What type of contracting? There's a wide range, from project based to placements within a team. Placements into a team (i.e: you join a team for a few months) are very easy to come by (just speak to any recruiter on LinkedIn) and don't require any sort of network. A typical rate (in my area anyway) is roughly 2x what you'd get per day as a salaried employee (i.e: 180th of the yearly salary). Generally, this type of work is shit (you're doing the work full time employees don't want to do) but very low effort, low accountability and low commitment. Easy money if you need to sustain yourself while doing something else.

Project based contracting by comparison, is almost exclusively network based. That's the fun contracting. You can try and shortcut it by using a freelance platform like UpWork but they're not great.