Rebranding micronations
Posted: Sat Jan 15, 2011 2:40 am
(adapted from some discussion on a Babkhan thread)
At its worst, "micronation" as understood by the average guy on the street means somewhere like Sealand, or at the very least a guy with a fake crown who has fortified has backyard and is threatening to shoot anyone who enters. At its best, it means somewhere like Molossia, which doesn't take itself too seriously but which is still a guy's ranch on Nevada and limited to the people who live there and their immediate families.
Most of these "micronationalists" are pretty intolerant of our mapping/role-playing paradigm. They insult us as silly people pretending to be elves, we insult them as pompous and potentially violent lunatics. The association hurts us both - they feel like we're preventing them from being taken seriously; we worry that they might make people take us too seriously.
But the fact is, they had the term "micronation" first, and when the popular press talks about micronations, they're referring to them.
The only reason we call ourselves micronations now is historical. Most of us claim some descent from a micronation closer to the Molossian paradigm; Audentior, my first micronation, was never entirely serious about seceding but certainly had no fantasy or simulation elements - in terms of philosophy it was probably pretty close to George's micronation of Atlantium (albeit limited to cyberspace). Many of you came via Danny Wallace's How to start your own country, which is about genuinely starting a new nation in the real world. These micronations gradually became interested in things like role-playing, recwar, and cartography, and morphed into the MCS micronations of today, which are nothing like what most of the world calls "micronations".
I think this is at the root of a lot of our recruiting problems. We're embarrassed to talk to "normal people" because they think we're crazy people trying to secede, and we're embarrassed to talk to micronationalists because they think we're fantasy geeks polluting their hobby.
So we should ditch the term "micronation" and think up a new one that better describes our own role. I suggest "active geofiction" (or perhaps "collaborative geofiction"), where geofiction is the hobby of making up countries and "active" refers to us actually being in and governing these countries instead of just drawing them up on a piece of paper or writing books about them.
There are already some well-established geofictional communities, and the conworlder communities consider themselves allied to geofiction, so we would get a big opportunity to recruit from there and from the people who would usually end up there (I think Oric from Antica and possibly Sander Dieleman came from there originally). And we could keep our relations with the wider micronational community (like OAM) in place as a hobby that is compatible to ours though not identical and which shares many common interests and goals.
At its worst, "micronation" as understood by the average guy on the street means somewhere like Sealand, or at the very least a guy with a fake crown who has fortified has backyard and is threatening to shoot anyone who enters. At its best, it means somewhere like Molossia, which doesn't take itself too seriously but which is still a guy's ranch on Nevada and limited to the people who live there and their immediate families.
Most of these "micronationalists" are pretty intolerant of our mapping/role-playing paradigm. They insult us as silly people pretending to be elves, we insult them as pompous and potentially violent lunatics. The association hurts us both - they feel like we're preventing them from being taken seriously; we worry that they might make people take us too seriously.
But the fact is, they had the term "micronation" first, and when the popular press talks about micronations, they're referring to them.
The only reason we call ourselves micronations now is historical. Most of us claim some descent from a micronation closer to the Molossian paradigm; Audentior, my first micronation, was never entirely serious about seceding but certainly had no fantasy or simulation elements - in terms of philosophy it was probably pretty close to George's micronation of Atlantium (albeit limited to cyberspace). Many of you came via Danny Wallace's How to start your own country, which is about genuinely starting a new nation in the real world. These micronations gradually became interested in things like role-playing, recwar, and cartography, and morphed into the MCS micronations of today, which are nothing like what most of the world calls "micronations".
I think this is at the root of a lot of our recruiting problems. We're embarrassed to talk to "normal people" because they think we're crazy people trying to secede, and we're embarrassed to talk to micronationalists because they think we're fantasy geeks polluting their hobby.
So we should ditch the term "micronation" and think up a new one that better describes our own role. I suggest "active geofiction" (or perhaps "collaborative geofiction"), where geofiction is the hobby of making up countries and "active" refers to us actually being in and governing these countries instead of just drawing them up on a piece of paper or writing books about them.
There are already some well-established geofictional communities, and the conworlder communities consider themselves allied to geofiction, so we would get a big opportunity to recruit from there and from the people who would usually end up there (I think Oric from Antica and possibly Sander Dieleman came from there originally). And we could keep our relations with the wider micronational community (like OAM) in place as a hobby that is compatible to ours though not identical and which shares many common interests and goals.
I'm just having fun here 
Don't mind me