Seeking Human Understanding Across a Fragmented Internet
How can our world stay informed & connected when social media has become fragmented and risky, locked behind private chatrooms, and controlled by mercurial billionaires with their own agendas?
On August 1st, I’m riding my bicycle 10 thousand meters of elevation in under 36 hours to find out. As I ride the height of Mount Everest from my home in the Finger Lakes, I’ll be guided with a mixtape from an extraordinary group of South Asian bloggers, translators, and activists, in a fundraiser to support Global Voices (I’m on the US board).
There was a time when people thought journalism could query and report on a world of social knowledge at scale. That time is over, as Henry Cooke & Ian Forrester recently wrote in a report for the BBC with projections on the social Internet. Instead, we need to rely on the basics of good journalism: people with trusted relationships who can understand, explain, and translate specific contexts to a wider audience.
That’s the idea at the heart of the work of Global Voices, a network of thousands of writers, editors, and translators who work in over 30 languages to report on stories around the world, translate those stories, defend free speech online, and empower underrepresented communities to tell their own stories.
This coming weekend (August 1–3), I’m going to be riding an “Everest Roam” on my bike, climbing over 32,000 feet in elevation across Central NY in under 36 hours to raise funds for Global Voices and for the simple idea that a better world depends on human connection and human understanding. If that’s something you believe in too, I invite you to donate.
a better world depends on human connection and human understanding
The sport of endurance cycling loves a challenge, and one of its biggest challenges is Everest Roam, where riders climb more than 10,000 meters in elevation (32,809 feet) in less than 36 hours, riding a minimum distance of 400km (248 miles). In my wildest dreams, I would love to collect a dollar for every meter in this 10,000 meter ascent.
To illustrate the beauty and glory of the Global Voices community, the Nepal team is creating a playlist for me to learn more about Himalayan culture on the road. I’ll share it as soon as I have it!
Folks who subscribe to my Medium posts will know that my cycling Everest Roam attempt is the latest in a series of journeys of understanding I have undertaken while coming to terms with a respiratory condition that changed my ability to travel widely.
In 2022, I rode a “Pilgrimage for a Million Lives,” 190 miles representing 12 inches for every COVID death. In 2023, Ivan Sigal and I rode through California’s Central Valley in the footsteps of the 1966 Farmworker March to learn about the future of food and the environment. In 2024, I designed the Maple Bicycle Adventure to search for hope on crises that feel impossibly big to change. And this summer, I rode across the Great Divide from Colorado to Utah to re-think the true power in people’s relationship with technology.
In case you’re wondering, training is going well! Saturday, July 26th, I got to ride around 16,000 feet in 12 hours while listening to Global Voices Executive Director Malka Older’s delightful novella The Mimicking of Known Successes and having a long, rambly phone conversation with my partner about Petrarch’s literary ascent of Mount Ventoux.
