Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
promoted by national legislative proposals that seek to bind an IP number to a
civil identity, as a mandatory practice to browse the Internet. However, the worldwide
computers web is a cybernetic network, not only of communication, but also
of control. The more distributed the network, the more it depends on its control
protocols that enable interaction between distant terminals. The possibility of interaction
demands the technical control of the data packages and the location of
the computers in the network to be able to receive and send packages from an IP
address to another. The IP binding to a civil identity allows the binding of all digital
tracks left by the browsing of an IP to an individual. Anonymity is what avoids the
transformation of the technical control of the data packages into immediate control
of the behavior and of the actions of the individuals.
Biopolitics and control on standards
Is there a biopolitics in the Internet? Are the sovereign States and the corporations
promoting new forms of biopower that go through the control if informational
networks? What is the need of eliminating anonymity and identifying individuals in
a control society? To initiate the equation of these issues, we should remember Deleuze:
“It is the control societies that are replacing the disciplinary ones” (1992, 220).
“The disciplinary societies have two poles: The signature that indicates the individual,
and the enrollment number that indicates the individual’s position in the
mass. That occurs because the disciplines never saw incompatibilities between
them, and at the same time, because power is massifying and individualizing...
and molds the individuality of each member of the body... In the control societies,
as opposite, the essential is not one more signature neither one number, but
a code: The code is a key, to the extent the disciplinary societies are regulated by
words of order (both from the point of view of integration as to resistance). The
numerical language of control is made of codes marking access to information,
or rejection. It is not anymore before the pair mass-individual. The individual
became ‘dividuals’, divisible, and the masses became samples, data, markets or
‘banks’” (1992, 222).
Foucault analyzed the power technologies, in the XVII and XVIII centuries,
based on the discipline that aimed at the coaching of the individual body. In the
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