Political Philosophy of The Star Fraction

Our philosophy is both straightforward and yet politically complex when compared with the majority of polarised territorial, nationalist and imperial mindsets common to the cluster at the moment:

* We do not claim space. That is to say we do not put up a flag and say: "this is our backyard, come here and we’ll set the dogs on you!"

* We do explore, develop and exploit the resources of space.

* We consider that the economic development of space will bring rich rewards to the corporations and individuals with the imagination to explore it. A neutral population means a customer base, means sales opportunities, and means economic stimulation and fiscal potential to open-minded and flexible business operations.

* We do believe in freespace in the sense of space that is not restricted by territorial cartel or imperial claims. However, we certainly do not conceive freespace as space where the individual is free from the responsibility to take care of his own defence. This means that we will oppose greedy and ridiculous closed space claims from imperialist powers but not not promise or provide any organised patrol or policing function to protect those too lazy or greedy to defend themselves.

* We believe that policing other people’s safety as a matter of course is akin to mutually regressive servitude; since the protector is obligated to defend the indefensible (since ignorance and vulnerability invites oppression) and the protected is maintained in a status of naïve victim-hood that establishes an entirely unacceptable caste divide between fellow residents of the frontier.

* While we will not police and patrol freespace to the benefit of the lazy and the weak we will endeavour to teach and inspire the ignorant in the ways and methods of surviving the frontier. This will involve encouraging people not to be victims, to learn to fight, and most importantly to consider their freedom the most precious commodity they have and to reject ultimately the premise of empires and protection rackets in free territories.

* It is our ultimate belief and aspiration that only an equal society of capable and confident space pilots, fully able to both survive adversity and fight back against oppression with effective violence at need, is able to approach the paradigm of free space in a meaningful fashion. As long as some are wolves and some are sheep there will be tyranny. If everyone can claim their own freedom, harbouring the meaningful promise of violent resistance in adversity, then justice and future prosperity will be ours.

Some questions that commonly arise

So does this mean everyone needs to be a fighter?

No, but everyone should be able to defend themselves in 0.0 space with evasion, clever use of tactics, common sense, and various techniques that can be taught to make an easy target a very hard target and thus deny victims to enemies and marauders. A capsuleer should be prepared to take advice and guidance in the equipage of cheap and sustainable combat vessels that may be used to defend the principles they each aspire to respect and defend. A miner or trader or non-combatant’s response to getting bullied by a couple of pirate or alliance frigate raiders should not be to cry for help and sit like a victim. It should be to dock his or her vulnerable craft and go out hunting in an interceptor, advanced cruiser or battleship of their own (preferably with other freespacers) and go to teach the oppressors that freespace has teeth.

What happens if a hostile force attacks the Star Fraction?

We will respond on our own terms and strike back at times and methods of our own choosing entirely. If faced with overwhelming force we will retreat and fight somewhere else. We have no emotional or patriotic stake in defending systems and stations for silly pride. If the enemy is strong we’ll go to where he is weak. If he is weak we will try to cut off his tail and wave it in the air to show that the beast is mortal and can bleed. Sometimes we will fight in battleships, sometimes we will run like the wind and mob foes with interceptors and frigates. Since our territory is the territory of ideas we have no obligation to do other than remain resolute in keeping to our core paradigms and transcend the nonsense of place and symbolic locations in post-diaspora warfare. In essence, we are a territorialist's worst nightmare because we do not play by his rules, and even while withdrawing in the face of massive fleets we are planning to counter-attack against his underbelly while making a neat profit selling him ammunition, equipment and advanced combat ships.

Will you attack all territorial alliances?

No. Only those those that bring hostility to us and are completely unreachable by diplomatic and philosophical conversation from the dead-end street of xenophobic territorialism; there is much value in debating political paradigms with the leaders of alliances. We believe have good arguments and persuasive military and economic heft to employ in such debates. The freespace, posthumanist geist is a powerful force in and of itself.

What of nationalist militias and imperialist paramilitaries?

Those that support the old core empires in word and deed are every bit as bad as those who seek to divide the new frontier into parcels of exclusive and enclosed territory. Worse, such capsuleers spread by action and deed the purest distillation of the ancient memes of nation and empire, infecting and seeking to persuade other capsuleers of the 'benefits' of servitude to corrupt and rotten edifices of government and control. In the war of ideas, these capsuleers are the ideological shocktroops of the old order and in pursuit of the promise of the future will at our option be viable targets for such action as the Star Fraction deems fit.

If everyone is equal who will rule?

Nobody; a society of battleship-owning territorially-independent freespacers with the will to defend their prerogatives cannot be 'ruled' in the traditional sense, it can only be appealed to in the effort to build sensible and rational consensus. In many ways, the old paradigms of hierarchy and corrupt administrative morass is exactly what we are set against. All such empires tumble in time under the weight of their own inefficiency; internal caste divides and disparities between interest groups bring suicide and destruction.

What about strip-mining of resources, how can a freespace alliance prevent that?

Why bother? Space is vast; if strip-miners come then it will increase the availability of raw minerals on the market and increase our profit margins from sales. Plus of course it’s much better to hunt faction pirate ships anyhow for quick and easy profits, and the presence of strip-miners in the belts increases respawn rates and focuses the efforts under the guns of one’s hunting ship. The key of the Star Fraction ethic is to reject the knee jerk of territorialism in all ways and simply look at the broader picture and see ways of turning any situation to personal and corporate advantage. The 'menace' of strip-miners has been used to terrorise the perceptions of the weak and the greedy since the first days of the capsuleer frontier and it is simply a puerile mythology to justify xenophobia and military oppression.

