Presentation at 1r1

1. The Libertarian's Saga:
Tracing the cultural roots of
ideology in EVE Online
John Carter McKnight
Arizona State University
@john_carter

2. facebook – eve online (albums) (csm7 propaganda)

3. a puzzle

4. second life
• launched 2003
• carefully managed real-money economy
• about 50,000 concurrent users
• community-driven “sandbox”
• global user base
• terrible UI and social tools
• programmer-driven corporate culture
• growing rift between designers and users

5. eve online
• launched 2003
• carefully managed real-money economy
• about 30,000 concurrent users
• community-driven “sandbox”
• global user base
• terrible UI and social tools
• programmer-driven corporate culture
• growing rift between designers and users

6. in california
• Ayn Rand + hippie culture
+ engineering culture +
1980s-1990s cyberpunk
• generally idealistic

7. “the californian ideology”
• Fred Turner, From Counterculture to
Cyberculture
• Barbrook & Cameron essay
http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/1
7/the- californian-ideology-2/

8. recipe
• “a mix of cybernetics, free market
economics, and counter-culture
libertarianism”
- barbrook & cameron
http://www.arpnet.it/chaos/barbrook.htm

9. in iceland
the californian ideology
+ the sagas
+ globalization
more nihilistic

11. • government a matter of feudal contract
between lord and producers
• lords not territorially based but a shifting
assemblage of personal contracts
• *not* responsible for punishment or
enforcement – those are private matters
• blood feud and shifting alliances based on
zero-sum resource competition

12. feud is
• moral: punishes breach of social norms
• executive power of a polity w/o central
authority
• political: arena where competition is played
out
• common model of politics in egalitarian
societies

14. “In Iceland, the violence of the law was not
something removed from the general populace.
There were no state apparatus to pretend to
monopolize the legitimate use of force….
It was up to free adult males to do the work of
law”
Miller, 232

15. david friedman
– silicon valley scholar of icelandic law
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html

16. mid-2000’s – iceland’s 60’s and 90’s

17. “the sagas matter not just because all Icelandic
children grow up with them.
They form part of the vocabulary, part of the
thought pattern, of young men as soon as they
start thinking about power”
Boyes, Meltdown Iceland, 60

18. “the new vikings”
techno-financial emergent elite
defined against the traditional egalitarianism of
their parents’ generation
use tradition to return to open power
competition
“roadkill in global competition” – lost the game
as it became zero-sum

19. demographics
• sl as the last expression of the techno-hippie
demographic (california 1998)
• eve as the first expression of young bitter
anarcho-capitalists (iceland 2008)

20. • sl – how 50-somethings wish the world was
“your world, your imagination”
• eve – how 20-somethings believe the world is
“space makes you bitter”
“yummy tears”

21. “A year in EVE will teach you more about human
nature than a decade in any other MMO, but
what you learn may scar you.”
http://tentonhammer.com/eve/spymaster/65

22. john.mcknight@asu.edu
johncartermcknight.com
@john_carter