The product of the universities is ‘knowledge’; that of the newspapers ‘information’. In both cases it seems that the only means of finance is to be patronage, with an associated return to nobiliary privilege. The implication is that this knowledge, like this information, will be increasingly reserved for the new feudatories. Within this order there takes shape the idea that the functioning of our society no longer requires the existence of a very large stratum of trained and informed subjects, rather that knowledge and information can be produced and disseminated only for the (few) beneficiaries of the economic circuit. It’s possible to do without public opinion. A paradoxical outcome in an age that hymns the splendours of digital democracy from below, when the internet deceives with its circulation of truly feverish ideas.