Concreteness and Virtuality Our Freedoms in the Era of the Internet

Abstract

Like any other human society, virtual communities face ethical-political issues. Discussions on the internauts’ human rights, especially those related to human freedom, and on the legitimacy of models of regulation are always present in the international Internet forums. The contemporary dispute over the true idea of freedom still places the heirs of Kant and Hegel in the arena. Following the dialectic route, we see as one of the main challenges of our time to unveil the concept of freedom that emerges from an evolutionary ontology. According to the dialectic actualization project shown here, the Internet is conceived as one more subsystem that emerges in nature under the constraints imposed by the evolutionary logical space. As a self-organized process that evolves over time, the Internet also has relational and processual traits, presenting equally a movement towards the coherence of the network itself. Online societies follow the same law of coherence that rules real societies and online freedom presents the same character of real freedom, the exploration of the open field of possible modes of coherence. Personal freedom on the Internet retains common traits with the personal freedom that every person has and should have in real society, but, as we shall show later, there are also subtle differences between the two, with a strong impact on the Theory of Law.