A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

That's a reference to the 1983 film “WarGames”. A film that has had incredible influence on not just the social milieu, but also cyber security and defence. It has a lot of lessons that need re-learning every couple of generations, and I think the time for that has come again.

Human beings are very interesting creatures. Tribalism and warfare are wired in our minds in such a visceral way, that we lose the ability to think more than one or two steps forward when we're trying to defend our tribe in anger.

Most people get that this is what makes warfare conducted with nuclear weapons particularly dangerous, but I think not enough words have been written about how this same tendency also makes warfare conducted with Social Media dangerous.

You cannot win a war on Social Media. You can only mire yourself in it more and more deeply, harming yourself, the people around you, and the potential of what you could've been doing instead of fighting that war. The more you throw yourself in it, the more catharsis you will feel, followed by more attacks, more retaliation, and more catharsis.

A Just War is addictive, and a Just War without loss of life is the most addictive of all.

The only winning move is not to play.

The Internet in general and Social Media in particular are very good at bringing close to you all kinds of strange and messed-up people. For a project like GNOME, it is almost unavoidable that the project and hence the people in it will encounter such people. Many of these people live for hate, and wish to see the GNOME project fail.

Engaging them and hence spending your energy on them is the easiest way to help them achieve their goals. You cannot bully them off the internet. Your angry-posting and epic blogs slamming them into the ground aren't going to make them stop. The best outcome is that they get bored and go annoy someone else.

The only winning move is not to play.

When dealing with abusive ex-partners or ex-family members, a critical piece of advice is given to victims: all they want is a reaction. Everything they're doing is in pursuit of control, and once you leave them, the only control they have left is over your emotional state.

When they throw a stone at you, don't lob it back at them. Catch it and drop it on the ground, as if it doesn't matter. In the beginning, they will intensify their attack, saying increasingly mean and cutting things in an attempt to evoke a response. You have to not care. Eventually they will get bored and leave you alone.

This is really REALLY hard to do, because the other person knows all your trigger points. They know you inside out. But it's the only way out.

The only winning move is not to play.

Wars that cannot be won, should not be fought. Simply because war has costs, and for the people working on GNOME, the cost is time and energy that they could've spent on creating the future that they want to see.

In my 20s and early 30s I made this same youthful mistake, and what got me out of it was my drive to always distil decisions through two questions: What is my core purpose? Is this helping me achieve my purpose?

This is such a powerful guiding and enabling force, that I would urge all readers to imbue it. It will change your life.