Summary: Where are the people who could reform America? Many of them are playing massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) such as Eve Online, the 21st centuries opium of the masses. How can we recruit them to a greater project, reforming America? This is part one; part two asks Is America experiencing a failure cascade?
“The soft enchanting fetters of the mind …”
— “Epistle to Joseph Hill, Esq” by James Thomson (1700-1748).
“MMORPGs are the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. They are the opium of the people.”
— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).
About EVE Online
Opening of “How to Destroy a Community“, Tim Maly, The New Inquiry, Volume 17, 5 July 2013
Sometimes, Alex Gianturco is a space tyrant. As The Mittani, he is the former spymaster and current CEO of the Goonswarm Federation, one of the largest player alliances in the hypercapitalist space opera EVE Online.
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer online role-playing Game (MMO). Every EVE player exists as the commander of a space ship in a single galaxy called New Eden. Players can mine asteroids, hunt NPCs or trade goods to gain money in order to improve their ship, and their character improves over time, as in any other MMO.
But while most big MMOs work hard to minimize player suffering, Eve doesn’t. EVE is beloved for the possibility (and fairly regular occurrence) of long cons, multi-year animosities, major betrayals, scams, and ponzi schemes. What attracts EVE’s half-million subscribers is that it is a game of lasting consequences.
… In EVE, when your ship explodes, it’s gone. The lost assets can represent days of in-game effort. Wars are fought over vast swaths of conquerable space. Losing territory and star bases in a war can represent the destruction of years of collective effort by thousands of people.
Alex Gianturco has been the architect of dozens of these defeats. As the spymaster The Mittani, bent on the destruction of Goonswarm’s enemies, he has had to devote a lot of thought to the following problem: How do you destroy an organization made up of the undying? Though losses in EVE are painful, as long as players keep paying their subscription fees, their characters can never die. And yet, alliances fail.
{The rest of the article describes Gianturco’s amazing accomplishments in this e-world}
Imagine if we could enlist these people in the most realistic and challenging of games: reforming a nation. There is no game of greater “lasting consequences”. Samuel Adams started the Committees of Correspondence in 1764 with less. People like Alex Gianturco could become leaders, applying their skills and insights on a historic scale.
What fetters of the mind keep them imprisoned in cyberspace? How might we unlock these fetters, offering them a red pill? Post your answers in the comments.
Part two looks at Gianturco’s most important insight, and what it tells us about America: Is America experiencing a failure cascade?
For More Information
For more about Gianturco’s insights and Eve Online see his article Secrets of a Solar Spymasters #20: Inside the Failure Cascade at Ten Ton Hammer, 16 July 2009.
Posts about reforming America
- Diagnosing the Eagle, Chapter III – reclaiming the Constitution.
- Fixing America: shall we choose elections, revolt, or passivity? — Part One.
- Fixing American: taking responsibility is the first step — Part Two.
- Fixing America: the choices are elections, revolt, or passivity — Part Three.
- The project to reform America: a matter for science, or a matter of will?.
- Fixing America in five steps.
- A third try at describing The First Step to reforming America.
Can we convince games the real world is as exciting as this?
