Information State

* Book: The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control | Jacob Siegel.

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Review

Geoff Shullenberger:

"A report from the RAND Corporation published in 1996, the dawning of the internet era ... predicted that the new information landscape’s “blurring of clear geographical, bureaucratic, jurisdictional, and even conceptual boundaries” would make it impossible to “clearly distinguish between ‘foreign and domestic’ threats … or ‘between public and private, military and commercial, and strategic and tactical.”

This is why, Siegel writes, “efforts to control the information environment overseas returned home.” It seems unlikely, therefore, that Rubio’s new initiatives will stay focused exclusively on foreign state actors any more than previous anti-disinformation projects did.

The Information State examines the ways states have sought to collect, control, and wield information going back to the France of Louis XIV. Siegel’s narrative lays special emphasis on two previous periods of US history in which rapid technological change coincided with foreign military excursions: the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and the Vietnam era. World War I, by Siegel’s account, was the founding moment of modern state propaganda, justified then as now by the need to counter foreign threats. Some of the era’s leading intellectuals, driven by faith in progressive technocracy, went to Washington to support the federal government’s use of new media tools to tame the unruly masses. Something similar happened in the 1960s, when the “best and the brightest” sought to instrumentalize cutting-edge information technology for hard and soft power ends as well as domestic crisis management.

Both of these prior episodes ended in ignominy. Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI) was disbanded toward the end of his presidency, and some of its most prominent collaborators, like Walter Lippmann, came to regret their participation. Later, the arrogance of the Johnson administration officials who mistook their computer simulations for the actual Vietnam war helped deflate the pretensions of elite technocratic rule for a generation. Meanwhile, the abuses of the 1960s security state in covert enterprises like the FBI’s COINTELPRO prompted Congress to enact new civil liberties protections.

Siegel argues that even though these previous periods of overreach provoked a backlash, much of the damage was never undone. When it comes to Wilson, he writes, his “greater legacy endured.” Even with the CPI gone, “the functions of propaganda, censorship, and publicity diffused throughout countless government offices, public relations agencies, military and intelligence bureaus, and advertising firms.” Likewise, he sees the establishment of FISA courts as a mostly symbolic victory against state surveillance of American citizens. FISA, he says, “is still held up as a model of effective oversight,” but in fact it has “turned into a rubber stamp.”

The years since 2022, when the Twitter files were released, have seen a comparable pendulum swing against the anti-disinformation crusade that began the previous decade. Siegel draws a parallel between the ascendance of Warren G. Harding in 1920, elected “with a mandate to roll back the excesses of the Woodrow Wilson administration,” and Trump’s return to office in 2024. In both elections, voters—a much larger majority of them in 1920—turned against an administration that had attempted to use emergency measures to suppress criticism.

When it comes to surveillance and censorship, though, there was at least one key difference between these transitions. The anti-war activists targeted under Wilson were almost all on the radical left. When the conservative Harding pardoned former Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs along with twenty-three others, he wasn’t bailing out a political ally—far from it. Instead, at least to some extent, he acted on principle. Comparable magnanimity to left-wing enemies is hard to imagine coming from the Republican currently in the White House.

Indeed, once in office, as Siegel writes, Trump rapidly “demolished the central mechanisms of information control built up over the previous decade,” but he also “maintained the state of emergency”—specifically, in order to go after political targets on the left. Meanwhile, “much of the technical infrastructure of the information state, while dormant, remained fundamentally intact.” It is hardly surprising that Rubio is now making an initial step toward reviving the same partnerships between the national security state and tech companies he promised to dissolve. The weapons of hybrid warfare were still lying around, waiting to be picked up.

In fact, it is questionable whether the information state really was “dormant” up to now during the second Trump administration. Whatever the ups and downs of the relationship between Musk and the White House, a de facto alliance between the administration and X was established before Trump took office, and the site has continued to function as a megaphone for the administration and its allies. During the period Musk had an office in the White House and DOGE was overseeing the demolition of various federal agencies, he publicized the effort on his own platform, whose algorithm was weighted to favor his own posts and those of his political fellow travelers. Surely this was another, more chaotic, iteration of the public-private partnerships that, in Siegel’s telling, are the essence of the information state.

At some points, he suggests as much. After Trump’s return, he says, social media “remained an arena of mass surveillance and collective psychosis” where “invisible, interactive algorithms were still being used to tweak people’s fractional perceptions and influence their behaviors.” However, he also asserts that the fact that “the government was no longer directing how the social media companies deployed those algorithms … made public life freer.” I’m not sure I agree. Musk’s X may have laxer content moderation than Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, but it is neither less manipulative nor less enmeshed with state power.

When he equates freedom with freedom from state oversight, Siegel seems to endorse the cyberlibertarian view that the government should leave the internet alone. Historically, opposition to state interference in technology has generally gone along with an optimistic view of the technologies in question—the idea being that in the absence of government meddling, freedom would spontaneously flourish online. This was the view, for instance, of the early cyberlibertarian ideologue John Perry Barlow, whose “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” Siegel discusses.

