Important… to me:

“What if…

What if those “what’s your apocalypse name” type games are really a ruse to get the name of a street you’ve lived on, or the name of a pet – the answers to commonly used security questions?

What if the “pick nine jobs and a fake one” is an effort to match your profile information with resume information on other websites, to differentiate you and your personal history from all the other John Smiths out there?

What if those Facebook messages you forward – to ALL of your contacts – are gathering distribution lists, profiling people who spread emotionally charged information without vetting it, and mapping social connections?

What if the little math picture problems and games are farming – not the people who get them right or wrong – but the people who defend their answers after getting them wrong, and fight and escalate and insult and create division while refusing to acknowledge the facts they’re being shown?

What if the “star states you’ve been to and heart the ones where you’ve lived” posts could be connected with a credit report, military record, arrest record, tax or banking information?

What if some of your friends, eager to build audiences for their bands or businesses, accept lots of friend requests from people they don’t know, and accounts that are not real?

What if these viral messages games and lists and groups also include that one account among thousands, allowing them to map *your* personal social network?

What if these viral posts are shared “friends of friends,” allowing just one account among thousands to silently access the results of those quizzes, those nine jobs you’ve worked, the desert island movies that reveal your nature, character and sense of self, the street on which you grew up, what state it was in, your pets names when you lived there?

What if all that information could be merged into a single database isolating you from all the others that share your name, with all the personal information you’ve willingly shared, and all the information available on the internet from all the places you’ve been and worked and lived.

What if the most important factor was who could trigger you, how to do it, and how likely you are to dig in based on identity and political alignment, rather than logic and discretion?

What if we knew, for an absolute fact, that that is exactly what’s been happening for the past five years?

What if we all got really bored, and spent half our time screaming into the void about the hopelessness of reckoning with the titanic forces that sow division and anger and confusion purely for political and financial gain… and we spent the other half of our time building a roadmap for those forces to follow?

What if “I don’t usually play these games or forward these messages but here goes just this once” doesn’t inoculate you from the consequences?

What do you think would happen?”

— Alex Schiller