why multiman's incredible campaign should worry all of us

Before I get into the meat of this take, I want to preface that I'm a big Multiman supporter whose vote was basically already cast after the presidential debate. I think that Multi won this election with his ideas, plans, and charisma.

With all of that being said, this recent campaign has gotten me really worried about the future of Redmont's politics. In a recent post by Juniperfig (which I highly recommend you read), she calculated that Multi has spent over $30,000 in paying players to campaign in the #campaign channel in the Discord. Judging by the fact that Multi has also paid players to advertise in-game with /ad, and the frequency of his ads in chat, I think it's fair to say that Multi has spent somewhere between 50k-100k in advertising for his campaign.

This is an exorbitant amount to pay for campaign ads, and while I do believe his recent showing in the polls is because he legitimately earned their support, I also think name recognition with newer players will certainly help him.

As Juniperfig said in her aforementioned post, relying on unaware new player votes isn't new, it's a tale almost as old as Democracy Craft itself. However, this intense ad budget could create a dangerous precedent for the future, where elections aren't decided by the better ideas, but by the bigger pockets. This isn't just bad because it will discourage independent candidates who aren't stupidly rich, it's also bad because it will force parties to find rich donors to be able to compete, something that was almost never an outright requirement. These rich donors would then have large influence over the elected officials, allowing them to create legislation that benefits them as rich donors and not the majority playerbase, creating a situation where elections are won off of name recognition and money, and the elected only serve the server's 1%.

Now thankfully for us, this isn't the Redmont we live in, at least not yet. And there's still time to prevent this from happening. How, you may ask? Well, various different suggestions can be proposed. One possible idea is a hard cap limit on a candidate's ad budget. Candidates will have to report how much money and how they plan to spend it on advertising to the DoS, and if caught exceeding this threshold, the candidate is removed from the ballot. Another option is to outright ban paying players for advertising in #campaign or /ad, forcing ads to be done by supporters who were legitimately won over.

There are a bunch of different things that could be done, but the one thing that shouldn't be done is ignoring this issue. We are still just at the start of a new Redmont, a Redmont whose playerbase is not made up of politics or economics nerds, but of regular Minecraft players, many of whom are young and aren't familiar with politics, allowing them to be easily persuaded by populism and logical fallacies, and who won't read up on all the news and scandals happening.

Whatever you think of Multi, and believe me, I love him to bits even with all his flaws, this can't be ignored. and I hope this article can bring some attention to the matter.

Thanks for reading the whole thing!