chris xu

make it make sense

Professor X from the X-Men having a bad telepathy migraine

This post is my attempt to share a few half-baked thoughts that have been swirling in my head about collective sensemaking over the last week, primarily aimed at other people who are equally tormented. Making sense of sensemaking, if you will! Ironically, this is not the most coherent I've ever felt, but it feels increasingly important to think and talk about these things in the open. So many of us are scrambling in parallel to figure out how best to transmute an unending firehose of confusion and horrors into something people can actually absorb, digest, and act on—let's scramble together!

Many kinds of information are needed to form an understanding.

3 particularly important and fundamental types for right now are:

  1. Updates - breaking news, this just happened! For Deez Times â„¢, these are most often shared by journalists and whistleblowers and can take great effort or expertise to obtain and vet and clarify, though the (un)lucky civilian can also sometimes contribute. Many small pieces of information whizzing by as quickly as possible.
  2. Explainers - here's the background context you need to piece the updates together, because maybe you didn't know the minutiae of how the Railroad Retirement Board or whatever worked more than 5 minutes ago. There are so many fantastic journalists and experts painstakingly putting these together in the form of stories, blog posts, and social media threads. These are then translated into different formats—infographics! videos! summary threads! Because these need to be somewhat evergreen to be worth the assemblage effort, these are often mutually exclusive from updates.
  3. Calls to action - these can be requests for support, ideas of things to do, or fully-fledged complex plans that need bodies and brains to execute. These can come from everyone and grow more powerful when amplified by anyone.

We have the ingredients.

The good news—there is an abundance of all 3 of those types of information being generated and passed around right now! You can piece together a pretty good picture of what's happening if you just: pay for a bunch of different mainstream news outlets, follow a couple dozen social media accounts across wildly different disciplines and multiple platforms, have excellent media literacy skills for discerning between trusted and untrusted sources, and spend several hours a day monitoring all of it because it's all moving so quickly 🙃

For anyone who's not terminally online, this all feels like the signal equivalent of whitewater rapids—way too much, way too fast. When I have tried to explain literally anything that happened in the last 2 weeks to the blissful grass-touchers of my life, I've found myself sending an overwhelming torrent of links. I can practically see their brains looking at me nervously through the keyhole and locking the door! I can't blame them!

And even for those of us willing to take the firehose to the face, it's still a lot of cognitive overhead to figure out where all the puzzle pieces go, and what's been updated when. It's particularly hard to get a sense of which fires have been put out vs. which are still burning unchecked.

What would be far more useful is a dam—a more placid collection of information ready to be shared and digested at the reader's pace, whenever they're ready.

We have the potential energy.

A second piece of good news: even though most people are ill-equipped to deal with the full firehose of information, the internet of the last two decades spawned quite a lot of us freaks who can, and do, and maybe in fact don't know how to stop. My feeds are practically vibrating with the unharnessed scrolling/processing/retransmitting energy radiating off of all of us. So there is a lot of potential energy here that can be tapped with a clear goal and enough structured guidance.

What's inspiring me

#sensemaking