There's a tendency for a lot of micronationalists to immediately found their own micronation, stick with it for a while, and then become members of some other community only after it doesn't work. Many people have the urge to express their own creative vision with a micronation exactly the way they want it, with themselves in charge.
This leads to the famous "too many chiefs, not enough Indians" problem. If twenty people have twenty micronations, all of their micronations are going to suck. Thanks to the magic of dual citizenship, they're not all necessarily going to be one-person nations - but they're going to be nations of a few people, with only one or two people whose focus and creative energies are on that particular country.
If the activity of a single country with all twenty people is X, then each of these twenty little countries will have an activity level of...maybe not quite as low as .05X, but somewhere in that range. This might not sound so bad. After all, the sum total activity is the same or maybe even greater, and everyone gets to follow their own little creative vision. This might be something like Harvey's point, though I don't want to put words in his mouth.
However, there are limits to what you can do in a one or two person country that prevent the creative vision from ever getting all that interesting. Consider the analogy of pixels and art. Let's say you can scan in the Mona Lisa onto a 100 x 100 pixel square without it losing too much quality. The Mona Lisa here representing a successful creative vision. 10,000 1-pixel squares contain exactly the same amount of pixels as the Mona Lisa. But summing up ten thousand 1-pixel works of art will never get you the same amount of art as that one Mona Lisa, simply because you can't make art in one pixel. There are some pieces of art you can't do really well without hundreds of thousands of pixels to work on.
Small micronations are mostly institutional clones of each other. One may be Egyptian-based, another German-based, but they've all got a couple of government forums, a few province forums, occasional cabinet meetings or whatever. They may have a brilliant con-culture appended onto that, but in terms of the actual nuts-and-bolts of it, it's always that same basic structure. There's no opportunity for anything like complex role-playing, internal recwars, economic simulations, universities, competitions, factional conflicts, competing corporations, shady plotting, sports leagues, or the like. The opportunity for any real creativity is limited to endless con-culturing - which can be really good, but is only one domain out of many possible ones.
Our community has partly solved these problems by internationalizing them. I think a foreigner might look at our community as being one nation (the MCS) with lots of little appended statelets. But if a group wants to have any sort of interesting internal dynamics beyond what the MCS can provide, it needs a critical mass of people.
This creates what can only be called an ethical dilemma. It's similar to a prisoner's dilemma, in fact. Defect is to found your own country. Cooperate is to join someone else's. If everyone cooperates, you get one big country that's sort of a bland mishmash of everyone's creative visions. If you defect and everyone else cooperates, you get a large and interesting country built to your creative vision - so there's a strong incentive to defect. But if everyone defects, you get twenty small countries that can't do anything - so the incentive to defect is really the voice of the devil.
Note that this same dilemma exists, on a larger scale, with mapping organizations. Everyone has their own idea of how a map should look, yet a one-country map is boring and useless. Every so often, someone from Shireroth says that if the MCS won't give us more land, we should go off and found a competing mapping organization, or someone from Babkha says that they need to found a map that's more "simulationist" or "serious". These may be valid complaints, but they are, once again, the voice of the devil. The reason the MCS is so popular and fun is that it's one map for everyone. The reason I get so enraged when someone tries to found a GSO is that it's ruining everyone's fun for selfish pursuit of one group's alternative "creative vision" (if "a crappy, low quality map on which my country has more land" can properly be called "a creative vision").
One of the things I like about Shireroth is that it's blundered into an optimal solution to this whole dilemma in the concept of subdivisions. Everyone gets their own one-person domain to do whatever they want in. There are five larger three-or-four person domains that represent a different balance between creativity and unity. And then there's the country as a whole, which is large enough to have awesome institutions like the PHPBank, the Wiki, and constant feudal plotting and civil wars. When I want to pursue a personal creative vision without asking anyone else, I go to Hyperborea; when I have a large scale plan that needs a dozen people, I go to Shirekeep.
But this only works if people don't abuse it. That's why for five years I (along with Gryphon the Pure) was the strongest supporter of the Feudal Holdings Act, the bill that said that every Duchy has to have at least four people or risk getting dissolved. The Shirerithian counterpart to "everyone wants to found their own micronation" is "everyone wants to be Duke of their own Duchy". But that prevents Duchies from serving their role as a middle ground between personal vision and multiperson complexity. The multiperson complexity goes out the window, and Duchies just become glorified counties. I and the other FHA partisans believed that you needed at least four people for Duchies to be the interesting vision-complexity midpoint that they were, and that if X duchies couldn't support four people each, then disband one and let X-1 duchies do the job.
I'm not saying it's never okay to go off on your own. There are some times when existing micronations and institutions just completely don't do it for you. I founded the nation of Hyperborea because at the time there were no other selective, insular, single-cit communities, and I thought it was important to have one. I merged Hyperborea into Shireroth because at some point I changed my mind, and decided that the importance of having that particular unique society was less important my obligation to the community to help create interesting and complex nations (inactivity also helped
). If you deeply and sincerely believe that there's something that really, really, really needs its own nation or Duchy, and that the need is so great that it trumps your obligation to help create large and functional nations, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong.But my side of this debate will be that you should think about it really, really, really hard first.
