SEAN SMITH

Behavioral Archetype

THE MAN WHO RAN TWO FOREIGN SERVICES AT ONCE – Subject was not a provocateur and not a griefer. He was a diplomat, twice over. By day, an Information Management Officer in the United States Foreign Service. By night, “Vile Rat,” director of diplomacy for Goonswarm, architect of the alliance’s Corps Diplomatique, and the man most responsible for the phrase that became internet culture’s most useful joke about itself: internet spaceships are serious business. He treated a video game’s inter-alliance politics with the exact discipline the State Department trained into him, and it worked. He negotiated the betrayal that broke Band of Brothers and handed Goonswarm the largest coalition in the game. Then he took a temporary posting in Benghazi and was killed in the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound. He was 34.

Essence Indicators

• Born January 30, 1978; U.S. Air Force veteran before the Foreign Service
• Information Management Officer, U.S. State Department – the person who makes diplomats’ electronics work; postings in Pretoria, The Hague, Montreal, Baghdad, and finally Benghazi
• A Something Awful goon; the Goon-to-EVE pipeline ran through the same forum culture Lowtax built
• In EVE Online: “Vile Rat,” longtime chief diplomat of Goonswarm, member of the sixth Council of Stellar Management (CSM6)
• Founded Goonswarm’s Corps Diplomatique, modeled on actual State Department protocol – a real diplomat building a fake diplomatic service
• Credited with the coalition diplomacy that flipped Mercenary Coalition in the Great War and led to the fall of Band of Brothers
• Final message, typed into a director-level Jabber channel as the compound came under fire: “FUCK” then “GUNFIRE,” then he disconnected
• CCP Games and the EVE community memorialized him extensively: station renamings, cynosural beacons lit across the map, an official CSM tribute, and his name inscribed on CCP’s real-world monument in Reykjavik, Iceland

Social Persona / Impression Management

Immediate impression: Warm, funny, competent. The fearsome handle concealed a man his colleagues on both continents described in nearly identical terms – generous, level-headed, the person you wanted in the room when things went wrong. The in-game reputation was for ruthless maneuvering; the personal reputation was for decency.

Energy: Steady. Diplomats are not the loudest people in the room, and Vile Rat’s authority came from reliability rather than volume. He was the back-channel operator, the one who kept talking to the other side after everyone else had stopped.

Impression management strategy: CONGRUENCE. There was no gap between the two jobs. The skills were the same – read the interests, keep the line open, make the deal, keep your word. He did not perform a persona so much as apply one competence to two arenas, one of which happened to involve spaceships. The “serious business” line lands because he meant both halves of it: it was a joke, and he took it seriously anyway.

Forensic Archetype Comparison

Psychometric Assessment

Big Five (OCEAN):

Dark Triad:

MBTI: ENFJ (“The Protagonist”) – Extraverted feeling driving an instinct to organize people toward a shared aim, paired with the patience to hold a coalition together. The type that builds the institution, staffs it, and keeps the relationships intact when interests collide. Vile Rat did it in two institutions at once.

Why This Profile Matters

Lurk More is dedicated to the dead – the martyrs for the lulz, the people internet culture carries. Most of that book’s ledger is people the culture killed or the state destroyed. Vile Rat is different, and the difference is the point. He was not a casualty of the internet or of prosecution. He was a Foreign Service officer who died doing the hardest version of his real job, and the internet mourned him because he had also done the hardest version of a fake one so well that the fake one turned out to matter.

He is the cleanest proof of the book’s argument that “internet spaceships are serious business” was never entirely a joke. Goon culture – the Something Awful sensibility Lowtax built and that ran downstream into every corner of the early social web – produced, among the griefers and the flame wars, a man who took a game’s diplomacy seriously enough to run it like a state, and then went and served an actual state until it killed him. When he died, rival alliances that had spent years trying to destroy each other stopped the war to light beacons for him. That is the culture recognizing one of its own, and recognizing that the seriousness was real all along.

Threat Assessment

Flame Warrior Classification

Primary: Diplomat / Coalition Builder Secondary: Innocent Bystander (killed on the job, not for anything he provoked) Notes: ATK 7 – the reach was real. He built and ran the diplomatic apparatus of the largest coalition in EVE, brokered the flip that decided the Great War, and did comparable work for the actual State Department. Few subjects in this file moved as many people with as little force. DEF 1 – he had none. There was no persona to hide behind and no institution that could protect him where it counted; he took the dangerous postings and one of them killed him. HP 0 – deceased at 34, in Benghazi, doing his job. The stat is the ledger’s, not his.

Sources: Sean Smith (diplomat) – Wikipedia; A tribute to Sean “Vile Rat” Smith – EVE Online / CCP Games; The Amazing Life of Sean Smith, the Masterful EVE Gamer Slain in Libya – Kotaku; There’s Now A Real-Life Monument To EVE Online Players – Kotaku.