№ 5 - 2003
Peskov D.N.
The Internet-Space: Pre-Modernity Condition?

The author offers a new conception of investigating the political in the Internet as anticipation of future society. Postmodernism, in the author’s opinion, is the only trend in political philosophy, which adequately describes both modern political reality and political virtuality of the Internet. As for pre-modernity condition in this context, it means priority of the present as related to the past and of the future as related to the present, i.e., in a sense, negation of history or reversal of the time arrow. In the Modernity society of our age, of which the main and constant characteristic is change, the task of studying the past (i.e., in fact, the main task of political science) is substituted for by analysis of the future in its manifestations in the present.The vector of the developments, the author holds, is unambiguously definite, it is being verbalized by intellectuals, promoted by business, and is verified by governments, it implies replacement of ideology, raising of the efficiency of socio-political processes and approximation of the world to the “ideal of Modernity” — the Internet. Such process, in point of fact, is the project of a second Modernity.