The CSM and you.

One of the most dreary things in politics is regulatory capture.

I've linked the wikipedia article but the TLDR is that regulatory capture generally happens when an issue is too uninteresting for regular people to worry about so the people who make money from a certain activity get to write the laws that govern it because they're the only people who give a shit.

One of the clearest examples is copyright. Originally copyright law was introduced to give writers an incentive to publish works, some security that if it proved popular the writer would get money from the sales. It now extends 70 years past an author's death. Does anyone think for one second that any writer is going to refuse to publish because they won't get paid 70 years after they've ceased caring about worldly things? Of course not. It got extended because Mickey Mouse was about to go into the public domain and that would have killed Disney. The company wanted new law and no one cared about it enough to fight them.

The problem with regulatory capture is that, like all forms of political corruption, it's very bad for the politics of the institutions affected by it.

The CSM is riddled with regulatory capture and always has been. It's been getting worse and worse over time, mostly as rivalries developed in the Eve media world have grown as significant as rivalries developed in the conquest wars of nullsec. Candidates openly stand as representatives of vested interests - imagine real world politicians who wore badges saying Enron Senator or BP Member of Parliament. It's actually an outrage that we have "Goon CSM candidates."

The usefulness of the CSM depends on the dev's interest in seeking them out for advice. If a dev team would rather develop their feature without talking to the CSM they do so.

When Fozzie rebalanced nullsec ore he consulted extensively with Mynnna, the Goon finance guy and CSM member. Mynnna helped him craft a solution which was good for the problem (risk/reward of mining) but especially good for Goons. The profit of mining shifted some from high sec to null sec.

Eve is suffering a declining population. The low sec and null sec populations are stable, the people who are losing interest are the high sec players.

It's not a coincidence that part of the development process has been captured by nullsec vested interests and that the unrepresented space is in decline. I can't help wondering if maybe CCP Fozzie looks back to the solution he worked out with Mynnna and asks himself "Was I played?"

Political progress happens when people get active. The abolition of the slave trade in Britain was a result of publicity and political pressure by William Wilberforce and others. The emancipation of women in England was a result of passionate direct action by the suffragettes. The 1968 Civil Rights Act of the USA was the result of the civil rights movement.

In each case to make things better people had to get involved.

Gevlon proposed to run for CSM on a protest slate, various people recommend protesting by abstaining or voting for joke candidates. Look at the real world. When did anything change for the better because good folk did nothing or because people voted for a joke candidate? That's not the way the world works.

If we want a CSM that can rebuild bridges to the CCP developers, that can work to make this game better we need to install people who don't have these agendas.

People who are there to advance the interests of their block are not people who the devs should be listening to. People who are there for inside scoops on news stories are not people the devs should be outlining confidential plans to.

The fix is to vote for good candidates who genuinely have the good of the game at heart and who are not there to shill for some null sec alliance or Eve media site.

There's far too much conflict of interest - actually conflict of interest is too kind because people like Sion aren't conflicted about whether to put the good of the game ahead of the good of their alliance. He'll chose the wrong thing every time.

I will be voting this CSM and I will be voting for people who I think will make Eve a better game. If you don't vote, effectively you're empowering Sion and all the other nullsec and media shills because they do care, they will mobilise support and they will be there unless we work to put someone better ahead of them.

So let's not hand over the CSM on a plate to the people least deserving of power because the devs aren't stupid and they just won't want to talk to such people.