State and society mutually restrict each other, destroying the critical public sphere.

Evidence

What was happening was not an expansion of the authority of the bourgeois public sphere, or of the circle of persons within it, into those that would be appropriate to a socialist public sphere, but instead a mutual restriction of state and society that undermined the old basis for the existence of a critical public sphere, without providing a new one. … What followed was a flourishing of publicity on the part of state, economic and political organizations and institutions seeking, and usually getting, support from a public that consisted of economically dependent consumers who were no longer accustomed to public debate and who viewed their own opinions as private ones. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 588

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The image of a public sphere hollowed out from both sides — neither expanded toward socialism nor preserved as liberal critique — is a diagnosis that repays sitting with, because it names a failure mode with no obvious successor structure.
• XREF: Connects to the learned corpus on media and public-opinion formation, where impartial broadcast form is said to recruit viewers into a false spectator neutrality.