Intergalactic Summit

Perhaps I'll go on a bit of a tangent and share something I've come to understand is not the norm many places in New Eden. This probably shouldn't have surprised me, but it's simply something I've never actually thought about or spent time noticing in my travels.

Among the Gripdjur, it's pretty much common for everyone to have a dataslate, datapad, personal assistant or whatever you'd like to call it. We all have variants on the theme ourselves. It's considered such a basic necessity in modern society that if you don't have one, one will be issued to you so you can keep abreast of relevant news, communicate, be given local notices, access job markets and so on and so forth. Essential equipment that's been around forever and ingrained itself in pretty much all our societies, yes?

This has pretty much led to hardcopies of pretty much anything being extremely rare among the Gripdjur clan. They're inefficient, they're a waste of natural resources, they're more expensive by several orders of magnitude to get in and out of gravity wells, clumsy to distribute and maintain and by definition can't really be used by multiple people at once.

So we networked it all, obviously. The Gripdjur clan has pretty much every single piece of text, audio, video, tech spec, etc that we encounter sent back to central repositories for the clan to freely access and use. Hardcopies are easily copied through simple and quick scans that the automated systems turn into text, audio or video versions ready for distribution. Redundant systems ensure it'd require pretty much a planetary cataclysm to destroy information and cooperation with other data repositories throughout New Eden means even that would require a cluster wide fire to "burn a book" as it were.

As long as the data doesn't contain operational secrets for clan, tribe or Republic activities, it's all free to access and peruse for any clan member of any age or social status. Even the things that are secret becomes public no less than one year after personnel or assets would not be put at risk through the information being disseminated, to ensure transparency.

While I've discovered this may not be the norm in New Eden, I've also seen that pretty much everyone has some version of this system in place. Unless you keep an idea or information purely as thoughts in your head, it'll be recorded and stored somewhere and likely be available for perusal either publicly or by authorities.

So, what does this rambling mean, really? Well for one, the ideas are out there. If it was ever written down some time in modern history, someone made a copy of it and put it out there. If it was spoken in public, someone probably recorded it and put it out there. The ideas and thoughts are being perused, considered, judged and found desirable or wanting.

This "book burning" notion is pretty much proof that those who would style themselves as civilized and superior remain subject to wildly outdated and barbaric notions that ideas and thoughts can and should be policed or removed. It is indicative of that horrific disease that keeps the Empire in New Eden that has the greatest potential for being a force for good, from becoming that force for good, due to the rampant madness that says "destroy that which disagrees with what we believe."

All other civilizations in New Eden has come to understand a simple truth. Ideas and views must be free to be spread and disseminated so as many eyes and minds can rest upon them as possible, so flaws and falsehoods in them can be noticed, recognized and rooted out, so the worthwhile parts can be taken and used for humanity's progress in whatever field they are relevant in. Simply attempting to symbolically or truly destroy an idea does nothing but show fear of what may be found in that idea or thought. A fear that it may hold some truth that will bring change. A fear that what you hold to be true now, may not be so true after all should it be critically perused.

If you truly want to dismiss Max' ramblings, which I'm sure I will be doing given what I've seen him utter in public so far, do not lend him and his "Amarria" credibility by showing you fear its contents. Consume it instead. Disseminate it. Let the ideas and thoughts be considered, reviewed, analysed and judged so it can publicly be dismissed as nonsense... or perhaps even realize it holds ideas of worth and merit, should that be the case.

If it has merit and worth, it may improve things for humanity in ways small or great. If it does not, it'll be filed away as useless and pointless.

What you will never succeed in doing, is destroying it. In today's New Eden, no ideas can be.

Pretty much. I feel it's in the interest of public discourse to elaborate on and support why this should be the case, though.

Not much discussion on the subject so far.

Of course you can. Just stop feeding them the attention they crave. Stay on topic, ignore their bleating, and voila. Discussion is had with little to no problem. The attention seekers aren't the problem, as much as those who insist on giving it to them. You can count the attention seekers on one hand, and they'd be utterly insignificant if it wasn't for the countless people insisting on making them relevant when they are not.

