The Metastasis of Technocracy

I was pleased to recently review Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control in The Washington Examiner Magazine, which ended up being the second review that I wrote. Upon concluding the book, I found it to be of such staggering significance that I had no idea how I could encapsulate it in what the magazine realistically had room to run, so I decided to just start writing until I felt that I had done the book justice, and couldn’t stop until I reached the nearly 5400 words below. Catharsis complete, I could turn to the more concise Examiner review.

The 2003 documentary The Fog of War, tracing the career and late-life musings of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, has become an ever more fascinating artifact as the decades go by. At the time of its initial release, it was difficult as an undergraduate not to see the film in the context of the “Dubya” administration’s rash invasion of Iraq and blundering attempt to build a western-style democracy from the rubble. At that moment, however badly McNamara had erred decades earlier, he came across as a wise breath of fresh air detailing his mistakes so that subsequent generations could avoid them.

But twenty-odd years later, the film reads more as stubborn rationalization from a vain old man refusing to take stock of his actual legacy. McNamara was a brilliant mind who seems to have basically had good intentions, but also a brittle ideologue enslaved by the technocratic fantasy that, given enough data, the best and brightest whiz kids can engineer a rational, enlightened global society. Alas, all humans, even the more talented ones, are frail and fallible, and hubristic overreach is inherent in the DNA of managerial technocracy as a sort of Original Sin.

A parade of such unappetizing characters feature in journalist and U.S. Army combat veteran Jacob Siegel’s bracing, upsetting, terrifying new book The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, which traces the inexorable rise of authoritarian managerialism back to the rise of bureaucratized nation-states in the 19^th century, with intellectual antecedents 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 alike to manipulate and herd electorates in preordained directions about which they have little to no say.

“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 late nineteenth century progressive movement. “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.”

For those who believe in limited, representative, and constitutional government, the stunningly self-righteous presidency of Woodrow Wilson proved catastrophic. With typical moralizing imperiousness, once Wilson determined that the United States should enter The Great War he dealt with critics not as fellow citizens with different points of view but as enemies of the state who deserved to be censored and even arrested. Wilson’s key mechanisms for controlling information were both established in 1917: the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a hybrid civilian-military bureau founded as America’s first full-fledged state propaganda organ, and the Espionage Act, sweeping secrecy and censorship legislation giving the executive branch vast authority to censor and persecute people considered problematic.

“With the advent of machine-age capitalism, leading progressives saw the U.S. Constitution as an outdated relic,” Siegel writes. “Wilson dismissed it as ‘a lot of nonsense’ talk ‘about the inalienable rights of the individual’ and other manner of ‘mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation.’ He opposed the principle of divided government, which was designed to act as a check against tyranny, as an impediment to technocratic efficiency.”

The war provided Wilson and his progressive supporters pretext to override the messiness of democratic governance. “War dispensed with the burdens of educating ignorant citizens to get them to support particular policies,” Siegel notes. “Galvanized by the national security threat and the need to support frontline troops, the masses could simply be marched in formation toward the proper beliefs… All the cloying articles of democracy that slowed the movement of progress could be swept away.”

With the end of World War I and the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding promising “A Return to Normalcy,” the excesses of the Wilson years appeared to have receded, but they hadn’t. “Wilson’s greater legacy endured,” Siegel notes. “The American propaganda complex triumphed by outlasting both the temporary state of emergency and the postwar backlash. The CPI was shuttered, but the functions of propaganda, censorship, and publicity diffused throughout countless government offices, public relations agencies, military and intelligence bureaus, and advertising firms.”

With the development of increasingly sophisticated computing machines during World War II and the Cold War, vainglorious technocrats’ ambitions ballooned yet further into a sort of idolatry of pure information that fed fantasies of engineering away human folly for a new golden age. “With the dawn of informational power, shooting wars did not disappear, but the military’s focus shifted from coordinated attack and devastating violence to managing systems of information and narrative control,” Siegel explains. By the 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy’s campaign had engaged a firm to digitally analyze and predict voter behaviors, as if human beings’ social existence could be understood and altered in the same sense as wartime tactics. “The digitization of politics, while just as powerful as the atomic bomb, would allegedly be a peaceful event, perfecting the spirit of democracy,” the author writes.

Vietnam proved a prime setting in which, not for the first or last time, arrogant technocrats would fly too close to the sun. Officials like Robert S. McNamara hoped to achieve military victory as much by winning Vietnamese peasants’ “hearts and minds” as conventional military tactics. “Counterinsurgency revived a progressive, technocratic impulse to civilize warfare, by rationalizing its aims and directing them towards worthy goals like redressing poverty,” Siegel argues. “Most of the experts who led Kennedy’s war effort were sophisticated thinkers, not chest-thumping militarists or narrow-minded bigots. To them, the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement at home fit together as pieces in a larger project of modernization and rational reform.” 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 towards managing the war as opposed to winning it. As has become familiar in more modern times, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

“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.” And it’s continued to metastasize ever since, despite intermittent organic resistance from the public, because the notion of rational governance administered by ever-more-perfect machines has appealed to dreamers across the ideological spectrum. “By the end of the 1960s, it was clear that the anti-technocratic backlash had done little to stop the expansion of centralized databases and technological surveillance beyond leaving a record of warnings,” the author notes.

