active networking is the 10th circle of hell,never in my life have I felt so actively disgusted with myself in a social context. how do you do this without the urge to 
or how do you tamp down that urge because oh my god I cannot stomach it, it feels so fucking slimy to do. i can't even do it at events where the sole purpose is networking, my dad pressed me into one and I bailed 15 minutes in after hovering around, it feels so utterly degrading and gross
You can do baseline networking by just going to events in your industry and talking to people. Intentionally networking using a persona can be exhausting. You can get some good mileage by just making yourself known as "a person that does X Y Z without making me hate them" among people you might someday work with.
Events intended to exactly be for networking are universally terrible. They're for employers to recruit, basically. A job fair. But these things are also good for networking, let's say for people who can program:
You can go to those things and just hang out and chat and so on and it counts as networking. Some of the people might even be cool.
Also doing socialist organizing has a component that can act as networking, though I don't intentionally treat it as that because that's gross. Socialists like to work with other socialists. I've had many socialists offer to get me jobs. Socialists are cool.