However, Siegel’s guiding light is a very different philosopher of technology: Jacques Ellul, who in his 1954 book The Technological Society critiqued the pervasive role of “technique” in modern life. To illustrate Ellul’s concept, Siegel points to TikTok, which by “feeding a curated list of attention-optimized short videos to the platform’s users … enforces ruthless efficiency in the realm of casual entertainment.” Ellul’s work, Siegel says, leads to the conclusion that social media platforms “[attack] the intrinsic worth of human values and relationships by demanding that anything that can be converted into data will be.” Is a platform like TikTok to be considered “free” so long as it avoids state censorship? Ellul surely wouldn’t think so, but the cyberlibertarians who decried the effort to ban or regulate the site on free speech grounds disagreed. I finished The Information State unsure which side Siegel was on.

At times, Siegel uses the term “information state” to refer to something historically limited: the complex of state agencies, NGOs, academic researchers, and Big Tech allies built up around the end of the Obama administration and dismantled by Trump after 2024. But a deterministic technological critique like Ellul’s would surely demand a more general definition. Any state that operates in the age of information technologies, in other words, will by necessity become an information state.

Are all information states alike? Toward the end of the book, Siegel references the writer N.S. Lyons’s theory of a “China convergence”: the idea that all advanced technological societies are gravitating toward the same end state of “totalizing techno-administrative governance,” with China’s model the most fully realized, toward which all the others are slouching. Where China built up its social credit system, American technocrats in the Obama era developed what they called a “whole of society” approach: “a new technique of governance that circumvented the normal legislative process by seizing the levers of the digital system to enact sweeping policy changes.” In such conditions, Siegel observes, the “notion of ‘free and spontaneous’ choices started to look like a farce in the context of an algorithmically controlled environment.”

This is an updated version of the basic problem Lippmann, reflecting on his propaganda work under Wilson, identified when he popularized the phrase “the manufacture of consent” a century ago. It is worth adding that in his initial formulation of the concept, Lippmann’s reference was not primarily to state projects like the one he took part in during World War I, but to the proliferation of “unregulated private enterprise” dedicated to different forms of publicity and propaganda. Regardless of the degree and mode of the state’s participation in the manufacture of consent, it is happening all around us.

The Chinese Communist Party appears to have been largely successful in using the affordances of digital technology to consolidate its rule. In contrast, by Siegel’s account, the “whole of society” apparatus failed in its parallel effort. On the contrary, the enterprise “accelerated a debilitating collapse of legitimacy across American society.” Under Biden, he says, an “illusion of control” fostered by the technocratic information management regime “blinded the administration to the limits and costs of its reliance on digital opinion formation.” As a result, it “lost not only the consent of the governed but its tether to a shared reality.” Something similar, in my view, is happening to the administration that succeeded it, which suggests that loss of contact with reality may be a liability for all those who attempt to govern the information state."

(https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-information-state-isnt-going-away/)

Video

See also: Jacob Siegel on the Information State

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Q9QJk1upo

"Jacob Siegel — writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, U.S. Army veteran, and author of The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control — about the intellectual and historical roots of his argument that the internet has given rise to a fundamentally new form of political regime, one that governs not through force or democratic consent, but by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena.

The first hour traces the theoretical and historical foundations of Siegel's argument, from the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul, to James Beniger's 1986 work The Control Revolution, to the 17th-century philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and its downstream influence on the cybernetic frameworks that gave rise to the internet.

They discuss the rise of digital swarms, the Anonymous movement, and what Siegel observed when he returned from Afghanistan in 2012 to find American culture being reshaped by the velocity and incoherence of online mass formation. The hour closes with an examination of his central thesis: that the internet — born out of Cold War Pentagon research and reconsolidated under government auspices after September 11th — has given rise to a third form of political regime he calls the information state.

The second hour examines how the information state differs in kind from the analog propaganda systems of the 20th century, and why Siegel believes it is simultaneously more powerful and more brittle than what came before. They dig into the paradox at the heart of his argument — that the same informational infrastructure built to extend elite control also created the conditions for the digital insurgencies now convulsing Western politics — and explore Siegel's critique of the counter-disinformation establishment, his views on the concentration of private platform power, and what a coherent policy response to the dysfunctions of the modern information environment might look like, including antitrust regulation, private data ownership, and the prosecution of foreign disinformation campaigns, while preserving the essential distinction between the speech rights of citizens and non-citizens alike."

Discussion

Arcotherium:

“The closure of the Internet did not accomplish what its architects intended. It failed to restore the epistemic authority of the academia/media/NGO network. It did not succeed at its top priority of keeping Donald Trump out of office. It has not stopped the rise of right-wing politics in Europe and the Anglosphere. And it did not keep the population compliant with the ever-changing winds of public COVID policy (RFK Jr is in the White House). The reason why it failed at all of these things is quite simple: all of them are downstream of people rationally responding to real-world issues, not bovine masses imbibing troughs of disinformation.

