People have different opinions about what’s going on with the fires on social media. Have you spent a lot of time on Xu lately? Have you seen what people are saying?
Not surprisingly, people on the internet have opinions. Take the Lahaina fire in Hawaii for example. Lahaina has gotten so out of control with misinformation. People have started painting their roofs blue because they think there are space lasers that can set their houses on fire. We just kind of stay above it as much as we can and try not to get involved too much. We poke and prod when misinformation comes out, trying to make a point, but we don’t really engage in much discourse.
Like, download Watch Duty and get the results there. Otherwise, keep going, man. Find it online and hope you feel better. I feel sorry for them, honestly, you know? I’ve been through this before. But the way I coped was by building Watch Duty, not shouting into the airwaves. We all have our own coping mechanisms. Some are productive and some are not.
Screenshot: Courtesy of Watch Duty
Do you think that people being able to get more information about what’s happening on the ground will help them be smarter about what they say online? Or will all this crap still happen?
I don’t know, man. I wish I had a good answer so I could play to your question, but I just don’t really care about these people. It’s just so uninteresting. People are still running from the fire. And that is really important. Now I don’t need armchair journalists. There are excellent off-duty reporters, like a bunch of people out there relaying information to the population on Xu, which is great. I’m glad they do. I wish they had a better platform for it. There are still great people on social media, but unfortunately you have to search through bitcoin porn and other random stuff that is currently overpowered by Chinese bots.
What’s next? How does Watch Duty approach the next few days of this fire, and then the fire after that?
This is a great time for Mike Tyson’s expression, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” We’re getting punched in the face multiple times right now. When I’m in that regime, we don’t make strategic plans.
We are extremely tactical. We focus on what’s in front of us, just like a firefighter. That’s what we’re doing today, keeping our servers online, making sure the engineers are fed, making sure they can keep this thing running as we experience three orders of magnitude explosive growth. And then journalists also need sleep, they need encouraging conversations, they need help. And so it’s really just “get through this,” man. Tonight we will experience another wind. We are far from done and tonight is going to be another damn bad one.
What about the long term? What is the future of how people use Watch Duty?
I can talk about long-term things because I’ve been thinking about it for years. We’re really thinking a lot about what it’s like to have other disasters in Watch Duty. Now we are actively developing it. We’re working to make sure we can do the same thing we did in LA for next time hurricane helene. Because those floods were catastrophic. People didn’t have enough warning, they didn’t understand it. And there are good data that are not presented to the masses. We want to be the voice of reason in these truly difficult times. And that’s what comes next when we go through this nonsense.
It beats sitting there in despair.
That. I have to be constructive, you know?