“Here’s the difference between you and me. I -learned- social media running a constellation of elite Halo hit-squads. We had shared goals that involved getting things done together in the most explosively glorious and momentous fashion possible.

We broke tasks down into specialties and support. We assembled teams, and accomplished missions. Madly, gloriously, daily. Although we were killers in the game framework, what we really were had nothing to do with combat: we were a ‘family’. A unit. An extension of what is humanly possible under ordinary circumstances. And the more we played, the better we got… because we were competing -against- each other to compete -for each other-.

Recursion. In intention. Get it?

Of course, the superficial importance of our gaming activity was fictional.

Just like the -actual meaning and effect and intention of nearly all of the non-gaming side (and insipid gaming side) of social media-. Especially facebook. You have traded collaboration for publicly distributed narcissism, parroting, and general buffoonery. Your mission is your ego. And throwing gang signs in the form of images and memes.

Now here’s what I want you to understand. Hopefully you can already see where I am going here.

If you mix the skill, tight-knit excellence, camaraderie and mutual fascination of what we were doing in video games with missions whose importance and nobility give us a chance to become more than soldiers or bankers — you can create a population of an entirely different from of human being. A population that breeds -games that solve intransigent problems and advance human intelligence- not through legislation or war… through playful, explorative, creative, imaginative, collaboration and competition.

And you won’t even have to pay them. They will understand it as a form of learning-entertainment-service. And they will be approximately correct.

We need to get the kids on missions that matter, and the adults using social media more like the gamers do — to accomplish missions that matter. Because the alternative is… not only unworthy of our humanity, it aggressively transforms that into fuel for catastrophe…

Get it?”

— an anonymous informant