A post-national freespace alliance? What does that mean?

What this means is that we are interested in presenting a genuinely progressive alternative to closed-border nationalism and the imperialist themes that are so redolent of the past. Star Fraction principles hold that society is changing with the passage of technological advancement and cultural evolution, and the old governments of tax and restriction and standing military force are outmoded and reactionary; now actually standing in the way of the free development and positive expression of posthumanist ambition.

Why posthumanist?

Because that is what we are, we neurologically-tempered pilots on the bleeding edge of scientific exploration of space. Our senses are as one with our ships; our minds have a focus and vision that transcends the old sub-light limitations of pre star-faring society. Our conversations and ideas are spread across the scope of a thousand, thousand suns and our dreams and desires are enabled by bright technology and perception-boosting integration with supralight intelligence and communications arrays. We are the future. We can be a force for good or evil, we can dominate the stars and enslave our planet bound kin or we can break the chains of social restraint and truly kick the habit of sentient imperialism forever in a glorious diaspora to paint our dreams in blazing colours across the very heavens!

Why capsuleers?

Because capsuleers have the chance to make a difference: they have the resources of nations! The vision of gods! Immortality and courage, swift prowess and the all the ambitions of history's forces arrayed and compressed into a single shining moment of sublime potential!

Lovely rhetoric but what does it really mean?

In short, we in the Star Fraction have long believed that the life of a capsuleer is worth much more to the human race than simply being another policeman or cog in the wheel of national paranoid military/industrial infrastructure. We each of us could destroy worlds if we were of a mind too, but equally we can change the course of the past cultural conceits and radically break the cycle of imperialism and repression that has long enslaved the human condition.

From the first moment you took command of your starter frigate from the academy you broke free of the fiscal support/dependence structure of your native worlds. In an hour's work mining, or hunting or trading or working agents you most likely paid in full the investment on the ship. In a day, you gathered enough resource to upgrade your vessel and purchase better equipment and modules. In a week, you were considering industrial vessels and economic plans to put planetside corporations and business investment to utter shame. Some of us have taken this yet further and earned billions upon billions of ISK in resources and invested in new technology, in warfare, in vast industrial activities that sever our connections to the old world of administrative corruption and imperial memetics as significantly and irrevocably as the monofilament scalpel severs the umbilical betwixt child and mother at the beginning of waking consciousness.

For one who has tasted freedom there is no going back.

The Star Fraction is an expression of this faith and understanding. We know it is possible to flourish and prosper in space without falling back into the old territorial paradigms of border control and government-sponsored robbery. We know that the mythology of control is just that, a myth. We understand that post-national conflict has no borders, no battlelines, that there is no protection in road-blocks and gate-camps, no security in xenophobia, no profit in hiding behind a wall of casual murder and organised corruption.

Those who now abide in the Star Fraction have raised empires and broken them, we have seen what works and what does not. We have tested the limits of social engineering and found the old paradigms of hierarchical caste division as useless to the future as the remnant religious imagery of ancestral prehistory is to radical fringe economics and technological zeitgeist.

We reject the premise of universal empire; we will have nothing of control and restriction, naught beyond pure fortune and hope as the gift to the individual, our fate as little defined by the ashen bones of past injustice, as the merest of those tyrant-forces does possess an ability to limit the very tapestry of stars in celestial circuit of the skies above.

The Star Fraction is our hope and our future; a union of disparate posthumanists brought close by their very disparity and individual dreams for tomorrow. This is not a futurist utopian march or tyranny of conformity in perfection, no; it is instead the expression of freedom on a vital and personal level, a messy and inexact freedom, a freedom to struggle and strive and freedom to suffer, but at the last a freedom to experience and make of individual destiny the room to manoeuvre in the culture of mimetic evolution that is so poisonous elsewhere to the very spirit of man and human endeavour both.

As was once written of neo-anarchist technologists in the early days of colonisation in the cluster:

"Of post-futurist political fractions... no shared ideal unites them - on the contrary. Having every cause to rebel, they need no ideal, no cause. One stubborn conviction is common to all of them: No More New World Orders. I will not conceal my own conviction that in this they are right. For we have seen the future - we have by now centuries of experience of the future - and we know it doesn’t work. It’ll be a great day when the future goes away! It’ll be a great day of liberation, when the armies, the functionaries, the camp-followers, the carpet-baggers of the future go away and leave us in peace to get on with the rest of our lives!"

This conviction is as vital now as it was then, for we finally have the chance to make of our own future a blank and unknown slate of wild possibility, and surely there can be no finer promise than a future society will deny nothing, control nothing, and merely facilitate the triumph or failings of human creativity without the dead hand of colonial control and bureaucratic imperialism to detriment of change and sweet potential.

Freedom is the freedom to make a choice from a broader cross section of possibility. The Star Fraction is an expression of rebellious vision and stubborn reckless chutzpah in the face of authority. Trust nothing beyond the outcome of healthy cynicism and eccentric individualism combined with reckless passion and the courage to dream.

If we fail, we fail because we set our sights too high and not because we did not dare to dream.

This is what we believe and why we act as we do. The principles are simple. The implications sometimes complex. Yet there is no dissembling and no deception, of self or anyone else, we know what we are about and we do not shrink from it.

The Freecaptains of the Star Fraction