So am I. It’s all well and good to say ‘oh, look, we can get rich, we’re our own nations’… but the largest group of us to ever exist, officially said to ‘hold sovereignty’ over sections of space, possessed of levels of income, organization, and capability that would stagger the minds of most baseliner planetary governments…
… can be turned off at the snap of a fingers, one and all, if CONCORD says so. We still pay our rents to CONCORD every month. We still can’t modify our ships in ways that would let us violate their restrictions on what traffic we can interact with or even monitor.
More than 40,000 ‘mobile nation states’—35000 of them in Goonswarm alone—and we exist in a limbo between being an interstellar Power… and a very well-incubated petri dish.
See, I don’t think that’s true. For those of us who are based in Empire space, sure. That’s part and parcel of the implicit deal we’ve made with whatever empire whose space we’re operating in. But CONCORD (or the Federation, or the State, or…) switching that off is really no different than the State closing its borders to Federation baseliner traffic a while ago.
But if you look into wormhole space, or nullsec, you’ll find everything we need. Clonebay access? Check. New ships, modules, and ammo? Check. A nice place to have a drink at the end of the day? Check.
The Gallente Federation is able to hold the strength of its fleet over the Intaki Syndicate and force them to stick to stations and not planets because the Syndicate is not a capsuleer nation. Can you immagine them trying to do the same thing to a good sized nullsec alliance?
No, it’s not. And no, you don’t see that in Anoikis at all. CONCORD can turn us off. It’s why no matter how many citadels get erected in Anoikis, if you get podded, you come out of Anoikis.
Why can’t Upwell structures in Anoikis house a clone bay with a medical clone? CONCORD says no.
Why can’t you jumpclone back into Anoikis? CONCORD says no.
And CONCORD can turn them off.
I am a Director in the largest alliance Nullsec has ever seen. Without getting into anything opsec, we can put at least two titans on the field for every ship that took part in the Empress’ Honor Guard display, without getting into our supercarriers. We house over 5 billion baseliners in our Keepstars alone, nevermind the other structures we have in Delve, Querious, Fountain, and all through New Eden.
And we could not hold our own against the Republic Fleet, let alone the Federation Navy. Thousands of titans, at least. Can I imagine them doing to us what they’ve done to the Intaki? Yes. Can I imagine them giving a crap about fewer individuals, capsuleer and baseliner, than the population of maybe four planets in the high-sec cores? No. They don’t need to give a damn.
After all, at the end of the day, they can flip a switch and watch us fall over dead. Just shut down the specific fluid router protocols that let us clone. See how long we last without that. My personal record is 5 months, 20d.
It’s natural, I suppose, for us to seek self-aggrandizement when we’re up against a cosmic backdrop, natural for us to want to see what we are as significant, or important. Just as there’s a drive for ‘empire building’ among certain populations out in null. Mizhara likes to snidely tell me that no capsuleer society’s nearly old enough to make any claims of legitimacy in terms of empire-building, but it’s more than that. It’s a matter of… mattering.
That’s all it is. That’s what the drive to empire-building is about. That’s what the urge to see our state as special is, and what we’re capable of as somehow… significant. We’re not. Really, in the grand scheme of things, humanity probably isn’t more than a momentary blip, a particularly wasteful cascade of chemical reactions for breaking matter down into waste heat.
But even as humanity goes… with what, 23,000 or so years of estimated history that we can reasonably infer from the Amarr calendar, our not-even-two-decades… is nothing. Pointedly insignificant.
To add small scale to her grand scale, without going into details of incidents I am supposed to pretend never happened, during the past (EDIT: I’m older than I think) seven years I have been involved in three separate fool’s errands of capsuleers thinking we can affect international politics with something heavier than pretty words and well-crafted publicity.
We like to think we’re gods, because that’s what publicity makes us. But when push comes to shove with the actual empires, our magic powers won’t work, unless CONCORD wants them to work.
If you think even all independent capsuleers put together could end CONCORD’s rule, you just haven’t hit your head on that particular wall enough times yet.