For the most part, I relished my eight years as staff writer for Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. I hadn’t taken a science, technology, engineering, and math course since high school, but it was deeply satisfying to help world-class scientists and engineers — brilliant at so many things, but not communication — explain and emphasize the exciting implications of their very boring incremental research. For my first number of years working there, beginning in 2013, Columbia Engineering was essentially apolitical, a most refreshing contrast to the strident dogmatism running rampant almost everywhere else on campus.
But by 2017, that was changing: the winds of woke had become a hurricane, and more and more of my assignments were churning out propaganda about climate change and the imperative of weaning the country off fossil fuels. Worst of all was having to cover Columbia’s annual “Data Science Day,” in which Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Eric Schmidt of Alphabet, would deliver self-aggrandizing utopian keynote addresses in between carefully choreographed panel discussions of faculty from across the university, pandering for grants and media exposure.
Increasingly, the impeccably credentialed experts promised to harness algorithms and artificial intelligence to automatically impose an indisputable vision of “social justice” determined outside of the democratic process. No longer would the backward bigots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Omaha, Nebraska, and Cleveland have a say in our democratic society; instead, expert “stakeholders” in Washington, New York, Boston, and the Bay Area would magnanimously shepherd “our democracy” and protect it from the ignorant masses.
So it was with a disgusted sense of recognition that I devoured journalist Jacob Siegel’s disturbing new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, an immediate contender for book of the year and likely of the decade. A U.S. Army combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Siegel traces the seemingly inexorable rise of authoritarian managerialism to the emergence of bureaucratized nation-states in the late 19th century, with dreams and theorizing stretching back centuries. Vastly expanding upon an essay Siegel wrote for Tablet magazine in 2023 that went mega-viral, the narrative details how the march of technology has enabled ideologues and opportunists to manipulate and attempt to herd electorates.
The suffocating paternalism that typified President Barack Obama’s second term in particular had its antecedents in the late 19th-century progressive movement and in the imperiously moralizing presidency of Woodrow Wilson. “It made no sense to wait if one believed, as they did, that the correct answers were already available through technical calculation and the empirical method,” Siegel writes of the early progressives, though his description is equally applicable to the Obama and Biden administrations. “The real obstacle to implementing these advances was the public itself, that teeming lump of superstitions, which democracy had naively granted a veto over the experts. Propaganda provided the solution.”
During World War I, the Wilson administration pioneered a federal propaganda apparatus that never really went away despite the successor Harding administration’s promises of a “return to normalcy.” Instead, Siegel writes, “the functions of propaganda, censorship, and publicity diffused throughout countless government offices, public relations agencies, military and intelligence bureaus, and advertising firms.” During World War II and then with the rapid evolution of computers during the Cold War, elite technocrats lapsed into a sort of idolatry of pure information that fed fantasies of engineering away human error for a new golden age.
Vietnam proved a disastrous crucible for elite technocrats’ vainglorious hubris. Supposed “whiz kids” such as Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara were dead certain that, given enough data, the best and the brightest could manufacture a rational and enlightened global society. They would win in Vietnam as much by capturing peasants’ “hearts and minds” as through conventional warfare. But, as rational as that approach may have appeared on the surface, the reality was that the military’s insatiable appetite for information incentivized the indiscriminate collection of data ranging from valid to irrelevant to pure junk, and leaders’ approach bent toward managing the war as opposed to winning it, leading eventually to humiliating defeat.
“Vietnam pioneered a self-perpetuating system of technological super-surveillance,” Siegel writes. “The system failed to achieve its own aims, underperforming by any objective standard, yet grew inordinately larger and more powerful as a result of that failure.” Backlash to Vietnam and Watergate led in the 1970s to the “Church Committee” exposing decades of horrifying abuses from U.S. intelligence agencies and to the establishment of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts installing some modicum of oversight.
But, the author argues, the reforms were cosmetic: “In practice, when officials with high-level security clearances justified a spying request as a matter of urgent national security, the court deferred to their expertise—which is how the signature reform of the intelligence community, which is still held up as a model of effective oversight, turned into a rubber stamp.”
With the end of the Cold War bringing slashed military budgets, the information warfare approach promised to do more with less, and in a more hygienic fashion. Then 9/11 happened, and was blamed on the vague yet expansive notion of “intelligence failure,” leading to vast sums of money getting thrown at technocrats promising to protect the homeland via unprecedented surveillance. Furnishing and processing that endless flood of miscellaneous data were not just members of Washington’s national security apparatus, but also Silicon Valley tech companies that made billions conducting surveillance and data analytics.
Riding a wave of public outrage against President George W. Bush’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama surged into office with a Wilson-esque agenda of “fundamentally transforming the United States” into a one-party state ruled top-down by an alliance between Democratic Party brokers and Silicon Valley oligarchs. “Obama’s unique vision was to see how the new digital environment presented an opportunity to fuse public and corporate power together in a structure of governance that would appear to be everywhere, at once intimately connected to voters’ daily lives and able to be overseen by his party’s elite cadres,” Siegel explains.
Chummy collusion between the White House and Silicon Valley enabled progressive technocrats to impose broadly unpopular policies via unlimited and arbitrary “content moderation” online, seamlessly marginalizing the sensibilities of hundreds of millions via a “whole of society” approach that “circumvented the normal legislative process by seizing the levers of the digital system to enact sweeping policy changes… like a phone automatically updating its operating code,” Siegel writes.
Yet, the press evinced little interest in holding Obama to account for his unconstitutional conduct. “By the end of the Wilson administration,” Siegel notes, “its excesses had alienated many of the progressive journalists who had been loyal supporters. No comparable period of public reckoning and reflection followed the Obama presidency … politics ultimately mattered less than a shared sense of cultural identity and class interest.” In turn, elite Democrats complacently assumed that they’d scored an indefinite lock on the White House and thus the Supreme Court.
The proper response to Donald Trump’s shock victory in the 2016 presidential election would have been for leading progressives to engage in some soul-searching about Obama’s abuses of power, to acknowledge that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate who’d run a lazy campaign, and to get back to the drawing board to win back the median American voter. Instead, they chose to blame Clinton’s defeat on social media not censoring people enough. “Like aristocracies through the ages, they considered their authority inborn and inviolable, unconnected to the record of their performance,” Siegel writes. “The fact that the populist challenge was both legal and highly democratic did not affect their view that it was illegitimate. If democracy allowed such a threat to arise, then the rules of democracy would have to be changed.”
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In the waning weeks of his administration, Obama conspired with senior Democrats to kneecap the Trump administration before it even entered office, and Obama personally ordered a bogus intelligence community assessment to advance the false narrative that Trump was working for the Russians. That it wasn’t true didn’t mean that control of both the social and legacy media echo chambers couldn’t generate enough hype to make it feel true to many millions for many years. “Russiagate was not a tragedy but a crime against the country,” Siegel writes. “Disinformation was both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up, a weapon that doubled as a disguise … By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning tools of war against American citizens.”
And yet that effrontery sowed the seeds of the regime’s downfall. Supercharging paranoia and undermining Americans’ shared sense of reality ultimately only undermined elite technocrats’ credibility and legitimacy. The dirty tricks only ensured the populists’ return. Trump wasted no time smashing the centralized information apparatus when he returned to office, but the technological capacity for control advances day by day, along with the temptation to use it. Siegel leaves readers with a warning: “From the rubble of the old information state, the outline of a new one takes shape.”
Jesse Adams is the writer and consultant behind The Ivy Exile on Substack.
