The internet has changed many facets of our world over the last fifteen years. Business and commerce have invaded the once purely academic network allowing us to not only shop online but to do business and make a living there as well. The global scope and freedom of information online has allowed a massive proliferation of alternate news sources and blogs, giving license to just about anyone to state their opinions on any topic they wish and enabled determined whistleblowers to shed light on topics that the mainstream media doesn’t seem motivated to report on anymore. Increased bandwidth has threatened to permanently alter the way in which writers, artists, journalists, and musicians do business, allowing their work to be sold world wide in an instant, or stolen just as fast. White collar workers can now telecommute from anywhere in the world, further blurring the borders between nations and making competition for knowledge jobs that much more intense. And chat rooms, forums, and social networking sites have enabled us to connect with groups of like minded people no matter where we are located or how esoteric our interests. Simply put, we are no longer fixed in space when it comes to our friendships and communities. Our bonds can span the globe. And it’s not unusual for us to know intimate details of dozens of people we’ve never met in person and yet barely know our next door neighbors whom we see every day.

All of the world’s major ideologies, our religions, political systems, economic models, etc., have evolved in a very different environment, one which lacked the broad and deep interconnectivity that we share today. With the internet having revolutionized so many other parts of our lives, it stands to reason that this increased connectivity will have a similar effect on our ideologies, perhaps making them all extinct or at least forcing them to mutate in order to survive in a highly interconnected world. In this essay I’ll take a look at how the internet is currently reshaping ideologies in order to predict the changes that we might see in the future.

One fundamentally unique thing that the internet has introduced is the concept of anonymity in social relations. On the internet you can hide behind an avatar, revealing little to nothing about yourself to others or simply lying about who you really are. And while a very determined sleuth could use what little traces you leave behind on the internet to connect your current avatar with those you’ve created in the past or even to your real life self, few people can do so or will even bother to make the effort. This leaves people essentially free to be whomever they want to be when they are online.

The impacts of this anonymity are many and profound and go way beyond the classic internet prank of pretending you’re a young girl, having cybersex with some guy, and then revealing to him that you’re actually a dude. For many people, the persona they adopt online is an idealized version of themselves, someone they want to be rather than who they are. They pick an avatar of the image they would like to project even if their avatar is little more than a clever name and a picture that appeals to them in some special way. Then, when they are online, they become a different person, trying to live up to their image, like an actor playing a role or a narcissist putting on airs to impress others. Online they can live life through that idealized person’s eyes, a life which is often quite different from their own. This gives people who have difficulty making friends in face to face meetings, perhaps due to physical unattractiveness, shyness, or odd personality quirks, an opportunity to shed those qualities and experience a side of life that was off limits to them before. For instance it’s not uncommon for an undesirable woman to use a sexy avatar and suddenly find herself popular with men. And even those people who aren’t pretending to be someone else can discover that their written communication skills reveal a side of themselves that was invisible to others before. In that way the awkward writer becoming popular online is not unlike the ugly singer or shy poet becoming popular through song or verse. In either case what can happen is that a person can become more attached to their online personality than to their real self, preferring to spend their time interacting in a social world where they are much more the person whom they want to be than who they really are. Ideologies can take advantage of this and I will discuss this potential in greater depth later in this essay.

Anonymity also allows people to be much less polite when they are online since they are generally not subject to any serious repercussions. In face to face interactions, being insulting or rude to someone else can sometimes get you into a fight, but online the worst thing that can usually happen to you is that you end up reading equally insulting things written back to you on your computer screen. For many this does not dissuade them from being rude and can even encourage them to be more insulting in return. This simple fact has unfortunately made flame wars, heated arguments, and "griefing" commonplace on the internet as well as reduced the amount of civility found in real life. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, "griefing" is when someone derives pleasure by being rude to others, especially when their victims get angry and their retorts become unintentionally humorous. A griefer’s goal when they go online is to ruin someone’s day; someone whom they feel deserves it, which can often be someone who takes their online activity far too seriously. They are essentially the online equivalent of a bully, and just like in elementary school, they mostly get away with it. But even aside from griefers, the lowered standards of civility have made online interactions between people more volatile, even when people are not anonymous and even between people who occasionally meet face to face. We seem more prone to express our unvarnished opinions when we are online, often in exaggerated form, and I would suggest that the anonymity, or the distance between people who know each other in real life, results in disinhibition. When we are online we feel fewer restraints on our actions in general, and as a result we do things there which we would never do in real life.

