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Foreword: This Magic Marketplace
As you will read in this book, eBay is a community, a platform, a
social experiment, a successful business, and a microcosm of
important Information Age precepts like "network
effects," "positive returns to
scale," "frictionless
economics," even "the changing
nature of intellectual property." eBay has a couple
of dozen knockout doctoral dissertations lurking in its depths, as
well as any number of statutory reforms, sermons, and life-lessons.
If you haven't played with eBay yet, you should. If
you have played with eBay, this book will enrich your play further.
eBay is becoming the most important way for people to exchange goods.
Exchanging goods, exchanging information, and exchanging culture are
the three most important activities undertaken by human beings, with
the exception of exchanging fluids (without this last exchange, the
human race would die off in a generation).
eBay is a uniquely Information Age technology, and as such, it is
properly ranked with other technologies that have democratized
participation in the fundamental activities of our existence, like
the Web itself and Napster.
When the Web was beginning, a lot of Solemn Information Clergy
muttered darkly about the inevitable failure of the Internet as a
"library" or an
"encyclopedia." Libraries are
grown-up affairs, filled with serious books written by serious people
and carefully cataloged by guardians of human knowledge into
hierarchies that express the depth and breadth of all endeavors. The
Web has no quality-control mechanism. Any nutbar can pen a few
thousand words of lavishly illustrated tinfoil-beanie woo-woo
conspiracy theory and post it online, without permission or
proofreading. No one seriously attempts to catalog or organize the
whole Web into hierarchies anymoreYahoo! was the last company
to make a go at it, and they've quietly deemphasized
their effort ever since they realized that keeping pace with the
explosive growth of woo-woo tinfoil-beanie conspiracy theories would
necessitate hiring every single human being alive and setting them to
work cataloging for 14 hours per day.
The best lesson of the Internet is that Napster is better than record
labels. Record labels are huge, lumbering, pre-Information Age
dinosaurs, thrashing around in the tar as they sink beneath the
weight of history while meteors detonate spectacularly overhead.
They're incredibly inefficient. They require
extraordinaryeven unconstitutional!legal protection to
coexist with the Internet. What's more,
they've spent a lot of time and money trying to
figure out what their customers want from online music distribution,
and have utterly missed the fact that hundreds of millions of
music-buyers around the world have taken up avid use of file-sharing
networks that give them all the music they care to listen to, at a
cost that's bundled in with their communications
services, day or night, with no
"copy-protection" or
"rights-management."
They've missed the fact that no customer of theirs
ever woke up in the morning and said, "Dammit, I
wish there was a way I could have less music, and do less with the
music I have."
And yet, the Web *is* displacing a lot of the traditional roles
played by libraries, despite its typos and madmen. Napster and its
progeny *are* becoming the world's preferred means
of locating and sharing information, shouting defiance at
extraordinarily wicked lawsuits and extraordinarily stupid Acts of
Congress. The Priesthood of Information and the Guardians of Music
have been displaced by dirty-faced kids whose technology is allowing
them to take control of their own information and cultural
transactions, and the world is a better place for it.
eBay is a marketplace, and marketplaces are the cradle of
civilization. The congress of the market is where all economic theory
begins. The Bazaar of the Market is noisome and varied and sticky.
Goods sell for one price at one moment, and another price the next.
Our modern descendants of the market have had their own priesthoods,
like the hyperkinetic hyperacidic floor-traders at the old NYSE who
shouted commodities prices out for eight hours a day, running on a
lean blend of caffeine and adrenaline.
Buying and selling goods, improving goods, building a business,
adding and subtracting value: these entrepreneurial qualities have
achieved mythic status in our world. The epitome of these activities
is the five-cent lemonade stand: by combining commodity
ingredientssugar, lemon juice, and tap-watera child can
pocket a 400 percent profit on one cent's worth of
goods.
Unfortunately, most of us leave the market after our childhoods,
revisiting it only long enough to haggle over the price of a car, buy
a new house, or throw a yard sale on a summer morning. We forget what
it means to be part of that negotiation, that process by which goods
and buyers and sellers dance frenziedly about one another, seeking a
moment of stability in which a perfect equilateral triangle is
formed.
No, most of our transactions are with enterprises like WalMart and
Starbucks, slick and faceless entities where haggling is unthinkable,
where the passionate intercourse of trade has been neutered, turned
into a family-safe, sexless politesse.
eBay makes us all into participants in the market again.
It's no coincidence that eBay's
first great wave of participation came from the collectibles trade.
The collectibles market occurs at the intersection of luck
(discovering a piece at a yard sale or thrift shop), knowledge
(recognizing its value), market sense (locating a buyer for the
goods), and salesmanship (describing the piece's
properties attractively). It requires little startup capital and lots
of smarts, something that each of us possesses in some measure.
Somewhere, in the world's attics and basements, are
all the treasures of history. Someone is using the Canopic jar
containing Queen Nefertiti's preserved spleen as an
ashtray. Someone is using George Washington's false
teeth as a paperweight. Somewhere, a mouse is nibbling at a frayed
carton containing the lost gold of El Dorado. A Yahoo! for junk would
never break even: you simply couldn't source enough
crack junque ninjas to infiltrate and catalog the
world's storehouses of *tchotchkes*, white elephants
and curios.
