Cons in the panopticon: Anti–globalization and cyber–piracy

This paper examines the paradox of the digital telecommunications revolution that augured the transcendence of big business and big government (Toffler, 1980), but also extended to the World Wide Web the processes of privatization and commodification. Instead of facilitating individuals to design, through interactive technology, their own media and directly express their will (Pool, 1983), the Internet has come to embody a panopticon [1] that extends the reach of corporatists [2]. We discuss the panopticon in the context of the globalizing cyber–technology, and argue that piracy is an anti–globalization movement.