Anonymity also alters the value that we place in our relationships. People moving from a small town to a big city experience the same shift in attitudes towards relationships that we see when we go online. In a small town everyone knows everyone else, or at least everyone knows most of the people in their age group. In small towns gossip will spread one’s deeds far and wide, so if you do something bad to someone your reputation will be stained and you will need to do something publicly to make up for it. In a big city, the number of people you know personally might be the same as for someone in a small town, but the much large number of people in your community can grant you a certain amount of anonymity there. In a big city if you ruin your reputation in one circle you can always move on to another circle and start over again with people who don’t know you. This allows people in big cities to be less scrupulous in their treatment of others, knowing that if they are discovered to be lying or cheating or doing some other devious act that they can always disappear and start fresh with a new group of people. Similarly, in a big city people can be pickier about whom they associate with and more resistant to changing things about themselves which others see as personality flaws. Big cities provide a much larger pool of potential friends and mates and thus instead of accepting an imperfect lover and adjusting oneself to accommodate one’s friends people will often cast off their flawed relationships in search of better ones or for a soul mate who fits them to a tee.

On the internet, anonymity multiplies this problem, providing a seemingly infinite number of new places where one can start over, or, as a con artist might view it, an infinite number of marks to be exploited. Cyberfriends and lovers can come and go with alarming frequency with relationships with them at first filled with passion and energy but which flame out just as fast. As a result, trust is hard to come by, and few people are willing to give anyone a chance to get close to them until they have spent a lot of time proving that they are worthy of their trust. This also leads to people putting less value in long term commitments and projects online, knowing that they are all too likely to fall apart for one reason or another. This is a tendency that can feed upon itself as fewer and fewer people seek long term commitments and thus short term becomes the governing time frame. So people indulge themselves in whatever strikes their fancy; milk it for as long as it lasts, and then cast it aside when it is no longer satisfying or when something else comes along that holds more appeal. Relationships, and thus people, have become more disposable than ever.

Lastly, anonymity has allowed radical and illegal groups to grow and thrive on the internet. Most notoriously are terrorist groups which use the internet to publicize their ideals for recruitment purposes as well as to organize and plan activities. This is a very direct example of how the internet is changing ideologies. Radical groups with small followings can now have a global voice which is more far reaching than anything that they would have been capable of just a decade ago. This allows groups with a very narrow appeal, such as eco-terrorists, pedophilia buffs, crush video aficionados, and fanatical Muslims, to pick up far flung members that they never would have been able to find using conventional means. Through the internet, these groups can find new recruits, indoctrinate them, and bring them into the fold. And just as computer programmers can work remotely through the internet, so can radical groups, directing their members without risking having them make the journey to their headquarters, if they even have one. Most if not all communication can happen anonymously, making the group very difficult for intelligence agencies to track down and arrest.

Radical groups can also go one step further to protect themselves from being caught, they can try to create and motivate "lone wolf" actors to do their deeds for them. This method involves purely one-way communication. The group puts its ideals and goals online along with suggestions on what actions they would like to see carried out. Some even go so far as to post fairly detailed instructions on how to perform various illegal activities as well as advice on how to keep a low profile so as not to get caught by the authorities. Then an angry and motivated individual finds the site, sympathizes with the group’s cause, and decides that he or she wants to do something to advance it. These potential lone wolves are sometimes advised not to contact anyone within the group but simply to independently work towards one of their stated goals. Thus, the only contact that a person might have with a radical group is a simple one time visit to their website. Even in our high surveillance world it would difficult for an intelligence service to track someone visiting a suspicious website, especially with anonymous surfing tools available. Then, the lone wolf goes about their daily business as normal, perhaps acquiring a weapon here or there, quietly purchasing explosive materials, plotting his misdeed in secret, but never or doing or saying anything that would give anyone the impression that they sympathize with a radical cause. Then one day they act, potentially catching their victims and the authorities completely off guard.

