“All hands on deck”: How to watch the Duty Continue with the fires in California

Like, download Watch Duty and get results here. Otherwise, get over it, man. Join the internet and I hope it makes you feel better. I feel bad for them, honestly, you know? I’ve been through this before. But the way I deal with it is to build Watch Duty, not to scream into the ether. We all have our own coping mechanisms. Some are productive and some are not.

Screenshot: Courtesy of Watch Duty

Do you think that people who can have more information about what is happening on the ground will help them to be smarter than what they say online? Or is all that shitposting still going to happen?

I don’t know, man. I wish I had a good answer that could play into your question, but I don’t really like, like, care about these people. It’s so uninteresting. People are still running from the fire now. And that’s really what matters. I don’t need armchair reporters right now. There are great journalists who are not on Watch Duty, like a bunch of people who are out there delivering information to the population in X, 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 sift through Bitcoin porn and other random stuff that has been taken down by Chinese bots now.

So what’s next? How will Watch Duty approach the next few days of this fire in particular, and then the fires beyond?

This is a great time for an expression of Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face.” Now, we’re hitting each other in the face repeatedly. When I’m in that mode, we don’t make strategic plans.

We are extraordinarily tactical. Let’s focus on what’s in front of us, like a firefighter. That’s what we’re doing today, keeping our servers online, keeping the engineers powered, making sure they can keep this thing running as we experience three orders of magnitude of explosive growth. And then the journalists need to sleep, they need discussions, they need help. And so it’s really just “get through it,” man. We are due to experience another wind event this evening. We are far from done and tonight is going to be another damn bad one.

And in the long run? What is the future of how people use Watch Duty?

I can talk about things at length because I’ve been thinking about them for ages. We really think a lot about what seems to be other disasters in Watch Duty. We are actively developing this now. We’re working to make sure we can do the same thing we did in LA for the next one Hurricane Helena. Because those floods were disastrous. People didn’t have enough notice, they didn’t understand. And there is good data that is not brought to the masses. We want to be a voice of reason in these really hard times. And so that’s what’s next for us when we have to go through this nonsense.

Beats sitting there in despair.

Yes. I have to be constructive, you know?