“Electronic social networks (and their projections on and into myriad aspects of our minds and lives) are vastly more provocatively charged with potential than anyone has yet or can yet imagine. This is a new developmental paradigm for human minds, not merely social connectivity. Our -brains- are changing in ways that emerge from our feelings, activity and attention to these technologies and the new forms of possible and actual relation which we are learning to establish together with them. And we are largely unaware of this.

These changes include new forms of threat as well as entirely new ways of seeing and opportunities for astonishing experiences of learning, relation and discovery. We have set foot upon another world, here at home. But we have not yet noticed, and so, in treating it as if it were ordinary and familiar, most of us have thus far overlooked the actual threats and otherwise impossible opportunities that now lie directly in our naive hands.

There are, of course, exceptions. Many of these are predators who want to formalize their structural domination over not only these opportunities — but this entire dimension of possibility — as if it were a kind of resource that will belong to those who can first lock it down. But there is another kind. Almost a new species. Some have called them x-altruists. Others have called them heroes. These are the people and collectives who will establish new ways of being human so powerful, beautiful, and provocative that … frankly, even the parasites will be hard pressed to resist giving up their gambit in favor of the obvious and otherwise impossible benefits of altruistic mutuality.”

— an a i