Wearing my ‘serial founder exploring starting a company’ hat, I advanced my passion project KIP3.
KIP is a seven-year long passion project to tackle the disinformation problem on social media that makes us poor information citizens and polarized neighbors who cannot take collective action in the face of threats like the climate crisis.
It’s a Wikipedia + Wordle for Current Affairs to make better citizens and voters…A comprehensive project that aims to promote trust and transparency in democracy while combating disinformation and corruption.The deliverables can be used individually or collectively to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools needed to critically evaluate information and build a network of trustworthy sources.Wearing my ‘serial founder exploring starting a company’ hat, I advanced my passion project KIP3.
KIP is a seven-year long passion project to tackle the disinformation problem on social media that makes us poor information citizens and polarized neighbors who cannot take collective action in the face of threats like the climate crisis.
With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.
For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!
Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits.
“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP
New read for Fogust...
I was fortunate to read an early manuscript of this new book release by ☀️ Jessica J.J. Lutz ☀️ and look forward to diving into the final version now making its way around the world!
I see Barbie gets a mention on p 110 - she was Jessica's favored doll because she wasn't a baby, she was a grown woman who knew what she wanted - Jessica and I were among the (how many, uncounted?) girls whose parents wouldn't allow us to play with the toy. Before Barbie director Greta Gerwig was even born, Barbie was a subversive force in our lives!
“A war correspondent facing burnout wonders why she suddenly feels fear when a bomb goes off at her Baghdad hotel: a clue comes when she realizes she is 4 months pregnant. To understand how her coping mechanisms no longer work, she applied her journalistic research skills to the inner conflict she experienced, and her upbringing. What comes out of it is a deep dive into the gender-based sociology, and the brain science, a review of the literature parsing it all, and a way forward, through simple exercises that anyone can do to start using our dual-sided human brain to succeed in life and work, and stay healthy and feel good about it too.”
Here’s where you can get the book in the USA: Amazon.
It’s a Wikipedia + Wordle for Current Affairs to make better citizens and voters…A comprehensive project that aims to promote trust and transparency in democracy while combating disinformation and corruption.The deliverables can be used individually or collectively to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools needed to critically evaluate information and build a network of trustworthy sources.“If you can’t follow what’s happening, you can’t adequately think or act in this crucial moment.”
Trump impeachment rally - San Francisco Federal Building 12/2019. Image by me.
Today’s info war sure is info hell, isn’t it? The United Nations is calling it an “infodemic”.
When I talk to people — intelligent people, educated people, media and news professionals, tuned in people, random people — pretty much when I talk to everyone, they don’t know at all what I know.
Or they know a lot less, or they admit they get their news from “CNN…and FoxNews, for balance”, or they simply aren’t trying to follow the firehose of info flying at us these days.
The enemy is noise, the goal is clarity.
~ Jon Stewart told the New York Times this week
Most people I talk to are clinging to an outdated and irrelevant opinion or worldview like it’s a life raft.
This is a problem.
An information diet that doesn’t serve you is COSTLY
during a pandemic that requires us to reenvision how we live;
in an Election Year;
when Western Liberal Democracy is under attack both domestic and foreign, with a main weapon being military-grade psy op disinformation and propaganda directed at a civilian population.
If people can’t follow what’s happening or learn the historical basis of what’s happening or perceive the machinations of global alliances and systems including the largest law enforcement action against organized crime that the world has ever seen, they can’t adequately think and act in this moment.
It’s a costly problem that can be solved, as Jon Stewart points out, by clarity.
“For more than a decade I’ve been following sources & stories that are coming together now. I want you to see what I see.”
I’m an info hound as you know. I’ve been curating speciality lists of expert sources on Twitter for more than a decade, and relying on them almost exclusively for my news gathering needs through the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. The list of 1,000 sources I mention in this post was meant to be my lens on American politics and current affairs for the 2016 Presidential Election.
I’ve been following stories that are all coming together now. And I’m working to share that with you. So you can see what I see.
See a few news stories a day…
Subscribe to a daily Trust Is A License Nuzzle newsletter with just a few of the top news stories shared from 1,000 curated sources
At its core the project is a Twitter account run by a small group of diverse centrists who see all sides of global and societal threats and want to ensure our fact-based perspective gets voice and distribution in this age of extreme disinformation campaigns.
We’re also exploring a variety of other ways to connect, present, and share this vital and contextual information that only become more relevant with each passing day. We all need to know this. It’s our history. More on that soon.
One of our readers has described us as civil service journalism. “What you’re doing is generative journalism. It’s a community service to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.”
“We vet content & sources, metabolize info & amplify points to help you understand this moment in time. ”
As the mainstream media failure became clear, citizen researchers and curators like me picked up the slack. At Knowledge Is Power, our focus has been on vetting the content and sources, metabolizing the information, and finding ways to underline and amplify clear points we believe are valuable to cutting through the noise and understanding this moment in time.
We hope to connect the dots for ourselves and others. We started doing this for OURSELVES. Yet, it’s for others. Without any marketing the account’s organic reach has grown 160x in its first year.
By vetting and amplifying the work of citizen researchers, whistleblowers, journalists, social justice workers, national security experts and more, we aim to strengthen democracy and stop the playing-the-extremes-so-nothing-gets-done horseshoe that divides us.
“Our 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.
”
As people begin to dig out from the damage of the cyber war/information war/total kinetic war against Western Liberal Democracy (including Trump & transnational organized crime) that we are currently experiencing in America and throughout the world, there’s going be a need for a massive education of the American people about what just happened. Hollywood is already telling these stories. We want to help with that.
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This talk "The Rise of Turkey" was moved to a larger room (about 100 in the audience and live-streaming the podcast to Commonwealth Club members everywhere) and we ran out of books to sign right away.
I was joined on the panel by:
Steven West, Ph.D., Fulbright Scholar to Turkey; Professor of Turkish Studies and Cross Cultural Communication
Bonnie Joy Kaslan, Honorary Consul General, Turkish Republic, S.F. Bay Area
Joel Brinkley, Professor of Journalism, Stanford University; Foreign Affairs Columnist; Former Pulitzer Prize Winning Foreign Correspondent, The New York Times — Moderator
Amidst the turmoil of the Arab Spring, Turkey has arisen as a powerful force in the Middle East. The distinguished panel will discuss the nation's culture and its sometimes bitter past, the growing influence of religion in Turkey, and her frayed alliances. In addition, the panelists will discuss how Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's dynamic prime minister, is becoming one of the most powerful voices in the troubled region.
You can listen to the podcast here.