The "lone wolf" method is not entirely new. For centuries, if not longer, hateful rhetoric spread by influential people has motivated assassins to kill the targets of those who wish to keep their hands clean. In recent years, it is suspected that angry denunciations of Dr. "Tiller the Baby Killer" and constant reiteration of the idea that abortion is murder may have inspired more than one person to try to kill the famed abortion doctor. Similarly Major Nidal Malik Hasan appears to have been at least partially motivated to gun down thirteen fellow soldiers at Fort Hood after exchanging e-mails with a radical Muslim imam. Historically, the concept of radical groups working in independent "cells" has been a tried and true staple of resistance movements everywhere. However, with the advent of the internet, the potential to radicalize independent individuals and create dozens or hundreds of one person cells across the globe has greatly increased this potential threat. The internet may very well make terrorism more common and more difficult to stop.

Because of this threat, among many others, the internet is in the process of being militarized, or at least wire-tapped on a massive scale to allow intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on anyone. Now, visiting a radical website isn’t illegal, yet, but the "lone wolf" scenario makes catching potential terrorists before they act of paramount importance, thus, surveillance of website traffic, as well as the tracking of gun purchases, explosive purchases, and other perfectly legal activities, are important tools in identifying threats. The idea here is to flag all of a person’s activities that could be leading up to a terrorist act, and when that person accumulates too many flags next to their name, agents move in. The usual trick is to have an agent pose as a fellow sympathizer, try to induce the suspect to confess to be plotting some sort of crime, provide him with limited support, and then arrest him before he can do any harm. It’s a fine line that law enforcement must walk to avoid charges of entrapment, but juries have been very lenient regarding law enforcement tactics when it comes to such cases, and if lone wolves proliferate and have some success in their violent plots it’s likely that countries which were once champions of human rights will become as draconian as the worst police states in their search for and treatment of suspects.

The ongoing rollback in personal freedoms has the potential to be a major change in political ideologies, specifically in western constitutional democracies where individual rights stand as the bedrock of power derived from the consent of the governed. In order to combat the threat posed by terrorist groups which can form sleeper cells in far flung countries and give rise to lone wolves, many democracies have made the inalienable rights of their citizens conditional, with the state able to waive them at will without disclosing their evidence and with no recourse available to the accused. Though sold as being temporary inconveniences, these rollbacks are likely to become permanent, and likely to fuel more anti-government sentiment and actions that in turn make those in charge more convinced that further police state measures are required. In many countries we’ve already seen rollbacks in individual rights and the adoption of police state methods that would have been unthinkable twenty if not ten years ago, so the question here is whether or not this spells an end to individual freedom as an ideological guarantee to its adherents or whether it is a momentary lapse of libertarian ideals to be overthrown by some sort of revolution.

Ideological evolution since the writing of the Magna Carta has been gradually but inexorably moving towards the liberation of the individual and the diminishment of state power. This trend has not been without its lapses and detours into police states and totalitarian regimes, some of which have persisted for some time before they are overthrown. Modern police states, and democracies flirting with autocratic control over their populations, are taking advantage of emerging technologies, along with the internet, to track and monitor their citizens regardless of the legality of such surveillance. Using such technology empowers them as never before and the temptation to abuse such power for political, financial, or personal purposes is too great to be ignored. Imagine using illegal wiretaps to glean insider information from Wall Street executives, or investigating members of Congress and blackmailing them into voting your way, or harassing common citizens who are legally forming a legitimate resistance movement. None of these tactics are new, but the degree and availability of such measures available today could bring about a sea change in the general population’s ability to overturn such measures. Democracy could end up becoming a hollowed out shell of its former self with a vote for a pair of preselected candidates, who are powerless to change the power structure of the nation anyway, being the last apparent support for the illusion of "We The People". Some might argue that this has already come to pass.

