Join the new world

(As promised...)

The question we must ask in relation to our presence within eRepublik is what potential capacity is there for us to move beyond capitalism? What cracks can we make? Indeed, is it worth attempting to crack eRepublik at all? Or do we have to do away with (negate) eRep in order to crack capitalism?

The eRep framework limits our "experiences" to, essentially, the pursuit of commodity accumulation through tightly constrained modules. If cracks are going to be found and created anywhere it is going to be in the elements of eRep with the loosest restrictions, those with the greatest social aspects. Newspapers is one example. The primary purpose of newspapers as presented in eRepublik is to accumulate votes and subscriptions - to become a "media mogul". But beyond that they allow the author to say pretty much whatever they like (as long as they avoid the wrath of the censoring admin - this can be done by hiding radical anti-eRep content within long complicated articles or quirky humorous ones, in other words, bamboozlement). The reader can respond in a comment. Why can we leave comments? For the author to accumulate feedback - but the author should appreciate feedback qualitatively, not quantitatively; its radical content. Therein lies the potential to form social relations based on something other than capital.

From this starting point we begin to see how political parties, forums, chat servers, organisation of any form including even government and military structures; an array of communicative activity that occurs on the peripheries can become subversive. Within this pursuit of accumulation there lies a contradiction that is cooperation which may have the potential to explode, sending cracks shooting off in all directions. An article, for example, can act as a crack that opens up all sorts of alternative practices, spreading throughout the entire eRep framework (and hopefully beyond).

Or can it? Just how deep can our cracks penetrate? Ultimately, is our active eRep account not perpetuating capitalistic forms of social relations? For it is a commodity on a market, it adds value to the eRepublik product. Can our subversive presence be strong enough to counter-balance that value added and take value away? Or is it the case that cracks here, even if they perpetuate capitalist eRepublik, serve a greater purpose in creating and spreading cracks in capitalism generally, in spreading memes, ideas and communistic forms of social relations?

I don't know about you, but these questions make my head hurt. It's all too easy to reject eRep outright faced with such dilemmas (as indeed I very much have done previously). I think it's necessary to examine this greater anti-capitalist, communist project in more detail before we can properly judge. So part 3 on this communiqué, The Human Strike, will examine just that.