There is a communications revolution happening right now. It crosses generations, and it scares the absolute shit out of a lot of people who benefit from ignorance and the control of information.

Though my son and his friends communicate in this barely-comprehensible patois of acronyms and phonetics, they’re more connected to each other than my generation ever was when we were their age, when three-way calling was a very big deal, almost as exciting as a digital watch. When I checked our family’s cell phone bill earlier this month, he’d only used a few of his minutes, but had sent nearly 2500 text messages to his friends, his mom, and me. My usage wasn’t as light on the voice, but it was just as heavy on the text. Thanks to Twitter, Google SMS, and a new Helio Ocean, I’m more connected than I’ve ever been, and though I’ve dipped my toes into this revolution, it wasn’t until recently that I became a participant.

Thanks to this new Ocean gizmo, I have the whole damn Internet in my pocket everywhere I go. In addition to text messages, I have maps, instant messages, and e-mail to stay in touch with my friends or keep myself entertained if I end up stuck in a line somewhere without a book.

You know why movies fail before they ever open? Because of this communications revolution. Studios can’t keep a shitty movie hidden and hope for one big opening weekend before it goes off to DVD land. At the same time, awesome indie films with little or no advertising budget can break out simply by being good and letting people who’ve seen it tell their friends. (Example: have you heard of King of Kong? If you have, the odds are you heard about it from a friend, or maybe read about it on a blog.) You know why movies may do okay on Friday, but play to empty theaters by Sunday? Because kids text each other, and their parents read instant reviews from their friends and even from strangers on blogs and sites like Rotten Tomatoes.

You know why the GOP seems to fool the Democratic leadership and beltway pundits more than they fool the voters? Because we read blogs and online news sources that do the sort of journalism that hardly exists in the Mass Media. Before the revolution (and as recently as the last two presidential elections) all they had to do was repeat the lie so often it became the truth, and the main media outlets where people turned for analysis and insights were inexplicably happy to play along. Over the last six painful years, though, we’ve seen their grip on power slowly unravel, because citizen journalists and professional journalists have turned away from the old Mass Media machine and joined our revolution. If Woodward and Bernstein were doing Watergate today, I believe they’d be writing for Talking Points Memo.

These are just two examples that I believe are driving the frantic efforts by the old media companies and their allies in government to rip apart the Internet, take away our ability to communicate with each other, spy on every single packet we send, and somehow return to the good old days when ignorance was strength and war was peace. Why do you think the justice department decided to get involved in the network neutrality argument? It certainly couldn’t be because the free flow of information from investigative reporters or eyewitnesses that could contradict the carefully structured narrative threatens the powerful, could it?

Communication empowers people, and an empowered people are very, very scary to the powerful upper class who hope that we’ll just go away, right after we buy a lot of crap from them that we don’t need. And holy shit are they scared right now. The revolution may not be televised, but it’s being blogged, YouTubed, MySpaced, Facebooked, Dugg and Netscaped. Instead of embracing this new technology and the generation that’s growing up with it and taking it for granted, the big media conglomerates and their *AA organizations are spending time, money and energy they could be spending on creating awesome content on trying to destroy the technology that scares them. Is it any wonder the big media cabal want to destroy network neutrality? Is it any surprise that they’re clinging to stupid DRM schemes that punish honest customers and infect computers with rootkits?

The audience isn’t going to stop consuming content online, and creators aren’t going to go back to the old way of groveling at the feet of some network boss or studio head or label president, because they don’t have to anymore. Instead, they’ll just use inexpensive technology to put it all together, and use the Internet to distribute it directly to the audience. The studios have a choice now: continue their full-on war against consumers and technology, or join and benefit from the revolution.

The first thing they can do is support network neutrality. The next generation of artists isn’t going to be discovered in the slush pile or in a box of demo CDs; the next generation of artists is already online, building loyal audiences for themselves by communicating directly through the ‘tubes. Rather than creating fake YouTube sensations, all the industry heads have to do is sit back and wait for a genuine YouTube sensation to emerge. The fanbase will be authentic and passionate, and everyone will profit.

The RIAA and its gang of thugs SoundExchange can stop the assault on Internet radio. I’ve written extensively about this before, but I’ll flog this one again because it’s so important to me, personally: traditional radio is absolute garbage, and the majority of radio stations being owned by a handful of companies is a huge reason why. Potential customers are turning the radio off and listening to podcasts, online stations, and satellite. Instead of making it impossible for independent Internet broadcasters to stay in business, the RIAA should embrace these passionate people and understand that they could be selling tons of music to their audiences. The broadcasters at Radioparadise and Soma.fm are passionate about what they do, and they’re communicating directly with like-minded listeners. They have a tremendous amount of credibility with their audience, and could easily turn listeners into a walking sales team for musicians.

The same thing goes for podcasters. I’ve never understood why a podcaster, who isn’t making any money off the effort, but is just an enthusiastic hobbyist, should have to pay a record label for the privilege of making potential customers out of listeners. There’s this band I just love called The Legends. You’ll never hear them on the radio, because they’re a tiny indie band from Sweden, but I just adore them, and thought that people who listen to my Radio Free Burrito podcast would dig them, too. I contacted their label, Lakeshore Records, for permission to include one of their songs in one of my podcasts, and the permission was enthusiastically granted. Someone at Lakeshore Records understands the communication revolution, and the idiots at Universal and Sony could learn a lot from him.

The last one is simple: DRM sucks. It punishes honest consumers, does little to combat actual piracy, and gives broadcasters and the evil *AA cartels way too much control over how we, their fucking customers, can enjoy the content we are paying them for. We all know that DRM isn’t really about stopping piracy. It’s about eventually controlling what your television or your mp3 player or even your computer will allow you to watch, listen to, or play. Practically, though, right now in 2007, it’s about limiting what we can do with things we pay for with our own money. Until the industry abandons their fundamental belief that all of their customers are thieves, we’re going to have an adversarial relationship with them and their artists. I predict a future where the whuffie of an artist is just as important as the art they create, as consumers grow increasingly fed up with being treated like criminals. Respect is important, and it’s earned, like and such as.

My final, tangible example of the revolution is right here at Suicide Girls. How many of these beautiful women, who have awesome tattoos and piercings, and look that is genuinely outside the mainstream, would have the opportunity to model like they do here? Can you imagine a world without Posh, Sash, Manko, Alexis and Emi? I’m glad I don’t have to.

See? Revolution.

Wil Wheaton is building a time machine.