When we of the Faith which to burn something, we may use The Bonfire located in the Munory system. Perhaps those of you who still follow the wayward and liberal Theology Council can locate a similar fire-producing celestial object for your wayward and liberal rites.

Respectfully, Ms. Del'thul, it seems difficult to say that the "barbaric notions" guiding an entity that's remained a going concern in one form or another for over four thousand years, including thousands as an interstellar civilization, are "wildly outdated." Apparently they're highly viable.

We capsuleers have the privilege of open discussion-- naturally, maybe, considering our anarchic society. Not everyone from our various societies does. I don't really know about the Matari, but the Caldari as a society disapprove of dissent even from their own, and, well, when arguments come from outsiders, they largely just don't want to hear it. They are themselves; they're content to be themselves; and what you or I or any other outsider might have to say is unlikely to be welcome.

The Gallentean approach, peacefully bouncing ideas off each other, is a neat experiment, but, comparatively speaking, that's just what it is-- experimental. It's not clear whether it's actually sustainable, and it has to engage in some very interesting manipulations of the dialog in order to stay even marginally stable. (If you're going to have an open society, which involves inviting a bunch of society-closing ideas to an open debate, you have to make sure those closed-society ideas can't easily win, even if they have a point, or you're apt to lose the open society.)

And whatever you might think of the Amarr, considering the things that sometimes happen when their religion goes down, ah, alternate routes ...

(Blood Raiders, Sani Sabik generally, the Equilibrium of Mankind, and whatever designation applies to Mr. Nauplius since hardly anyone seems to want to claim him)

... I can kind of understand why they're not big on heterodoxy.

You understand, ms. Jenneth!

Religion was there with Man since the first couple crawled out of their primal cave back in our long lost Old Eden of creation. We all need something to believe in, something to hope for, something to live for. But what feeds our inner creative light, if twisted just a little bit, can begin to feed our inner murderous darkness.

And that's why we, the faithful, must clean up our crazies!

"Free market of ideas" is a very bad thing.

Mostly because the content providers on this market are inherently, and vastly, more competent than most consumers. Also, this inevitably leads to the content providers pandering to the basest whims of the consumers in their efforts to be acknowledged and famous.

A fully free, anarchic "market of ideas" would rather shortly produce a society that'll be worse than Gallente Federation, because even there some ideas are not permitted on the legal market.

But it'll get even worse in a generation or two (in our thought experiment), because the most trending ideas will enter a positive feedback loop as more people that grew up on them and expect more of the same enter the consumer phase.

It's a idiocracy nightmare.

No.

... um. Miz? The idea that ideas can't be stamped out is kind of a matter of hope over experience. It's hard for brains to hold ideas when half their mass has boiled away into greasy smoke.

It's also not especially difficult to persuade people to accept or reject an idea when their survival and well-being depend on it. The sheer number of freed Matari slaves who are still good, practicing members of the Amarrian faith suggests clearly: conversion by the sword has historically worked just fine, and directly involves the forceful suppression of ideas.

You may not like it, and I certainly don't want to be subjected to it, but that doesn't change its effectiveness.

Capsuleers are exceptions to a lot of rules, but it's not clear how far we're actually allowed to go.

My antecedent is silent now. I don't really think she was silenced for her beliefs, at least not directly. She disappeared of her own accord ... or it looks that way. But now I'm here. Aria Jenneth, revised edition.

It's hard for me to say what to make of that. I do know that I'm not an accident. Someone made me, purposely, and I think I know who and why, but I could also be wrong.

Also, Nauplius remains. Does that mean they really can't kill us? Why would any power make people like us without the ability to at least pull the plug?

... I'm not sure what to say. Maybe ideas really are immortal if capsuleers hold them. Doomheim's membership seems to say not, though.



About the Matari resurgence: if the embers aren't out, neither is the fire. But I don't see many Udorians or Ni-Kunni calling for revolt. Do you really think they didn't want to?

You can kill a fire. It just takes a lot of stamping.

(Or water, or chemical fire suppressant, or vacuum, etc.)