Publicizing information itself became the method of modern political rule

Evidence

The gazette was no longer to be simply a written announcement of the government’s orders and instructions, precisely as government itself was no longer conceived as the mere issuing and enforcement of orders. Information and instructions were to become the method of politics, something ‘useful’ which the political process was to publish and make public. There was an entire realm of thought, of meaning to be made public (while the authors of this public knowledge were to become more hidden, to disguise themselves). — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Foucault’s governmentality and the idea that the ‘public sphere’ is itself a construct of the state — relevant to the reader’s interest in communication-as-culture. — connects to: Mass daily news created the modern public sphere and public opinion — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 42; Progressive openness transformed judicial confirmation into public politics — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 544
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that knowledge goes public while its authors become hidden — the anonymity of authorship as a condition of modern publicness — is a genuinely dense inversion worth sitting with.