Long, long before George RR Martin wrote Game of Thrones - long before he was a staff writer on Beauty and the Beast - he wrote a story called Sandkings. Sandkings was about a rich man who collected exotic pets who ended up buying an alien ant farm (no relation). The ants had the advantage of worshipping their provider as a god with sculptures and everything. Unfortunately the rich man was twisted and proved that creatures living in a warped universe create a warped culture.
I've had a suspicion that Martin wrote an analogy for the Internet twenty years before the Internet for a while now.