“But sprinkled throughout the files are references to Epstein’s banned Xbox Live account, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Five Nights At Freddy’s porn, the concept of microtransactions, and even specific people like ex-Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, former Rockstar North president and founder of MindsEye studio Build A Rocket Boy, Leslie Benzies, and current Rockstar president Sam Houser”
“Also in May 2013, Epstein emailed Kotick an unhinged missive about edutainment that seems to have originally been written by self-proclaimed “hacker, inventor & technology futurist” Pablos Holman after Epstein mentioned to Holman that he was meeting with former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education Joel Klein”
“Video games are already great at teaching. If they don’t assess your level and put an appropriate challenge right in front of you, the game fails. Challenge too hard and you get frustrated and quit playing. Too easy and the game is no fun. That is exactly what a good teacher or tutor would do. Fundamentally the thing that works is a 1 to 1 student teacher ratio. Even if you have a shitty teacher or tutor, you will learn a lot because that person gets to know you and challenges you at your level. That doesn’t scale, but computers do. So we have to use computers to replace teachers – or at least augment them.”
“The best scheme I’ve come up with so far is to use X-Prize or something like it to co-opt the existing video game industry. Give out a prize to the game that comes up with the best way of teaching kids anything from a normal school curriculum.”
“You want to skip convincing educators and parents about this stuff and just go straight for the kids.”
“The next day, Kotick replied: “X prize is a good idea but key is real world rewards. Learn to read: earn cell phone minutes, iPhone credits, virtual items in games.””
“Epstein and his associates saw games as mechanisms for profit, coercion, and control, a throughline that persists in his association with two key figures in Gamergate and the surrounding bedlam: Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon”
“The Epstein files, in their current incomplete and piecemeal form, are if nothing else a useful demonstration of how obscenely powerful people talk to each other – how they seek to exert control and the levers they pull on to do so”
“Resulting class solidarity among the hyper-wealthy is unconstrained by laws, boundaries, or industries”
“The option for a patriarchal man to violently abuse people – including children – is a core appeal of the ideology, which is why far-right politicians and personalities have spent years trying to normalize rolling back laws around abortion, consent, marriage age, and spousal abuse”
“The point of the project has always been to consolidate power in the hands of a select few; now we’re seeing exactly who those few are and what they intend for it to look like”