The World Wide Web and the California Land Rush
Kaitlin Duck SherwoodCopyright 1994
I wrote this essay in 1994, at a time when I was having some trouble convincing people at my university that it was worthwhile to develop materials for the Internet. It's interesting to see how far we've come so fast!
I read an article several years ago which talked about the land grab in California in the 1800s. It seems that a small handful of people were able to amass huge quantities of land for practically nothing. (Kern county is named after Mr. Kern because he owned practically all of it.)
The article that I read explained the procedure: The government was encouraging settlement in California, so they gave away land to homesteaders. However, there were no restrictions on resale of the land. So the Kerns of the day would hang out at the sailor bars in San Francisco and find sailors who would only be in town for a few days. They would hire these sailors to go down to the land office, sign up for a parcel, and then sign the parcel over. They would repeat this procedure as needed until they got massive amounts of land.
This article bothered me. I kept asking myself, "How were they able to do this? Why weren't the rules changed when they saw that it was being abused?" Or, more troubling, "Why didn't everybody do it?"
I think now I understand. I am guessing that the notice that land was available was probably at the back of an obscure journal, right underneath the funeral notice for Ezra P. Snodwhistle. Furthermore, that notice probably just said, "For more info write to ...", so they would have to actually write a letter to find more info. Then, undoubtedly, they found that they'd have to take the trolley to the end of the line, walk a mile, go down a street (whose street sign had fallen down) to the Wilberforce J. Finklemeyer Bank building, take a side door, and go up three flights of stairs. And the office would only be open Thursdays and Tuesdays between one and five because old Mr. Grundy was mostly retired.
Furthermore, Kern and his ilk would have had to hang out in sailor bars and convince the sailors that, after six months at sea, they would rather go spend some Quality Time with old Mr. Grundy than drink beer and chase women. And the Kerns would have to pay the sailors for their time. And catch up to them afterwards to get the title transferred over.
So this took some effort on the Kern's part that was not insignificant. I can imagine their friends wondering why they were going to all that effort for desert -- land that was so cheap that they were giving it away!
I decided that this is The Way It Was because I see the exact same thing happening on the Web. I go to some not inconsiderable effort to publish pages on the Web. I have to investigate things, type them in, perform maintenance, etc. Furthermore, it is not free. My monthly ISP fees are about $20/month, and my disk fees are now getting up into the same range.
And while it is fun to publish, and gratifying to have people from all over the world send me fan mail telling me how much they enjoyed my New Zealand trip report, it is not at all clear that this will ever result in serious dollars going into my pocket. Nor is there any way to get money directly from my essay on What I Learned From Shaving My Head, and I have a hard time imagining how I'd get money indirectly. (I don't think Gillette will leap right up and ask to sponsor the page.)
But I just have the almost religious belief that this will end up being a very important technology, and feel that somehow this will all pay off. Just like those guys buying desert must have felt.
Ducky
