How to Plug Into A Crisis
(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, ]
Idea: Systemic Disruption Dashboard
Data centers in the NYC region
Lead time for an inbound threat varies from minutes to days. There should be a tool that can adapt to either timeline that assesses the potential for systems disruption. Data centers, railways, bridges, sewers, energy pipelines, subway switches, the list goes on. What’s in harms way? Can it be affected by the threat (fire? water? wind? bomb?).
An at a glance systems disruption dashboard. Should be baked into every city command center. But also available to the population. I would use this to monitor every major event, ever.
Example: Johns Hopkins has this capability for the electricity grid. Their model says Sandy could take down power for 10 million. That’s useful knowledge. Much more useful than the weatherporn the masses are getting now – random places with water or a reporter being blown around in the wind.
The same tool could be used over time to to build out a resiliency index. How much of what is locally produced/consumed? Response times. How susceptible is a place to disruption? Can it survive on its own and for how long?
FEMA/DHS/etc should have this. But that’s the wrong customer for stuff that matters.
Three Sovereigns Graphic Novel
Pretty cool project by Anthony. It’s got 60 hours left to raise $2k. It is…
an action-adventure graphic novel that tells a radically different new story of the subversive life of Jesus. It favors historical plausibility over dogma, ancient politics over modern religion, and embraces all the lurid spectacle of the Roman empire in the style of the ongoing Spartacus series.
Check out a sample here. Join me in putting in a few bucks to get a print copy.
StartupDystopia.com
You’ll find all the startup dystopia stories over there along with my dystopian Pinterest on the new site.
The site already has two new stories that haven’t been published here. Go check them out.
More soon.
The Dirty Weapons
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.