Why a-sociality is needed to make difference

People see that a-social methods work. Working with machines (and bots in games) instead of with people became common practice. "Don't care what people say" is written on every second motivational poster. However they try to weasel themselves out from the obvious conclusion "being a-social is needed". In a sense, they are right. Among the wast sea of morons and slackers who just "wanna hav som fun", you can easily get into the top 10% with some simple practices (often dubbed as "work ethic") without abandoning purely social relationships, while hanging out with people just for the sake of it sometimes (not always like the M&S).

Same is true for games like EVE. If you know how to fit your ship and undock enough to get 100M kills a month, you are already in the top 10% of EVE pilots. Kill 1.2B/month and you are in top 1%. Because the rest are so bad. While there are others much stronger than you, they'll ignore you as they have their own business. No one sane will go after you even if he could, because he can farm 10x more noobs in the same time. Just like in real life: when the damn salesman comes to your house to convince you to buy something completely useless and you tell him to go away, he will as he knows that there will be an idiot next door. There is no point for him or his company to somehow defeat you.

However if you plan to make difference, they will have a reason and they will come after you with all their social engineering power. And if you are social, you will fail. Socials are predictable, they follow their prehistoric subroutines (often called "knee-jerk reaction"). So the ones with power lay a trap which is quite obvious to everyone else (even other socials), but you are still compelled to step into it. However if you are a-social, you shake it off like dog shakes off water. Let me show a brilliant example:

CCP Falcon posted:

Whenever I feel down, whenever I feel sad... the outrageous lunacy, sheer tinfoil and unbelievably biased and unhinged craziness of Gevlon's blog always cheers me up.

This statement contains no criticism or argument against any of my posts or ideas. He didn't say "Gevlon is wrong in X", so I can't defend X, nor say "yes, it's wrong, I see it now". He simply claims that I'm an outrageous lunatic and unhinged crazy. Someone who serves no other purpose in the community than a good laughter. What would you do if a dev of your favorite game would publicly post something like that about you? No you wouldn't answer calmly as there is no argument to debate in his post. Merely posting "I believe I'm not a lunatic crazy and my ideas serve more purpose than laughter" won't convince anyone (as everyone, including mental patients say the same).

You would answer something "witty" or "dunking", something in his style. Well, that would be quite unwise:

You may not abuse, harass or threaten another player or authorized representative of CCP, including customer service personnel and volunteers. This includes, but is not limited to: filing support tickets with false information in an attempt to gain from it or have someone else suffer from it; sending excessive e-mails, EVE-mails or support tickets; obstructing CCP Employees from doing their jobs; refusal to follow the instructions of a CCP Employee; or implying favoritism by a CCP Employee.

Just stop for a second and think what would happen with your account if you'd post "Whenever I feel down, whenever I feel sad... the outrageous lunacy, sheer tinfoil and unbelievably biased and unhinged craziness of the devblogs of [CCP dev name] always cheers me up."

I'd also ask you to not ignore the last part of the ToS quote: "or implying favoritism by a CCP Employee". After I ignored this reddit post (and deleted a few dozen comments linking it), the Goon propaganda site linked it in the official Imperium SotA, under the false name "this post by Gevlon Goblin" (I never post on reddit). Still, it would be bannable offense to imply that CCP Falcon is somehow helping the Goons. I would never do that. Unfortunately other players aren't that law-abiding. Sion Kumitomo shamelessly claims that in the case of the vandalising of the EVE monument:

CCP could have chosen any number of ways to deal with the bad publicity. What they opted to do was to protect the people involved, protect the people associated with the vandals, and finally, they made one decision that surprised even me. Following on the heels of the Fatbee sticker that got plastered on the monument, many assumed that this escalation was from the same source, from a member of Goonswarm. CCP Falcon, despite knowing full well that the vandalism was committed by a pair of Goonswarm members, apologized to Goonswarm for people wrongly accusing us. Why?

CCP Falcon realized that implicating an entire alliance would have serious consequences for an alliance full of innocent people. He went out of his way to ensure that no one knew who was responsible and fought internally to make sure that it stayed that way. There would be no naming and shaming. There would be no guilt by association. He is the reason why those stacks of articles don’t all say “Goonswarm vandalizes monument”. He knew that while he was capable of making the distinction between guilty individuals and the innocence of the whole, others would not have so easy a time with such nuance.

Most surprisingly of all, once CCP received payment for damages, they reversed all the permanent bans. All of them. Instead, the people named in Theo’s mail got a mixture of three- to six-month temporary bans, and the prohibitions on attending future EVE events was lifted. For that again, CCP Falcon was in large part responsible. He figured that since they did indeed come forward and since damages were paid, that it showed a measure of good faith that CCP would honor with good faith in return, all while keeping the matter confidential.

I'm completely shocked and I condemn this blatant and public defamation of CCP Falcon. How can anyone claim that he was protecting real world criminal Goons (who did it to frame it on me by the way) and even let them back to the game and to Fanfest?! Bad, bad Sion!

In the meantime I ask you to think how many times you'd have been banned if this incident (the post, not the vandalism) happened to you and not me. And something like this will happen to you if you aspire for more than "above average".

Update: CCP Falcon posted a reply to this, which is nothing but a "we love everybody, including crazies and crazies are amazing" corporate PR text. I feel sorry for the lore writer who had to write it for him.


PS: this is just normal Sov transfer between coalition members, nothing to see here, move along: