‘All Hands on Deck’: How Watch Duty Keeps Up With the California Wildfires

People have all sorts of opinions about what’s happening with the fires on social media. Have you spent much time on X lately? Have you seen what people are saying?

It’s not surprising that people on the internet have opinions. Let’s use the Lahaina fire in Hawaii, for an example. Lahaina got so out of control with misinformation. People started painting their roofs blue because they think there are space lasers that can light their houses on fire. We just kind of stay above it as best we can and just try not to get too involved. We poke and prod when there’s misinformation coming out, trying to put some reason out there, but we don’t really engage too much in the discourse.

Like, download Watch Duty and get results there. Otherwise, have at it, man. Have at it on the internet and hope it makes you feel better. I feel bad for them, honestly, you know? I’ve been through this before. But the way that I coped is by building Watch Duty, not by yelling into the ether. We all have our coping mechanisms. Some are productive and some are not.

Do you think people being able to get more information about what’s happening on the ground will help them be smarter about what they’re saying online? Or is all that shitposting still going to happen?

I don’t know, man. I wish I had a good answer that I could play into your question, but I just don’t really, like, care about those people. It’s just so uninteresting. People are still running from fire right now. And that’s really what matters. I don’t need armchair reporters now. There are great reporters who are not in Watch Duty, like a bunch of people who are out there relaying information to the populace on X, which is great. I’m glad they do it. 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’s being overridden by the Chinese bots right now.

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

This is a great time for an expression from Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Right now, we’re getting punched in the face repeatedly. When I’m in that mode, we don’t make strategic plans.

We’re extraordinarily tactical. We focus on what’s in front of us, just like a firefighter does. That’s what we’re doing today, keeping our servers online, keeping the engineers fed, making sure that they can keep this thing running as we’re experiencing three orders of magnitude explosive growth. And then the reporters as well need sleep, need pep talks, need help. And so it’s really just “get through this,” man. We’re about to experience another wind event tonight. We are far from done and tonight’s going to be another goddamn bad one.

What about long-term? What’s the future of how people use Watch Duty?

I can talk about long-term stuff because I’ve been thinking about it for ages. We’re really thinking a lot about what it looks like to have other disasters in Watch Duty. We’re actively developing that now. We’re working on making sure that we can do the same thing we’ve done in LA for the next Hurricane Helene. Because those floods were disastrous. People did not have enough warning, did not understand it. And there is good data out there that is not being brought to the masses. We want to be a voice of reason throughout these really hard times. And so that is what is next for us when we get through this nonsense.

Beats sitting there in despair.

Yeah. I gotta be constructive, you know?