The internet has facilitated the spread of ideologies and is in no small part responsible for the rapid rise of the tea party movement in the United States. In that movement’s rise, the internet provided a way for grassroots organizations to spread their messages to like minded people fed up with the government. Numerous websites popped up and a number of videos hit YouTube, all part of a mass uprising which attracted new members and fueled itself as it grew into a powerful force. In time a number of left-leaning news sources accused the tea party movement of being "Astroturf", meaning that it wasn’t truly grass roots at all but funded and fueled by a number of wealthy Americans and corporations which wanted to see their candidates elected and their agenda moved forwards. This is partly true. Partisan news outlets like Fox News played a major role in stirring the pot and drawing attention to the movement and many of the "grassroots" organizations were heavily sponsored by wealthy donors, but it is disingenuous to say that the movement was entirely manufactured. There was and still is a great deal of anger in the country and that anger was going to find a voice in one way or another. What the Astroturf groups managed to do was to redirect that anger and channel it to serve their purposes, at least for the most part. The Astroturf groups are staunchly Republican, and are very adept at directing the people’s anger toward democrats and the government in general, but when the tea party movement went to the polls, they threw out a lot of mainstream Republicans along with Democrats, which was a blow to the Republican Party. However, the tea party movement, which began with a lot of anger towards illegal immigration, bank bailouts, and police state tactics, was later distilled down to mostly a single goal: balancing the federal budget without raising taxes. It is telling that the tea party platform has changed from being against three things that corporate America profits from to being for something that disproportionately burdens the middle class and the poor and it could be a sign that the tea party has been used and betrayed by the Astroturf groups. However it remains to be scene what the Republican Party can accomplish while still maintaining tea party support.

One part of the internet which is of particular importance when discussing ideological evolution is MMORPGs, or "Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Games". To the uninitiated, these games are actually virtual worlds, complete with cities, landscapes, castles, dungeons, citizens, monsters, and anything else that the creators can dream up, which players can explore and interact with. In these games a player will create some sort of avatar, like a burly warrior with a sword, and move about in the virtual world by moving the mouse or through some such interface. The screen shows the player what they see, like angry Orcs coming to beat them up, and any facts that they need to know, like how many health points they have left before they keel over. The multi-player aspect means that a player’s avatar can end up meeting other players’ avatars in the game world which makes it more interactive compared to classic computer games. In classic single player games, all of the people and creatures that you meet are controlled by the computer, which, despite advances in artificial intelligence, can make them seem dumb and rather one-dimensional. But in a multi-player game, you can meet other players in the virtual world who are just like you, talk with them by typing messages to each other, fight a duel if you want to see who is the toughest, go off killing Orcs together or completing a quest, wander off and figure out if the game has some kind of cybersex simulation, or anything else that the game allows. No longer are computer games just you solving some kind of puzzle, having terse "conversations" with computer characters in order to ferret out valuable clues, or defeating a series of progressively tougher opponents; now you can interact with real people online, form your own communities, compete with rival communities, and even make up your own adventures. And the "massively multi-player" aspect means that a large number of people can play, like hundreds, or thousands, or more, allowing the game world to live and breathe as if it were a city or a nation unto itself.

These MMORPGs are more than just games. They have quickly evolved into being the social equivalent of a neighborhood bar, a bowling alley, a night club, or any other place where people congregate and share, and are as equally significant. They are places where like minded people can go, hang out, socialize, play games, and relax after a hard day at work, and all in the convenience of your own home. And before you think that MMORPG players should all turn off their computers and go get a life, understand that they do have a life, online, and that it can be as deep, as elaborate, and as rewarding as their real life. It’s not unusual for players who have never met to have their avatars get involved romantically, get married virtually, and of course cheat on each other and get into fights about that sort of thing. Friendship bonds can also be strong online and these relationships don’t necessarily need to stay just between players’ avatars. It’s not unusual for players to get together and meet IRL (In Real Life) or talk on the phone or text and share facts about their personal lives, getting to know the people behind the avatars. Thus, the line between the virtual world and real life can become quite blurred and even go away altogether. This can be seen even more clearly when you learn that people are willing to pay real world money for purely virtual items, like a powerful sword that will help their avatar complete a quest, or a custom made avatar that looks better than the standard ones offered in the game. At first this may seem crazy, paying real money for something that exists only as ones and zeroes on a computer somewhere, but if you think about it as an entertainment expense, like the dollars spent at a movie theater or gaming arcade, it makes perfect sense.

