Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone had a Tom Friedman remix contest:
Him:
And now for the winners. The first grenade goes to “Shlok,” whose noir take on Friedman was really stirring — would make a great movie, like an upside-down, on-acid version of Out of the Past:
Me:
The same nightmare. 24/7/365. Always her, hopeless and beautiful. Giant sounds and lights mark a fight within the faith. Fire rages across her face. Acid eats her away. I fall on a grenade, then pull the pin. She tears, triggers, explodes. The midwife pounds chainsaw-nails-into-Saddam’s-head and suddenly she’s back. She’s chaos, she’s venom unleashed. Too little trust, I know, but I am alone, standing between her and chaos. What to do?
-Shlok
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“The fact that Guardian Angels are on the streets trying to restore law just shows how out of control the situation is in lower Manhattan,” he added, referring to a group of anti-crime volunteers which operates in the city.
-Shlok
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(Or, how to be a Stephensonian Gargoyle.*)
I know a little bit about this. In November 2008, I was using Twitter (before it was big) to live narrate the Mumbai attacks. Real-time analysis in 140 character counts (the graph is how small Twitter was), distilling multiple video and audio feeds, and even talking to people on the ground. All in two to three languages. It worked. I got some media play (PBS, radio etc).
More importantly, people like you and me found it useful. It taught me a lot about the information terrain. Over the last four years, I’ve kind of gotten good at it. Even built a product that helps others be great at it. Some basics follow.
Here are the background components:
- Audio. Listen in to the police streams. Here’s a link.
- Video. Keep a TV on in the background – in this case, the Weather Channel is better than CNN. Find people on the ground though with cameras. Here’s one New Yorker.
Keep these on and in the background. Stuff will jump out at you. Tweet that. Which brings us to Twitter.
- Contrary to popular opinion, the best sources aren’t necessarily on the ground or even in the same country.
- Try different languages. You may get access to something unique.
- Search for keywords. “Holy shit” works as well as “underwater.”
- People are the best aggregators. Pulse and Flipboard etc are beyond useless during a real event.
- When you find someone through the aggregator, follow them. Repeat.
And above all, be a source. Tweet what you know and what you learn and what could be. If someone says you were wrong, tweet that too. It’s not your job to verify. You’re a transmission medium. You’re slaving your cognitive capacity to the global hive.
It’s their responsibility to figure out what’s chaff and what isn’t.
That is somewhat controversial. (I say that because I’ve been yelled at for it, consistently, every time I’ve done this.) There are people who will whine at you for not adhering to some arcane notion of journalistic integrity. It’s bullshit.
That’s a philosophy when information was in the hands of the few, it was expensive to generate, expensive to transmit. This is the world of the impossibly complex. Information abundance. Responsibilities shift. You matter. Go matter.
*Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. [Snowcrash 123-124, ]
-Shlok
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This is the era of the dirty weapon.
Nation-states took all the clean ones. The ones that could be controlled. The ones that required hundreds of academics and engineers. And in doing so, they did the R&D for the loners, the losers, the crazy, the broken, the faithful, those huddled masses that clamber atop online forums and find ways to matter. Our taxes paid for our every step of their self-discovery.
In our lifetimes, we’ll watch kids drop drones on the schools they used to shoot up and then silently, anonymously, attend the funerals. We’ll see brittle, shaking hands tape hard-won radioactive material onto a bag of fertilizer before detonation. We’ll watch in horror as a single cough rips through Comic-Con, melting eyeballs as it goes. We’ll run as masked shooters chase us through the streets and then disappear.
This isn’t complex, or hard, it’s warfare. The stuff of simplicity. Of anger and hate. And in that most basic context, good enough is good enough.
-Shlok
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Companies will increasingly invest in people through direct hires or by outsourcing the content creation process. At Mindjumpers, we realized we needed a leader that had a strong publishing background.
We hired a veteran journalist and former online chief editor from one of the largest media companies in Denmark. I strongly believe that companies will follow our example in 2012.
-Jonas Klit Nielsen, CEO and Founder, MindJumpers
-Shlok
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