This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power. (Žižek, S. "Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks." London Review of Books 33.2 (2011): 9-10. ) . Unknown
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The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written about this paradox in the article "Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks." He argues that the biggest problem with the free flow of information is not that it threatens democracy by revealing secrets but that it destroys social relations. The power of sharing information without knowing what you are sharing is much greater than the power of secrecy, which only works if everyone knows. As he puts it, "This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power."

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