Marketplace Stories

The following reflection was previously published via my blog/life update email on 8/14/24. I just got around to porting it over here!

Recently, I’ve been spending an unreasonable amount of time browsing posts on the virtual bazaar that is Facebook Marketplace. There’s so much odd stuff on there that — even with Facebook’s best algorithmic curation efforts¹ — it’s a digital space that retains an element of serendipity and informality that feels missing on much of the micro-targeted internet.

Do I want to buy a decommissioned traffic light? Or a HUGE fingerboard ramp lot? Or a $4000 automatic donut-making machine? I’m not sure, but I certainly wouldn’t have considered it before seeing these posts (NB: the seller promises that I will “make my money back 10x fold!!” if I invest in the donut machine).

Marketplace posts often come with little stories attached — idiosyncratic mini-histories of an object and its relation to a person, perhaps explaining where it came from, or justifying why it’s been put up for sale despite being in complete working order.

• “Found this while cleaning out my mom’s attic — still works great!”
• “Bought the wrong size :(“
• “Forgot that I had this!”
• “Sadly getting out of the hobby, and selling off all my gear”
• “This was a gift and only used 2 or 3 times”
• “Upgrading to a newer version but this still works great!”

There’s a charming honesty in these micro stories: they are little windows into some aspect of a seller’s personality or recent life events: the seller is forgetful, or careless, or busy, or a dabbler; they’re sentimental (or not), or making some life changes, or investing in their hobby; they have recently lost a parent. And so on.

Sometimes, the story behind a marketplace post is so irrepressible that it pushes through a seller’s best efforts at impersonal commercial language. The briefly-used engagement ring is an recurring find of this sort:

Other times, posts raise more questions than answers. How exactly did you come across this “real authentic stash book (from a real trap house)”? Will someone buy it? Is it even legal to sell what appears to be a literal army tank on Facebook Marketplace²? Mysteries are a kind of story, too.

These stories attach to the objects themselves. Knowing (a bit of) the history of an object individualizes it — makes it singular in a way. Commercial capitalism typically erases or ignores these kinds of histories of particular objects, dissolving them with the sameness-difference boundaries of broader commodity categories. Even in offline resale clearing houses like thrift stores and pawn shops, object histories are typically invisible. This vintage shirt was donated or sold or passed along by someone — but who? when? why?

Facebook Marketplace is of course not the first online resale marketplace — platforms like eBay and Craigslist long precede it chronologically³. But there’s something about FB marketplace’s combination of visual-browsability (photos), locality, and informality that makes it engrossing in a different kind of way. And with the prevalence of smartphones (and FB accounts), the barrier to posting is extremely low. Why not see if someone wants to buy the pre-assembled lego flower bouquet you were going to discard, or the “odd drawing” from your sketchbook?