Is there some natural connection between some ideology and the network? It seems, there is. Ideologies are nothing which appears without reason, without base in the real world, but fulfill some function. We do not want to defend here some trivial marxism that the ideology is predefined by the circumstances we live in: The influence of the circumstances we live in on our ideologies is only a tendency, and there is also a strong influence in the other direction, from our ideas on the circumstances we live in.
Nonetheless, the network will have some influence on the ideology of it's participants, and we can make some reasonable predictions about this influence based on the circumstances of life in the network.
The mechanism how the network can modify the ideology is simple: Initially, the network will be most attractive to some subset of people - those who find some of the differences between the network and the current society most attractive. These first users can be expected to follow ideologies which consider the differences between the network and the current state as advantages of the network and highly value these advantages.
These first users are those who build the infrastructure of the network, occupy the best positions in the network, teach the next generation of newbies how to use it, and obtain almost automatically a high status as veterans of the network. All these three factors give their ideologies some strong advantage.
Instead, those with ideologies which consider the differences as disadvantages of the network, and the network itself as dangerous and evil, will be the last one who will participate in it. Therefore, at least initially their influence on the network will be much weaker, and it becomes much harder for them to gain influence. (The only way for them to gain power is to find some problems which are handled badly by the network and the infrastructure created in the first phase - problems which have been ignored, because they have not been important for the first users. )
Thus, there are objective reasons which will favour some ideologies and disfavour others. It remains to find out which ideas will be favoured by the first users of the network.
In most archaic societies, holding the own promises is much more important than today in modern democracies. This is not an accident, but a natural consequence of the problem of the stranger: Only in a small society it is possible to verify if somebody holds his promises - for a stranger, we have no way to verify this. Therefore, we have to rely, instead of his word, on general law and the police enforcing it.
But the network solves this problem. It becomes possible to evaluate the personal honour of a stranger, by evaluating his rules and the available information about him: If there is no record in the black list, and the arbitrators he accepts are reliable, it is reasonable to trust him.
As a consequence, the ideological value of honour and other personal qualities considered today in some sense as archaic will raise again.
While holding the own promise is an old, almost archaic value, which will revive in the network, there is another value which is quite modern: self-determination. Here, again, it is that the network makes self-determination possible in a domain where it has been impossible in the past - the domain of establishing the rules for the own behaviour. This is an obviously much more important point for self-determination than particular hobbies or fashion or the choice of the preferred rock group which is what is self-determination reduced to in democracy: If one has to follow rules defined by others, some government, one is not self-determined, but government-determined, and it does not matter at all if the government is monarchistic or democratic: Your participation in the election does not make it your government, it remains to be a government, which governs your behaviour because it establishes the rules you have to follow.
The meaning of self-determination in the network is therefore much stronger, contains much more than in democracy, where the most essential parts of self-determination are not given to the people. So one can also expect that self-determination, in this strong meaning of the word, will be an important value for the participants of the network.
Part of the self-determination in the network is that one cannot cry for government support if one has made a bad contract. Now, one is not obliged to follow it, but then the record about this violation becomes part of the black list. This may be unproblematic if the contract was forced or really unfair, because everybody is free to judge about the seriousness of the violation of the contract.
Thus, the network will be preferred by those who accept that freedom means also acceptance of the consequences of the own bad decisions, by those who reject paternalism by government. There will be not much sympathy for the losers if they cry for government for help.
Mutual support in case of failure is another question: There will be insurance companies as well as organizations for mutual help in case of necessity. But it should be noted that there is a danger: The first users may be those who don't care much about this, accepting the ideology that one has to pay for the own errors. Thus, the problem of creating an appropriate infrastructure for helping the poor may be ignored. This can give a base for a revival of ideologies in favour of paternalism by some central government.
This is, essentially, what has happened after the crash of communism in the West: Instead of transforming the social security system into something compatible with free markets, it has been heavily reduced. As a consequence, it has become possible for marxistic ideology to revive.
With the network, it becomes much harder to cheat and to lie: One can ask the suspected liar to put his lies into some promise into the network. His refusal to do so strongly suggests that one should not believe him. Instead, if he accepts this, he risks a lot, in particular a record in the black list. This makes the network much more attractive for those with a high value for truth.
