End of an era.... Xitter no more

When you find yourself tweeting/retweeting like I did this morning the very real evidence of civilizational collapse all around us, maybe it’s time to do something different with those minutes and hours and days.

Today I closed my last Xitter account after 17 years of daily use.

SEVENTEEN YEARS!

I’ve had a few accounts, but this was the holdout account and it’s formed the content of my KIP sensemaking framework for the past five years. (That’s okay, it’s just the end of a chapter since the framework and the data still exist and can be used, and await other editors, curators, contributors, and researchers.)

Closing the channel of the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed with my carefully vetted lists of the best civic participators

Closing this particular social media account and ending my association with that platform is a great loss for me since it’s been my lifeline. I’ve just closed the channel of the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed with carefully vetted powerhouse lists and follows of the best civic participators and my custom search and consumption practices that have consistently generated sharp, expert, early insights into current events.

It was my lifeline to the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed due to my carefully vetted powerhouse lists, follows, and my custom search and consumption practices that have consistently generated sharp, expert, early insights into current events.

I guess I’ll just head over to LInkedin…where I see we’ve breached 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, and we’re past the point of national-scale mitigation. The dire immensity of this moment is a lot to take in.

However I’m eager to partake in the different pursuits that open up for me with the new-found time and attention. Especially because community resilience, local survival plans, and protecting each other is the only way forward.

“I’m eager to partake in the different pursuits that open up for me with the new-found time and attention. ”

— Especially because community resilience, local survival plans, and protecting each other is the only way forward.

Archived: the KIP project

Images and links may no longer operate. Meant as an archive only.

CHECK OUT KIP, IT’S FOR ALL OF US

I have an idea. It’s good for people and good for democracy in the social age. And it’s fun to play?

I noticed we lack the infrastructure to make sense of news and current affairs today, leading to dire real consequences for people and society.

I thought about how I build trust in the sources I follow and ‘play’ the news. I do this for myself every day, as an infovore it’s a calming and even fun way to process what I see out there on my feed… I realized we can do it together with what I’ve built and patterned.

I want to gamify the learning of the world’s complex dynamics - with a daily online brainteaser the public can play, backed by an educational framework for journalism in the social age.

I wonder who’s connecting dots for you in media literacy, critical thinking, civic responsibility, holding power to account?

Disinformation tracks with current affairs and is employed across many fields, but we lack a unified solution...essentially, we are all frustrated sense makers.

KIP (“Knowledge Is Power”) aims to solve that with a current affairs framework for The Fifth Estate, for citizens, and for game lovers.

👇 Here’s my plan to provide a unified solution to the disinformation on social media that harms us as information citizens and voters — harming our democracy in the process.

Knowledge Graph As A Service

👈 Here’s the information ecosystem that the KIP platform aims to connect, showing data flow and network actors to technologies and end user interfaces and opportunities. We can do this today.

KIP means to bring civic participation media/generative content to strategic partners, like schools and organizations.

Our news and information landscape has changed. Our map makers have changed.

This is a playing board we can all use to parse and process news and current events, with KIP’s core value unit being a digital playing card. A bit of news currency. A bit of information that deep receipts can be attached to.

The KIP platform helps people find better information and make sense of this moment, with a pathway to renewed credibility and civic engagement for all.

I believe when it comes to news and current events, in order for us to act collectively in our best interests we need to get on the same page … and the same playing board.

““As much as we want to hold institutions accountable, citizens are constantly left to their own devices. Thinking holistically and user-centred is a necessary step for us all.”

— Scott DeJong, a public scholar making and studying games about disinformation

I also want to give credit to the people who help us understand what’s happening and what we can do about it.

CASSANDRA AWARDS to recognize our sense makers

I’m proposing a new information award for voices explaining this moment best. These are the ones who emerged for me as I used the KIP framework.

I nominate the above voices for the first Cassandra Awards to recognize sense makers among us in this information war. Listen to a 5 minute narration of the bigger picture they created for me here. It’s the big thing, the biggest thing. It’s so big it’s hard to see, hard to have one image capturing it. I strung together a narrative of quotes of the bigger picture that I took years to capture in my framework.

Who would you nominate for a Cassandra Award?

Cassandra Awards for our news and information mapmakers

“Our news & information landscape has changed. Our mapmakers have changed. ”

— Announcing The Cassandra Awards for civic participators/participatory media/Fifth Estate content creators, dot connectors, and sense makers in our networks

Image: Using AI voice generation for an audio script of numerous quotes from my curated KIP (“Knowledge is Power”) sources on Twitter/Xitter which begin to tell the larger story of this moment, all in 5 minutes. Read the whole transcript here.

Image: This is the conclusion. I announce The Cassandra Awards. You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.

LISTEN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE

You can listen here or read the transcript with credits here

“You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.”

— I invite you all to check their receipts.

With The Cassandra Awards and other information interfaces for you to engage with, my passion project KIP aims to re-educate the entire population in digital media literacy, information literacy, digital civic literacy, and help de-program those who have fallen victim to disinformation.

Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

Information war victims come for the meteorologists

Now they’re coming for the meteorologists. The right wing radio chemtrail folklore spawns death threats.

Another civilian victim of a military grade information war: he threatens to hang a meteorologist for treason. After the election we'll need to rehabilitate the information space and all the people who say "treason" but don't know where to pin it just like all the January 6, 2021 Capitol Attack insurrection dupes that are going to prison.

KIP and projects like it that can rehabilitate consumers of disinformation are greatly needed.

What should journalism do to reveal the state of our democracy?

Washington Post has my opinion 8 months later

Washington Post says America needs civics and history to save democracy.

This is how the Post’s Editorial Board puts it today. “While the country spends about $50 federal dollars per student per year on science and math education, only five cents per year per student is allocated for civic education,” notes Lawrence Tribe whose tweet I first saw. “Democracy demands a population better educated in history and civics,” says the professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

I said as much 8 months ago when announcing my pro-democracy knowledge project: America needs a re-education.

Helping people requires what one of my readers called “a new civil service journalism to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.”

My mission is to help with what comes next: when we dig out from the damage, there will be a massive need to educate people about what just happened.

Last June I wrote about my work on a curated knowledge & awareness project for concerned citizens.

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