Modern colonial power grows more effective the less it is noticed

Evidence

At the same time as they were extended, these strategies were to become increasingly unnoticeable. Lord Cromer, who liked to describe colonial control as a process of continuous ‘tutoring’, envisaged the ideal colonial official in the form of an omnipotent yet silent school teacher: ‘he was to exercise supreme authority over his pupil, and at the same time … his authority was to be unfelt’. … This was because the new methods of creating the effect of frameworks or structures worked not only to hold and coordinate the individual subject’s physical body. They were also to work upon a non-physical interior, the individual mind. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 543

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘unfelt authority’ ideal parallels the noise book’s finding that decentralized/ambient control is more pervasive, and Zamyatin’s We where invisible control replaces overt discipline. — connects to: Power grows stronger the less visible it is — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 42
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that effective order becomes unnoticeable while its truth becomes more certain is a dense, hard-to-summarize double movement worth sitting with.