Now, it may be argued that this does not make a difference: Truth is a high value even today. But this is not really the case. Politicians in a democracy and journalists in democratic mass media are notorious liars, not because they are inherently bad, but because one cannot survive in these businesses without telling lies. Most intelligent people have more or less accepted as a fact of life that one should not believe politicians or mass media (possibly with some exceptions for a few high quality journals).
The ideal of truth-seeking is much stronger and more common among scientists. A probable consequence is that scientists themself as well as scientific values will become more popular in the network.
There is one reasonable and plausible meta-rule: The Golden Rule. It is likely to be accepted by many participants: The conventions are likely to have the form of agreements between those who participate.
Once the participants will have rules which differ, and, in particular, differ from the laws of the particular governments, there is a strong incentive to justify this difference in a moral way, by moral argumentation. Now, the Golden Rule gives such a justification in a quite general form: It forbids (in a quite natural interpretation) any legal monopoly of some person or organization, thus, in essence, forbids states, which depend on such legal monopolies, in particular on the monopoly of the use of force.
Therefore it seems quite likely that political anarchism - the ideology which rejects the state as amoral, in particular as violating the Golden Rule - will be quite popular in the network. In particular, it will be extremely popular among those who use the network for illegal activities: The obvious reason is that they have not only an ideological, but also a real conflict with the laws of the government. This will be used by opponents to suggest that political anarchists and network users in general have criminal interests. But who cares? Given the density of government regulations in almost every domain of live and the stupidity of many of these regulations, most people have at least some illegal interests, even if it is only copyright violation or tax avoidance. Given the possibilities of the network to realize them, one can expect that they will be used. An ideology which justifies this behaviour will become popular among the network users.
The network also gives unrestricted, uncensorable free speech. This includes all types of free speech, including pornographic speech, hate speech, and distribution of dangerous information. Those who favour the network consider this as an important advantage: Whatever their personal reasons (may be they simply like forbidden porn), they can use general political arguments to justify this. Thus, there will be also a strong support for unrestricted freedom of speech.
But freedom of speech has some other, implicit consequences for the ideologies which will become more popular.
Freedom of speech is a value in democracy, but it in no way means that all political opinions have a chance in the mass media. The mass media present only a surprisingly small part of the different political theories and ideologies.
The reason for this is the way democracy works, especially in the case when there are only two big parties. Only one of them will win, but to win the election, the best position is the center. As a consequence, above big parties will fight for the center, and, therefore, present to the public almost identical political positions. Their political fight is, of course, a real fight, but only for power: Their political position is almost the same, the differences are only minimal. Even if some of the politicians in these parties have other opinions for themself, they will be unable to express them openly if they are in conflict with the position of the center.
The democratic mass media hide this. The media present the minimal differences in the political positions as important, big differences, even if they are only minimal disagreements about almost unimportant particularities. Presented in such a way, the agreement about all the questions shared by the two big parties looks like agreement of a great majority – of all those who vote for the two big parties. It isn't. People have, at best, not thought about those questions which are consensus among the great parties. If they have, they often disagree, but nonetheless vote for one of the big parties, the one less evil, because everything else would mean a loss of their vote.
But the alternatives, outside the mainstream, are seldom discussed. If politicians of the great parties participate, they reject them in full agreement as nonsensical, radical or worse, and after this discuss their minor disagreements about how to fight them. What they share is the agreement that "one should not give a forum to these positions". This is far away from the ideal of democratic discussion, but it is how democratic mass media work.
What changes with the network? Every position can be presented, in as much detail as one likes, in the network. In part, this already happens in the usual web, but only in part: Some of the positions already cannot be presented today openly in the internet, the world-wide censorship has heavily increased during the last years. The network cannot be censored as easy as the internet, because all what is presented pseudonymously cannot be traced back to real persons. There is also no provider of a particular site who can be forced to shut down the site. Censorship simply will be technically impossible without suppressing the network as a whole - a possibility we consider at another place.
When, there will be uncensored discussion forums as well. Now, uncensored discussion forums have some problems. The main problem is that there are lot's of crank participants with extremely dubious positions which most of the readers would like to ignore. The classical way to handle this problem is the so-called killfile: A list of people one does not want to read. Unfortunately, the cranks don't like them and often change their names. Then, spamming is another problem. As well, discussions in the net show a tendency to become more heated and aggressive than real live discussions. But these problems are solvable. In the worst case, moderated discussion groups are a solution.
