FYI:
It’s worth bringing up some of the Japanese background context behind MGS2:
In some ways, Japanese online culture was nearly a decade ahead of Western online culture. After all, it was the Japanese site 2chan that gave birth to its Western offspring 4chan, which in turn played a big role in shaping Western online culture. Much like its later 4chan offspring in the mid-late 2000s, 2chan in the late ’90s was a site for “Otakus” (into games, anime and manga) that became notorious for “junk data” such as trolling and memes, long before the term “internet meme” was coined.
So it’s not like Kojima came up with his ideas out of the blue, but some of his ideas were a reaction to Japanese “Otaku” sites like 2chan in the late ‘90s. While 2chan was dismissed as some niche “Otaku” thing in Japan, Kojima took it seriously, and realized that all this trite “junk data” accumulating on Otaku sites like 2chan could represent the future of the world, and he was examining the potential impact and issues that could arise from it. He was able to connect the dots, and make a prediction on how the future of the world could turn out. Over time, Kojima’s predictions have been vindicated, as we come closer to the future he was envisioning back in the late ’90s (when he wrote MGS2).
After looking more into it, I’ve found 2chan’s predecessor to be a similar anonymous board called Ayashi World, which was founded a few years earlier. According to some Japanese sources (there are hardly any English sources on it), Ayashi World was controversial in the ‘90s, such as sharing an indie game making fun of the 1995 Tokyo terror attack (carried out by Buddhist terrorists). Ayashi World closed down in 1998, apparently after the site’s owner got death threats from users complaining about down-time (sounds like something 4chan trolls might do), which led to the creation of 2chan in 1999. In other words, it wasn’t 2chan that influenced Kojima’s ideas (since his script predates it), but possibly its lesser-known predecessor Ayashi World.