And like Napster found the cheapest way to get all the music online,
eBay has found the most cost-effective means of cataloging the
world's attics and basements. It's
attic-Napster, and it has spread the cost and effort around. When you
spy a nice casino ashtray on the 25-cent shelf at Thrift Town and
snap its pic and put it up on eBay, and when the renowned collector
of glass ashtrays, ColBatGuano, bids it up to $400, you have taken
part in a market transaction that has simultaneously cataloged a nice
bit of bric-a-brac and moved it to a collection where it will be
lovingly cared forand you've left a record of
where it is and what it was worth when last we saw it. Buried in
eBay's backup tapes is a Blue Book with the last
known value of nearly every object we have ever created as a species,
from Trinitite (green, faintly radioactive glass fused at the
detonation of the first nuclear explosion at Los Alamos, $2.59 a gram
at last check) to commodity 40-gigabyte laptop hard-drives ($30 at
press-time and falling fast).
Collectors and the junk-pushers who service them have long relied on
reputation to manage their relationships. When a picker finds a Hank
Williams rookie card at a Volunteer Fire Department
Ladies' Auxiliary yard sale at the end of a dusty
dirt road and contacts a few customers in Japan, New York, and
Frankfurt to arrange for a bidding war and sale, they all need to
trust one another. The collectors and the seller need to know that
the goods and the cash can be exchanged in confidence before they
begin the bidding.
But reputation doesn't
scalethat's one of the factors that keeps the
laity away from the market's pulpit. No one wants to
be the sucker who gives a fellow on the street $500 for a dodgy
"diamond bracelet" and ends up with
$5 worth of paste-gems. No one wants to get taken by a respondent to
a classified car-sale ad who vanishes with your vintage VW Beetle,
leaving a rubber check behind.
Geeks have been trying to find a system to allow strangers to trust
each other online for decades, and they're still at
it. The systems that have emerged are plagued by the need to balance
simplicity and accuracy, and being geeks, most engineers have
produced reputation systems that require a subtle and rarefied grasp
of philosophy and cryptography to get your arms around.
eBay's reputation system is as ingenious as it is
simple. It's a streamlined Better Business Bureau,
one that's nimble enough to cope with the rapid
growth of eBay. And as fascinating as it is when it works,
it's even more interesting (and heartbreaking) when
it fails, as when a seller with many years'
good-standing suddenly lists five $5,000 laptops and disappears with
the cash.
The interplay of reputation, buyers, sellers, and goods is what makes
auctions so exciting and paradoxical. The more interested bidders
there are, the higher the price goes, but high prices attract more
sellers, which lowers the closing price of the goods. Add in a few
negative feedbacks for some of the bidders and a few more for some of
the sellers and you've got an interaction as
unpredictable and interesting and mysterious as the weather.
In all this high-minded business about bidding and selling and
markets and human striving, it's important not to
lose sight of what makes eBay so fiendishly addictive: you can sell
anything. You can buy anything. Anything. You can get bargains. You
can turn trash into treasure. You can turn your
cottage's furnishings into a cottage industry,
serving hipster doofuses on the West Coast who've
rediscovered seventies kitsch. You can write code that automates this
process!
Me, I collect vintage Disney theme park memorabilia.
That's my kink. When I started shopping on eBay,
this was a manageable habit. I could go through four or five pages of
new listings every morning while I listened to the news, and put down
a few bids on fright-masks from the Haunted Mansion and cocktail
umbrellas from the Tiki Room.
But as eBay grew, the Disney category was overrun with
sellersDisney has made a *lot* of memorabilia over the
yearsand going through the listings screen by screen became a
full-time occupation. So I started to tinker with searches, like
this:
> disney* -pin
That is, "show me all listings containing
`disney' but not
`pin'." Gradually,
my search grew, metastasizing into something like this:
> disney* -pin -beanie -pinback -classics -baby -wdcc -watch -t-shirt
-tshirt -teeshirt -girl* -CD -DVD -VHS
. . . and so onit grew to 20 kilobytes, and
I'd paste it into my browser every morning and get a
shower and dress while eBay's poor servers labored
under its demands, spitting out a screen-full of likely items.
But eBay's servers grew more taxed, and my demands
grew more taxing. My query started timing out.
And I had to develop a new strategy. I went back through all the
items that I found particularly interesting, the things
I'd bid on or thought hard about bidding on, and
went through their bid histories, noting the names of all the people
who'd competed with me for the lots. These people, I
reasoned, had good enough taste to bid on the things that I liked,
and they apparently have enough spare time to search the listings
more thoroughly than I do. Why don't I just take a
free ride on their labor?
Which is what I did. I searched eBay for all the auctions that my
erstwhile competitors were bidding on and I bookmarked each result.
Thereafter, instead of trying to use a series of keywords to locate
individual items of interest, I used *people*people
who'd bid against me. By watching what they were
bidding on, I was able to discover any number of interesting items up
on the block, and whenever I bid in a new auction, I got the added
bonus of more names to add to my list of researchers who had the
knack for finding the stuff I sought.
This strategy worked altogether too well. Not only did I discover
many things I wanted to bid on, I won many of the auctions. Too many.
Enough that my once-spacious warehouse loft began to bulge at the
seams, and my banker took to phoning me up in the middle of the night
to ask me in earnest tones if I'd developed a heroin
habit.
If he only knewI was addicted to something far more fiendish:
junque, not junk. I am an unabashed junquie, and eBay is the
marketplace of *tchotchkes* where I feed my addiction.
I'm happy to welcome you all into the fold. Your
habit awaits.
Cory Doctorowwww.boingboing.net) and is the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). Cory is a prolific and award-winning science fiction writer; his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was recently published by Tor books. He is a regular contributor to Wired magazine and a columnist for the O'Reilly Network.