To quote page 249 of Jacob Siegel’s The Information State:

- Mass censorship and manipulation did not convince vaccine skeptics to reconsider their position. Instead, it appeared to redouble their doubts. The same was true for efforts at deradicalizing Trump supporters. Perhaps it was not a coincidence that the crusaders against disinformation tended to come from fields like counterterrorism, journalism, academia, and epidemiology that shared records of failure in recent years. If information control failed to achieve its putative goals, it did keep many people employed, offering them back some of the authority that their professions had squandered. By removing harmful ideas, the war on disinformation was supposed to rebuild people’s trust in their political system. Without mis- and malinformation polluting their minds, they would come to see the party and its affiliated institutions as legitimate and good. Instead, it accelerated a debilitating collapse of legitimacy across American society. In a Gallup poll from 2022, at the height of the information state’s power, Americans expressed record-low levels of confidence in their institutions. Only 23 percent said they had a great deal of trust in the presidency, down 15 percentage points from the previous year. Congress was at 7 percent. Newspapers hit an all-time low of 16 percent, and just 5 percent among Republicans. ... Curbing Russian influence was always more of an excuse than the real purpose, but it is worth pointing out that the closure of the Internet failed at that too. This was always inevitable, because Russian influence operations were approximately irrelevant on the major Western platforms in 2015 and so there was not much to curb. It did, however, make organic pro-Russian sentiment much more common on the domestic Western right. It did so mostly indirectly, via negative polarization, because Western rightists correctly saw “fighting Russian influence” as an excuse to suppress them and delegitimize the 2016 election. Russia was also painted, by the censors themselves, as a paragon of conservative values to justify the crackdown on the right, which naturally made disinterested rightists, not knowing much about Russia beyond what the media told them, drift towards it. Additionally, many Western rightists joined Russian social media platforms, most notably Telegram, after being banned on Western ones (Voskresenskii 2023).

More importantly, the vast majority of pro-Russian sentiment in the early 2010s was not found on the right, but on the left, a relic of the Cold War. Recall Obama laughing at Mitt Romney for declaring Russia a threat in 2012 or the German government’s reaction to Trump’s warning about becoming dependent on Russian gas. And this went double for the anti-establishment left. The purge of the right naturally made the anti-establishment left, and with it pro-Russian sentiment, more prominent. And in part because of its presence on both ends of the political spectrum, foreign policy (and economic) heterodoxy were more permissible than “hate.” Pro-Russian right-wingers were less likely to be banned and suppressed than accounts talking about migration or race or feminism or any number of other topics, provided they downplayed their domestic political views and focused on foreign affairs, and could even expect some degree of solidarity from the left.

The closure of the Internet failed to “deradicalize” the emerging online right too. In fact, it backfired. The online right after the purges was more radical, more open to using violence, more anti-Semitic and more fascist. Why?

First, it's important to understand that most dissidents had, and some still have, fairly mainstream political views. Steve Sailer, for example, has argued civilly and rationally for decades for immigration restriction and better selection of immigrants, fewer foreign wars, and less affirmative action. Most dissidents circa 2014 departed from the institutional consensus on a few particular issues—most commonly related to the histrionic and hyper-aggressive variant of feminism common in 2014—but otherwise considered themselves liberals, libertarians, conservatives, moderates, or otherwise non-radicals. James Damore is an example: his only dissident view was that Google's technical hiring process picked up more men than women because men were, on average (he took pains to point out that this did not necessarily apply to individuals) more interested in programming, and not because Google was sexist and needed special hiring tracks for women. Otherwise, he was a self-identifying liberal.

There were certainly “extremists” (not that “extremism” is something that ought to be persecuted or necessarily wrong) who believed some sort of radical overhaul of society was needed, but they were a small and fringe minority within the many heterodox spheres of 2014 and 2015. The “moderates” who were basically OK with the 2012 or 2007 West were much closer to the popular mood than the more esoteric and eccentric radicals, and so far more popular. This popularity made them high-profile. And since they didn’t see themselves as dissidents, and so typically didn’t maintain opsec, they were easy targets and targeted first. With them gone, the radicals were able to take over the sphere.

And it’s not just a question of selection effects. The arrival of mass censorship vindicated the radicals. Many of the purges were framed as fighting online Nazis and anti-Semites or misogynists, and actually getting persecuted in the name of and nominally on behalf of the Jews or of women changed things. It’s one thing to joke about Jews running the world, and it’s quite another to watch one of your friends get fired and debanked by a campaign organized by the ADL. Without these purges, many would have soon moved on to another meme. But once under fire, they dug in. Their views crystallized and hardened. An anonymous poster recalled that “we discovered National Socialism from first principles.”

I also believe the closure of the Internet is essential to understanding why major Silicon Valley figures, who had been loyal Democrats for decades, moved to the Republican Party in the 2020s—many of them are liberal or libertarian-inclined and were horrified by seeing this happen first-hand.

Because the hegemonic leftist institutional consensus is wrong about many easily-observable features of reality, it cannot actually shut down resistance to its authority. Reality bats last. But it did succeed in obliterating the online intellectual ecosystem and with it any rigorous alternative or correction mechanism. So the closure of the Internet did not lead to the resurrection of the deeply flawed institutional consensus but a kind of epistemic wasteland of lowest-common-denominator populism and mind-numbingly stupid propaganda. Contrast Sean Last with Candace Owens.”

(https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-closure-of-the-internet)