So I'm chatting online with Dave, who's writing a paper. Here's something we cooked up for Discipline and Punish:

One of Foucault's points is that society (a.k.a. the system) maintains order (discipline) by creating data about individuals which can be used to categorize them and direct them in the way that society sees fit. Your credit rating, your grades, your "permanent record," these are all examples of ways in which civilization seeks to keep you in line. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- Power isn't Evil -- but it's something to be congnizant about.

In the information age the real threats to order aren't malicious crackers. As it stands, they're not able to be directly destructive enough to undermine anything. It's just crime. And that's the point: people see and understand that what these people are doing is Wrong, and so there's little chance that their activities will catch on.

The real threats are things which threaten the order and seem Right. This is why the FBI came down so hard on Kevin Mitnick. He didn't steal or break anything; he just got access. His actions betray the ease with which the central position in the panopticon can be assumed. They undermine authority. This is why he's a folk hero of sorts online, and this is why they're making an example of him.

Another great instance of this is the Grokster case, where the dominant powers-that-be in the culture business are attempting to outlaw a technology based on the legal reasoning that it has the potential to violate copyright and therefore it must be prohibited. This goes against much of the American tradition (c.f. guns), but because the case is arcane it may succeed.

The threat to the current cultural regime is dual. On the one hand, there is the relatively minor threat that it feels naturally Right to share culture: to play music for your friends, make it available online, to remix and reuse, even if this is a violation of copyright. This is where they want to keep the debate. Even though the RIAA's party-line that file sharing hurts profits has been proven bogus (revenues and file sharing are both up over the past few years), they like to keep this frame on the debate, because it allows them to claim the moral, entrepreneurial and legal high ground. Even though they could monitize the impulse to share culture and reap huge profits, they don't. Why?

It's the other threat, the big one, the fact that unless they can lock down the power relationships which are being upset by technological progress, they will loose their seat in the center of the panopticon. They need to outlaw anything with the potential to violate copyright not to quack copyright violations, but to put a lid on p2p distribution and promotion. Without tight controls over these, the mainstram revenue stream will escape the current cultural power-elite.

There will always be a place for record labels and there will always be a place for phone companies. It's just that neither of these things need to be massive conglomorates anymore. I don't know how it will go down, but if we're going to escape the 1984 scenario, the information age must be defined by the network, not the panopticon.