Given the popularity of MMORPGs it seems inevitable that game creators will take advantage of the many advances in technology to make their virtual worlds even more realistic and immersive. Motion capture technology will enable players to control their avatars with their bodies and increases in computer power will be able to make their avatars and their environments extremely lifelike. It may not be long before people are jogging in place in their living room while seeing themselves as a Na’vi running across the branches of Home Tree with everything rendered as crisply and lifelike as the movie Avatar. And that will only be the beginning. Smell, touch, and taste sensations will come along in time and other forms of environmental feedback will make you feel like you are really in the game. At some point the technology will develop so that the game plugs directly into your brain and you will be able to control your avatar with just your thoughts. At that point virtual reality will be just as real as reality itself. With such an interface the potential for entertainment is limitless and it is quite likely that these virtual worlds will make the real world pale in comparison. Why go to the zoo when going to Pandora is so much more fantastical? Why go skiing or snowboarding when you can be Spiderman swinging from building to building and romancing Mary Jane? Why attend cooking or gardening classes when you can go to Hogwarts and become a great virtual sorcerer? Internet addiction is already a problem, so imagine the temptation to spend all of one’s days inside a virtual world of infinite wonders when those wonders surpass reality in every way.

Indeed, one can imagine a world where people driven by success have cast aside earthly pleasures and become absorbed with chasing virtual goals instead. Their ideologies would certainly suffer as they would no longer be contributing to them, so if too much productivity were diverted into virtual reality, we could possibly find ourselves at risk of social and ideological collapse. Ideologies thrive by providing their adherents with rewards, both physical and psychological, in return for doing things that further the aims of the ideology. Ideologies which are best at motivating their believers and preparing them to succeed will have a survival advantage over other ideologies. However, virtual worlds like those in MMORPGs compete directly with ideologies, slowly stealing away the motivations of adherents. MMORPGs simulate real world challenges, although in far more fantastical form, and give out rewards for success at far more frequent intervals than reality does. For example, one need not go through years of hardships and struggle to win the Super Bowl or the Indy 500; with a computer simulation one can play out a sports or racing career over the course just of a few weeks. And it isn’t like the games aren’t a challenge, they are, but they aren’t such a challenge that most people can never succeed. This is the secret to a successful computer game, and the reason why they can be so addictive, they give ordinary people the ability to live out fantasies they could never achieve in real life, and so people are choosing fantasy over reality more and more. Of course, I don’t think that nations will fall to dust just because their citizens are paying more attention to their Second Life than their primary one, but as computer games become more appealing and addictive a lot more time and energy will not be spent furthering the goals of susceptible ideologies. Some people, groups, and even nations will suffer as a result while others will thrive.

To be successful, ideologies of the future will need to adapt to meet the challenges that have been detailed in this essay. For instance, some ideologies might become quite hostile to computer games, seeing them as direct competition and trying to get them banned, but the successful ones will realize their potential and embrace them, taking advantage of the games’ appeal but having players end up working to further ideological goals as they play. Games can of course be teaching tools, and it should be simple enough to create games based around religious, political, and economic themes so that they spread ideological beliefs. But one can go even farther than a game and create an ideologically centered virtual world online complete with virtual universities and virtual libraries which espouse an ideologically centered point of view, and with adherents as mentors available to answer questions and explain an ideology’s principals to the curious. Instead of learning by reading or by watching videos one could learn by doing, by playing, by interacting, and by creating one’s own content in a virtual world. Education, as well as ideological indoctrination, through virtual reality seems a natural next step, and if ideologically based games are as addictive as purely entertainment based ones are, they could easily give rise to fanatical devotion. Players might become so enchanted with ideological games that they would willingly brainwash themselves playing them. And as we witnessed during the rise of the tea party movement, the internet is fertile ground for the spread of ideas, and in the immersive environment of virtual reality these ideas can be sunk much deeper into the minds of the faithful. Online an ordinary person can become extraordinary, seeing their avatar become a champion for their beliefs in online games and making them feel like they are an important part of the movement. And since in a virtual world the environment is completely controlled the winning formula will inevitably be the one which embraces the tenets of the ideology. Thus, in the games, winning and adhering to ideological principles would be one and the same with each victory reinforcing the ideology’s beliefs in the mind of the player.

