The other day I turned on the TV, and a video automatically began to play. It was an interview my daughter Daniele conducted with her friends.

Daniele, 15, is a punk rocker, and she hangs out with a punk band and a bunch of hair-dyed, studded-collared, leopard-skinned, body-pierced friends.

She asks the band members, sprawled on guitarist and bandleader Ted's front porch, what they think about issues of the day -- how the world should be, politics, economics, education. The boys' answers are simultaneously alienated and innocent:

"People need to understand one another better. People go too much by appearances."

"We need to get away from money, and corporations, and success, and status, and just be who we are."

"The Nazis, man -- they're as bad as the jocks!"

Daniele and Ted have a running argument. Ted believes punks might as well act surly, because that is all people expect of them. (Though he believes this, it is not apparent from his own behavior -- he's a pleasant kid.) Daniele, by contrast, thinks punks should be ambassadors of friendliness until people respond with unfriendliness -- because who knows?

Sometimes I get upset with punks, in the aggregate, for not engaging more with the establishment, to work with it. Instead they live a life scornfully separate from it, loathing the corporatism of it. As long as the establishment is what it is -- gluttonous, manipulative, and irresponsible -- they have no hope of engaging meaningfully with it. It is not capable of conversing.

When you are a teenager, you're shopping for leverage against the grownup world. Punkism is just that, a holding action, a turnable lever, a moment to sit out the dance and catch one's breath on life's way.

Why am I saying all this? Because it is the first thing I thought of with last week's announced merger of Viacom and CBS. With one stroke of the multinational pen, a giant, distant entity becomes more gigantic and more distant, and the punks' future becomes more unlivable.

The industry spin on the merger is that bigger is more competitive and that the world of converging information inevitably delivers solid value to consumers.

Excuse me for saying so, but the kids are right. All this corporate techno-convergence is having the opposite effect, of eliminating competition and delivering consumers to advertisers.

Big mergers do not add vitality to the stream. Though bookstores seem bigger and cable offerings seem greater, the reality is that it is hard to find differentiation in the news or programming, because the corporate strategies are so similar -- corralling a billion eyeballs and selling them hogtied to advertisers.

Like Rockefeller's Standard Oil, Viacom/CBS will be an immense, fully vertically integrated business. They will be able to produce, sell and distribute everything in a vast industry, from movies to videos to book publishing to cable and broadcast radio and TV.

Americans have always been leery of bigness, and rightfully so. As big banks lose all sense of locality, and big government loses all sense of accountability, so does big media lose all sense of individuality, of having a relationship with the served.

And no, market research is not evidence of a sincere relationship, but of espionage on one side's part to wring advantage from the other.

When one party in a conversation is a million times bigger than the other, and it does all the talking, that's not a conversation. Yet big information insists in its commercials and pronouncements that it is committed to excellence and to speaking from the heart, that a serious ethical compact exists between corporation and consumer.

It is one thing to be fatuous about selling soap flakes. It's another thing to be that way when supplying a democratic society with its lifeblood, information, as if it were soap.

The punks see through the deception. They see a presidential election that is already over, bought and paid for, the electorate never consulted. They see a society that allows info corporations to heave an endless volley of broad bandwidth crap at them, from every media orifice.

The prospective employment picture features a society split between a happy handful of well-paid yuppie technocrats and everybody else, downscaled and downpaid to short-term jobs of dopey repetitiveness. Paper or plastic?

It's all so false. And the previous generation, a smug, affluent, bullying group who once professed hippie values of tolerance, fun, and doing one's own thing, is down on their punky kids for not embracing the opportunities their generation created for them -- sound familiar?

The kids would be powerless except for one thing. It is the little dirtball of contempt they roll between finger and thumb, ready to fling. It is the one defense against the colossus that the colossus can't strip away -- attitude.

They can live in a rotten world but they don't have to belong to it. They can just say no.

Because they are our children, and we love them, and want them to belong to our world, the dirtball is like a giant boulder, crushing everything it rolls over.

Will they succeed or succumb? The latter, if their parents' generation provides the pattern. But until then, they are the underground resistance to the bigness that is undoing the benefits of the information revolution.

Let it roll, kids. Let it roll.

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