The Power of Law: The Problems of the Freedom to Assemble

Another way of describing the conclusion would be that the purpose of these activities is to generate a message, while the purpose of the police is to generate order. "Legality" is a line between forms of disorder, and also between forms of policing. Where the disorder and where the policing are relative to that line changes from moment to moment, and isn't very important. How much energy is expended in the system matters to the amplification of messages.

Not only protesters' messages are amplified by the energy of collision. You might want to think about that more carefully.

Talking about law as a strong or weak form of social control seems odd to me here. Force is a forceful mode of social control. In your environment, order is produced using force, or the threat of force, every second. What is being "controlled" by this social control, moreover, isn't society. It's a message-generating system, made of social parts, including people. But its purpose is symbolic, like a theater troupe, not organic, like a village.

What you call "being infantilized" could be described another way, as "being normalized." When forces of social order don't turn on the amplifier by using confrontation, what has been a message-generator becomes instead a village. Instead of an army, there are forest rangers, and instead of a message machine, there's a sustainable natural resource.

There's more thinking to do about this. Adbusters is a magazine. It understands symbolic culture perfectly. Rupert Murdoch understands modern symbolic culture pretty well too. But the Net is changing the nature of human symbolic culture much faster than anything else in human history. It's really important to have been physically present in these places, and it's really important also to think about your experience in the broadest possible context, with the closest possible attention to the nature of Web culture and the changes in human communication wrought by the Net so far.