I’m not really into politics, but I always thought one of the main arguments of libertarians was that you don’t need government mandated social programs because people would help each other out on their own. So maybe it still is a libertarian design?
In that respect, sure; however, there's also a lot of lawlessness without repercussions there, like year(s)-long long-cons where people climb up the corporate ladder to eventually empty out said corporate's wallets and assets.
Sure, the player character involved will be marked for life, but they can just move the assets to a new character and nobody will be the wiser.
That said, the game was (or seemed to be designed) that the bigger alliances should be fighting for terrain all the time, but as it turns out they recognize it's mutually beneficial to not wage war. I remember reading about when they introduced titans, and that they were stupid expensive and involved to make (took like a month or so? plus all the raw materials). But the alliances scaled up, stocked up, and now there's hundreds if not thousands of the things and they rarely, if at all get used and lost in combat. So there's no "sink" of those things. I haven't heard of any major conflict involving titans since B-R5RB [0], but looking at that article there was another one in 2020 apparently that was a bit more costly ($378K in real money).
The problem that Eve has is also its unique selling point, it's all one big universe, so there can be battles involving over 6000 people in one system. But the game's internal clock slows way down, meaning that inside one system time moves at 1/10th of what is out there, also meaning that it feels like reinforcements can arrive within seconds or minutes instead of how long it should usually take. And they still do a once per day server shutdown for maintenance, but idk if these battles continue after that, or if they suspend shutdown during these big fights nowadays.
The ingame groups ended up creating structures that look quite like governments. It felt almost like a recapitulation of real frontier history. Which is something that always felt self-defeating about libertarian ideology to me - like, we know what happens when there are no rules and governments, people make them, and without a government you can't stop that.
It's a self defeating aspect of the specific rightist-style framing of libertarianism that many people end up buying into, including the drafters of the Bill of Rights. IMO this was Gödel's loophole he referenced but never elaborated upon, as it's right in line with his work in logical contradictions.
Defining freedoms as a bunch of basic primitives that merely "the government" is prevented from infringing, and narrowly defining coercion as something that only the government is capable of (legally) doing is a broken framing. Layered complexity will make it so that other entities apart from the bona fide "government" are able to exercise significant actual coercion, and then infringe upon individual freedoms. And then using the broken definitions you will be told you are not actually being coerced, but rather choosing to "voluntarily" interact, and so your rights aren't actually be infringed.
The only way libertarianism makes sense is to define rights in terms of ability to exercise individual freedoms with respect to coercion by anyone else. This looks messier, but only because it puts the inevitable conflict front and center to be immediately resolved by equitable judgement about the amounts of coercion. The broken framework just pushes this logical conflict into the background, leaving it to continue growing as societal complexity does.
I’m not sure these structures are exactly like governments, in the libertarian sense. Do they demand taxes from people in their area? Do they set arbitrary laws?
