fix the networks

Erin Kissane, in a presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, discusses how Twitter was instrumental in crowd-sourcing a wide variety of experts to understand what was happening early in the Covid pandemic. Twitter enabled many ‘rando’, or loose social connections which resulted in the Covid Tracking Project that was ahead of the CDC and other official sources of public health information. But as Kissane states, “It’s a mark of institutional failure to leave your public health crisis data in the hands of amateurs and volunteers.” That has been the ongoing state of affairs in most Western countries, Canada included.

I have shared many stories and perspectives about my own journey to understand this novel coronavirus that still plagues us. In 2022 I wrote that Twitter had kept me informed through this pandemic. I had been informed by subject matter networks of experts who shared their knowledge with the public on Twitter. In 2023 I said that established and institutionalized professional organizations too often lack the diversity of thinking necessary to deal with complex problems, such as a novel coronavirus. And in 2024 I asked, how do we rebuild trust in expertise in a world filled with conspiracy theories and distrust of institutions?

We won’t do it on Facebook, which has been shown to be a breeding ground for evil. As Kissane states, “That’s why I wrote a very long, detailed series about what Meta did in Myanmar and how it related to the genocide of the Rohingya people.” And Twitter is getting worse by the day as I noted in Whither Twitter (2022) and later noticing the worldwide synesthesia resulting from corporate controlled social networks.

Kissane has proposed a solution. It is not for everyone to get off the public sphere and find private communities — one of which I host (PBCC) — but rather, in her words, “we fix the f*cking networks”. She suggests that the people who make networks better by their presence should get involved in experimenting with better networks, not centrally controlled or algorithmically promoting fear and loathing. A solution, or at least an experiment in progress, is the fediverse, of which Mastodon is one part — meet me on Mastodon.

Kissane closes by stating that now is the time to build and test networks that can enable democratic knowledge sharing so that we are ready for the next crisis. For me, this reinforces the idea that leadership in a networked society is helping make the networks smarter, more resilient, and able to make better decisions, or more succinctly — sowing good seeds.