake or you can have a business conference on the corporate nickle in a five star hotel where the rake is established as a matter of law. Customer preference wins.

Regulation in prostitution tells client that they can't do what they are willing to pay to do, and it is not capitally intensive and does not reward megascale. After decriminalization you can have the sex that they allow you to have or the sex that you want to have. Customer preference wins.

But like bank robbers who foolishly think they wouldn't get caught on the 10th robbery, or a gambler playing martingale double or nothing all night, they fucked up. Craig should have pried open his fat ass wallet and toss millions of pocket change towards lobbying, branding, PR and advertising many, many years ago. Instead, they let their enemies, the media itself, define their brand and PR, and they lost control of the message, the agenda and the way they are presented to the mass public.

But Craig is apparently too hung up on his neo-hippy ideals of keeping Craigslist anti-corporate to realize that if he doesn't sink to the same dirty corporate warfare as the enemy, then they'll stab him in the back eventually. All they need is one good shot, and it's just a matter of time. I don't really get how a privately held $100 million/yr corporation is "anti-corporate." At that point it's just folly and self-delusion, he should have seen this storm cloud brewing miles away and years ago, and prepared for it to hit. Such as when Ebay tried to steal the company years ago. Too late now—say buh-bye to that $36 million a year in revenues from adult ads! Ouch!

I'm an unabashed Craiglist hater simply because he completely fucked up and missed the boat and failed us developers by not transforming the most popular and best single Internet site of high signal/noise anonymous contact into the best open mashup API of real-time, localized, semantic data. And this souped up mashup data API didn't have to be all corporatified either—Craig could have kept it hippy! Like Twitter! CL would only need to lift their pinky finger to instantly defeat the hundreds of millions invested in data mashup startups, Google, FB, AT&T, Ebay, etc who are trying to pin the market which CL dominates. Again, I see the opportunity cost—by CL not chasing change, we the users of the Internet have now lost more than we've gained from the potential of CL as force for good, community and the overall power of the Internet. I suppose my idealism is even purer than Craig's. :) At the very least, CL can stop sending C&D orders and DMCA takedowns to small websites scraping their data.

I believe a data API like this would have caused Craigslist to become even bigger and more unstoppable. Craig, Jim and whoever pulls the the strings are lazy, unimaginative fucktards who deserve to be dethroned so we, the Internet, can have a new winner in the next round of King-of-the-Hill: Winner Takes All Internet Edition. :)