So, every political and ideological position can represent itself in the network. As well, in appropriately organized discussion forums every ideological position can be discussed and criticized from all other political positions.
Unfortunately, it is not that easy that the best position easily wins in such discussions.
One reason is that different political and ideological positions are often based on different positions about the facts of real life. But it is hard to evaluate claims about what happens in real life reading only a discussion about it.
The easiest thing which can be evaluated is the internal consistency of some position. As a consequence, one has to expect, as a first consequence of free speech, that the winning positions are more internally consistent. The participants of such discussions do not have to win elections, they have to win discussions. You win discussions if your opponents have no good arguments against you, but any internal contradiction in your position is a good argument - very powerful because everybody can see such internal contradictions, without having to check the facts, and (for the same reason) it is much easier for your opponents to find such arguments.
This heavily distinguishes them from the mainstream position defended by democratic parties. The way one defines the position defended by mass media and politicians can be described in a very simple way: Take a questionaire with all the politically relevant questions and ask some institute to find out the majority opinion about each of them. The resulting position is the position which is likely to give you the support of the majority in elections. This is obviously not a way to obtain a consistent position. But in TV discussions this does not matter much - the attention span is much to small, and those who are nonetheless able to catch the contradictions cannot simply start to participate, as they can in a discussion forum.
Therefore one could expect that internally consistent positions become more popular in the network, while the contradictory mix of popular prejudices which wins in democratic parties and elections will loose support.
There is only one correct consistent position. Unfortunately, there are much more wrong inconsistent positions. And one characteristic property of wrong inconsistent positions is that they may be heavily wrong - sometimes much more wrong than the contradictory compromise position defended by democratic parties. And they radically differ from other internally consistent positions, much more than the positions of the great political parties which defend essentially the same mainstream position.
Of course, we may hope that, in the long run, the truth will win. But in a short run we have to expect a radicalization of society. The democratic consensus position will be the loser: It is full of inconsistencies, of political compromise, of nonsense which cannot be defended in a consistent way in uncensored discussion. Instead, radical positions are often much more internally consistent.
In particular, the moderate, civilized Western versions of Christian religion are quite inconsistent with the Bible text. Christian fundamentalism is much more internally consistent. The moderate Christian is usually shocked if confronted with the parts of the Bible where God requires murder of innocents and genocide. For the fundamentalist, this is not an argument at all. If God tell's us to kill, let's kill. So, the radical position can win arguments because of it's consistency. This is not accidental: It is the search for consistency which has caused the development of these radical proposals. Thus, one has to expect some rise of fundamentalism, in comparison with more civilized, less dangerous versions of Christianity. The same has to be expected for all the other religions too.
But as well there will be a rise of atheism too: First, as a reaction to the increasing danger to humanity from the more and more fundamentalist religions, but also for the same reason of internal consistency - the rejection of religions is much more consistent than the sort of moderate acceptance of peaceful religious beliefs and the refusal to fight them as wrong and misguided which is typical for democratic parties.
This is quite close to what we observe: Radical islam, as well as radical christianity, have become much more powerful and influential in the last twenty years, and, as far as I know, other religions also show such tendencies. But atheism is also increasing: the movement of the brights is evidence for this. Another evidence is that libertarianism is becoming more influental too. This website is part of this. Instead, the established, moderate versions of the various religions seem to lose.
In fact, this argument is not a prediction, but an explanation - the result of the author's attempts to understand the reasons for the rise of fundamentalism in the age of the internet. This explanation also fits nicely with the fact that islamist extremists use the internet as well as that they are often from middle-class or even rich origin.
But considering the dangers of radicalization, we should not forget another effect which diminishes the most dangerous form of radicalism: In the network there is simply no possibility to silent the opposition to the own ideas by killing or incarcerating them all. This measure is simply not effective: If it becomes only slightly uncomfortable to defend some point of view in the open, one can always use a pseudonym to defend it. Thus, long before somebody proposes to kill or incarcerate all the opponents, at least some of these opponents, enough to defend the position, will have switched to pseudonyms. This does not decrease their argumentative influence - everybody can read them - but prevents all the repressive measures.
