Panóptico digital e ciberpoder: o poder e o direito na sociedade da informação

Abstract

Michel Foucault is perhaps the twentieth century philosopher who most contributed to understanding what power is and how it works in modern societies. First of all, I investigate his analysis of power, which was carried out throughout the 1970s. A clear opponent comes to the fore: the "juridico-discursive" conception of power, that lacks resources to describe the myriad of mechanisms of power, and consequently it tends to hide the relevant relations of forces and to mask the operating techniques of domination. I propose looking more closely at two of Foucault's suggestions that may offer the route to new alternatives: (1) rather than starting from a supposed center, we start our analysis from the extremities, in a "capillary" form; (2) instead of the privilege of law, we take into account a plurality of models (like the disciplinary and the biopolitical) that cast light on power relations beyond and below the legal domain. Following these guidelines, I examine the question of cyberpower and the role of law in the information society. To that end, I focus my attention on the new digital panopticon, based on a set of interrelated phenomena: the big data, the hypercommunication, the continuous examination, the cybercontrol, and the codes.