Colonisation has a sad and brutal history. The main reason being that the nations that went out to colonise the world, or at least that much of it they could reach, did so to advance their economic interests, using violent means when diplomacy would not suffice.
It stands to reason that foreigners from abroad, making onerous demands, are not the most welcome of visitors. For the nations on the receiving end of this unwanted attention the sad reality was that the visitors often brought new weapons against which they had no defence. It is a universal truth that people with superior fire power are seldom polite.
Technological advances today offer us yet another opportunity to colonise a territory, to carve out a place for ourselves and to seek such opportunities as this undiscovered country may afford. This time we may choose to use our extensive experience, knowledge and history to build a place for ourselves in this territory in which we can bring to fruition the full expression of the talent and intellect that is locked inside each and every one of us.
This place is called cyberspace, a term first coined in the 1960s, by Danish couple Susanne Ussing and her partner Carsten Hoff. William Gibson is credited with first using it in a work of fiction.
Today we have many examples of the virtual places first dreamt of by the people who could envision such spaces to exist before the technology was actually capable of delivering the full experience they envisioned.
Creating and populating such virtual worlds is an endeavour with which we now have quite a bit of experience and there is a great multitude of people who are aware of their existence, who live and thrive in them as their preferred third places.
One such place is EVE Online, created by CCP, it encompasses a star cluster of many thousands of stars in which capsuleers come to weave their own strand in the rich tapestry that is New Eden. In it they build their own stories, forge friendships, nurse (petty) grievances and wield the myriad of tools CCP has made available to capsuleers across the entire planet where electricity is reliably available and societies are free enough to allow their citizens to find this place of magic and wonder, there to build a new expression of their identities, affording them the opportunity to become what the real world often does not allow them to be.
New Eden is ready to become its own nation. CCP have sought to introduce new ideas and concepts into the world, often with reckless abandon, to see which idea takes root, which concept will wither or thrive. It has formed a nation with its own language, its own customs, its own history, its own art and music that has no rival in the world.
The first step is to establish New Eden as a nation. The second is to provide its citizens, all of whom belonging to the elite social stratum commonly referred to as ‘capsuleers’ or ‘pod pilots’, with a passport establishing their identity as a member of this new nation.
From personal experience this author can only marvel at what this nation would bring forth into the world in the way of systems to establish, settle and become an entity unto itself. Which rules would we choose to enable and apply, which form would our nation take and how would we construct this entity such that it would add to the lives of its members?
There are enough capable members among us who would be able to contribute to this idea, if they so chose, to create one of the first expressions of a virtual sovereign nation. Our success, as it has in the past and today, would embolden others to try and claim their own stake in this virtual realm.
I, for one, would be thrilled to one day be able to proudly declare: Civis New Eden Sum!