But to be truly successful, ideologies will need to leverage their virtual following into producing real world results. Using the tea party as an example, the movement transformed internet based interest and involvement into protests, disruption of town hall meetings, public demonstrations, donations to favored politicians, and the final payoff: casting votes for tea party candidates. Adding to the barrage were well known politicians, twittering away in real time, which put them in close contact with activists and voters and made them seem more real and personal. And tea party members were actively trying to convince others that their ideas and causes were worthy and correct, bringing new members into the fold and thus generating larger donations and more votes in the end. This is one area where computer games are lacking, seeing as how they are mostly just for entertainment, but the potential exists to make ideological movements a similarly interactive and immersive experience. This sort of game would not stop at the edge of the internet but extend beyond it, overlapping between the virtual world and the real world and merging the two into a cohesive whole. Things you do on one side will carry over into the other and vice-versa.

Thus, the virtual world would become more real, with real significance and real impact, and since the virtual world can be anything that its creators desire one could use it to simulate fantastical religious and spiritual realms, making them seem real as well. In a game you could visit heaven or hell or Valhalla, fly with angels, fight demons in holy wars, commune with animal spirits, walk and talk with Jesus and hang beside him as he dies for your sins, or simply go about doing good deeds and earning positive karma. Religion and spirituality, which can seem so distant in modern times, can be made relevant once more. To many people, heaven, hell, nirvana, the underworld, gods, angels, devils, etc., are just objects in aging stained glass windows, scenes in renaissance period paintings, and threats reverberating in the crazed ranting of evangelical preachers. But what if you could see horned tormentors laughing in your face, smell the brimstone as it bites into your flesh, and feel the heat as hellfire burns you to the soul? How much easier would it be to believe that the earth really is the battleground between good and evil? And what if you were to live through hundreds of lives in a breathtaking virtual version of Brahma’s glorious creation? How much more compelling would belief in reincarnation and karma become? This is the new frontier for ideologies and the sooner that they realize the potential of virtual reality the stronger they can become.

These reformed ideologies will also have to adapt to other changes brought on by the internet, namely the reduction of civility and the volatility of personal relationships. Virtues like politeness, faithfulness, and modesty will likely play a reduced role in future. If an ideology demands such things, internet travelers will simply go somewhere else that caters more to their desires. Instead, reformed ideologies will need to create an awesome online experience, promising both real world and virtual rewards, and allowing followers to create and build up avatars and realms that they can be proud of. The competition will be fierce because people will be fickle, joining one ideology and going as far as they can with it before getting bored and switching to another one that seems more interesting. Ideologies will have to reinvent themselves frequently as political parties do today, coming up with new hooks to attract attention and gain back their lost market share.

Chillingly, the addictive nature of ideologically based virtual worlds may result in a proliferation of "lone wolf" type radicals, people fiercely dedicated to the ideology and willing to do anything to further its goals. We have already seen people becoming lost in online games or actually killing themselves over what happened in virtual reality. If an ideologically based game promised avid believers that advancement to the "final levels" of a great game required something like martyrdom in real life how appealing would such an act be? Imagine if one of the "levels" of the game involved wandering through a landscape of real photographs of burned bodies, viewing scenes of the rape and torture of innocents by ruthless enemies of the ideology, and living through those horrors, virtually, but all the while knowing that they are actually being visited upon fellow believers in some part of the world, how powerful would the effect be on the mind? And if one couldn’t find the courage to martyr one’s self after such an experience, perhaps a few discussions with a group of like minded radicals could provide the encouragement to complete the "quest" and move up to the "next level".

Volatility, it seems, will be the order of the future, exacerbated by tendencies towards disinhibition and short term attachment on the internet and heightened by the failures of current ideologies to forge a workable world order in the present. Ideological warfare will likely proliferate, spilling over national boundaries and escalating in cyberspace. Police states will likely try to enforce order upon the internet, and most likely be as successful there as police states are in reality, that is, the more order they enforce, the less productive their realm of cyberspace will be. And as technology moves forward and the lines between reality and virtual worlds get blurry, we will be able to reach out and touch the faces of our gods.

As they swallow us whole.