8

The Scrooge Shift

Why a Soccer Team, a Fingerprint, and a Name Can Tilt Us in the Other Direction

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which

interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, although he

derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

—Adam Smith, father of economics

In 1993, a man named Craig Newmark left IBM after seventeen years to take a computer security
position at Charles Schwab in San Francisco. As a single guy new to the Bay Area, he was looking
for ways to spice up his social life. In early 1995, he started e-mailing friends to share information
about local arts and technology events. Word of mouth spread, and people began to expand the
postings beyond events to feature job openings, apartments, and miscellaneous items for sale. By
June, the e-mail list had grown to 240 people. It was too large for direct e-mail, so Craig moved it to
a listserv. In 1996, a website was born, and it was called Craigslist. By the end of 2011, there were
Craigslist sites in more than seven hundred locations around the world. In the United States alone,
roughly fifty million people visit Craigslist each month, making Craigslist one of the ten most popular
websites in the country—and one of the forty most visited in the world.
Craigslist flourished by appealing to our basic matcher instincts. It facilitates transactions in
which buyers and sellers can agree on a fair price, exchanging goods and services for what they’re
worth. Fundamentally, Craigslist is about trading value in direct exchanges between people, creating
a matcher’s preferred even balance of give and take. “We’re not altruistic,” Newmark writes. “From
one perspective, we’re like a flea market.”
Could a system like this function based entirely on giving, instead of matching?
In 2003, an Ohio native by the name of Deron Beal decided to find out. Just like Craig Newmark,
Beal was in a new city where he lacked information, so he started an e-mail list of friends. Following
the lead from Craigslist, Beal was aiming to create Internet-based local communities of exchange for