Therefore, while more radical from point of view of the content of the proposed ideologies, at least some proponents of these ideologies will have to continue to discuss their ideology with the opponents: Else, the opponents simply have the last word in the open discussion forums which will be accessible to everybody.
Thus, the picture may be quite different from the scheme of ideological opposition in the past: While the factual differences between Stalinists and Trotzkyists, shiits and sunnits, catholics and protestants have been minor in comparison with the part they have shared, they have killed each other merciless. In the network, proponents of quite opposite ideologies, who share almost nothing, may peacefully (even if hatefully) discuss with each other. This happens not because they have become full of love for their enemies, or understood the value of free speech for society, but simply because they have no chance to kill their opponents, and because finishing the discussion means to loose the ideological battle.
Political discussions in mass media, in particular TV, have only an extremely short attention span: One cannot present an argument which needs more than half a minute for explanation.
This is different in discussion forums and on websites: Here, arguments can be worked out in much more detail. Moreover, all sorts of books will be available for free (no costs for copying and no copyright restrictions), making them much more accessible.
Thus, the complexity of the ideologies and in particular of the arguments about them is much less restricted than in democracy.
This effect is clearly positive: To see the contradictions in the standard democratic ideology, but also the problems of the various extremist solutions (which are usually based on radical simplifications), one needs more than the half a minute mass media attention span. The chances of simple populist ideologies decrease.
It has often been noted that democracy requires some irrationality of the majority: In particular, the participation in the election is highly irrational: The probability that the own vote decides the election is close to zero. In comparison with this, it is irrational to go to the election, and even more irrational to spend time for decision-making about this choice.
A remnant of this irrationality is that the choice made is highly irrational, and much more stupid than the choice of the average citizen if one would give him the opportunity to decide about this question after learning about the relevant facts some time. In this case, this same person would spend more time and be more interested to find out the best solution. Instead, arguments during election campains have to take into account that the attention span is not more than half a minute. To explain something more complicate is a waste of TV time, because nobody would care, given that it is irrational to care at all about elections.
This central irrationality of democratic elections does not exist in the network. Here, if you care about your rules, you will gain the advantages, if not, you will have to pay for your accepting bad rules. Thus, it is rational to care about them. It is also rational to behave honourably, much more rational than in a democracy, where you can behave unhonourably as long as this does not violate the laws, or the fines are too small to deter you.
We have been able to identify some ideological tendencies which with high probability will be related with the network.
The revival of values related with honour, as well as the increasing role of self-determination, seem quite natural. Look at the games of children: Even today, their heros behave honourably and show a lot of self-determination, without caring too much about democratic values. They also love freedom of speech: They like to use forbidden words even if they don't know their meanings. The new ideological values themself are easy to understand even by analphabets. In their environments, honour plays a more important role even today, and they often self-determine themself in conflict with established society.
Honour and self-determination as ideological values are also a good starting point for a new generation to fight their parents: To distinguish themself from the older generation via music, clothings, or drug use has exhausted itself.
A certain radicalization of society, based on the rejection, at first, of the inconsistent democratic consensus ideology, is what we already observe. This is what would be favoured by a new generation of protesters as well as truth seakers: Before finding truth, one has to go through some errors, and these errors will be often consistent but radical theories.
Fortunately, this radicalization, if it happens in a situation of real free speech, is not that dangerous - it is only the intermediate result of the search for truth: Radical ideologies are attractive, because they combine consistency with simplicity. But they have their weak points, and to fight them is not hopeless at all.
The point of free speech supported technically, within a network which allows pseudonyms, is that it prevents the main reason for radical ideologies becoming dangerous for their environments: The wish to kill or otherwise silent their opposition. Most mass murder has not occurred between ideologies which have been radically different, but between ideologies sufficiently close to each other - religions or ideologies which have shared the same Holy Scripts like the Old Testament, or Marx's "Das Kapital". Thus, it is not the large difference between ideologies which causes mass murder: Instead, mass murder is a way to solve the problem with the opposition if you lose in a free discussion. But in the network, this is no longer a way to solve the problem. Therefore widely different, radical ideologies in themself are much less problematic as it seems at a first look.