In the 1970s, faced with public outrage about Watergate and the Vietnam War, the U.S. Senate convened the “Church committee,” named for Idaho Senator Frank Church, to investigate security agency abuses dating back to the Truman years. The sixteen-month investigation uncovered a vast sea of unconstitutional misconduct ranging from mass spying upon American citizens to far more dystopian programs. “Mirroring tactics used by the Soviet secret police and borrowing counterinsurgency tools developed to fight foreign enemies, US intelligence agencies ran “black ops” on American citizens,” Siegel writes.

There was the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s notorious COINTELPRO program, which surveilled people considered subversive and used whatever dirt it found to sabotage those people’s lives and careers. There was the Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation Mockingbird, which aimed to steer news coverage in both the United States and abroad, feeding propaganda and even entire prewritten stories to outlets including The New York Times. And then there was the CIA’s MKUltra program. “Experiments carried out under the name MKUltra entailed forcibly drugging and attempting to brainwash unwitting subjects in what was formally classified as ‘the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification,’” Siegel explains. “It saw human beings as essentially blank slates who could be programmed by the right cocktail of drugs and psychological techniques, into ‘a wholly dependent controlled tool—a value-free spying machine disguised in a human body.’”

Outrage against these dystopian excesses led to demands for reform and the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act establishing a FISA court, but Siegel argues it was a fundamentally toothless change: “The judges who sat on the FISA court lacked the national security credentials to vet the claims coming before them. 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 emergence of relatively compact mainframe computers, and personal computers by the late ’70s, the possibilities of mass surveillance and control began to swell yet further, trending toward ubiquity. And with the end of the Cold War bringing slashed military budgets, the information warfare approach promised to do more with less, and in more hygienic fashion. “The doctrine rested on the belief that human societies are glorified ant colonies,” Siegel observes. “The enemy’s mind did not possess any inherent essence or spark of a soul. It did not even seem to contain the chaos and incompleteness that mathematics and quantum physics had discovered at the beginning of the century were present in all things. Rather, it operated as a matrix of inputs that could be mapped and exploited.”

And with the arrival of so many new toys came a broad cultural forgetting, Siegel writes. “Remarkably, the technological dimension of America’s failure in Vietnam seemed to have been wiped from the collective memory in only a few decades. Popular culture replaced the image of Harvard-educated generals demanding more data with the iconic lone soldier, John Rambo, exorcising his personal demons. The war was no longer an indictment of America’s ruling class, which had planned and led it, but a source of individual trauma and shame for the mostly working- and middle-class soldiers who fought in it.”

Drunk with hubris at the United States becoming a unipolar superpower, and the supposed End of History, managerial technocrats embraced the notion of globalism, that all of humanity could become cogs in a well-oiled administrative machine transcending obsolete national borders. Siegel points to a 1996 RAND Corporation report entitled “Strategic Information Warfare,” which “suggested that the capacity for intelligent individuals to make any distinctions based on their own senses was disappearing. They would have to rely on the superior calculations of information machines that were built to navigate a borderless world.” Despite all the triumphal humanitarian rhetoric, Siegel suggests that there was more than a whiff of self-interest involved. “Computers had not demanded the eradication of national borders or the construction of a single global marketplace. The claim that information required financial deregulation or unfettered access to goods and labor did not come from machines. It was an ideology that served a particular constituency—knowledge-class professionals and their political representatives—in the name of a global good.” Part of that ended up involving chasing near-term profits in effectively relocating much of the U.S. manufacturing base to China.

Following the horrors of 9/11, more managerial opportunism bloomed like algae in a stagnant pond: the terrorist attacks were blamed on the vague catch-all term of “intelligence failure.” That was ominous, Siegel argues: “There was no question that a terrible failure had taken place. Yet, the problem with the sweeping indictment is that it upheld a misconception about intelligence. It presumed that there was something like an impenetrable intelligence system and that failure represented a deviation from that ideal. But that way of thinking mistook quantity for quality and process for outcome… the rhetoric shifted responsibility for the breach of America’s defenses from particular individuals to an amorphous process.”

After 9/11, with a vast windfall of new spending, managerial self-indulgence reached the point of the absurd, if it hadn’t already. A nuclear physicist named John Poindexter, who’d been forced to resign as Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser due to involvement with the Iran-Contra affair, was appointed to head up the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, designed as a “database of all databases” to enable seamless and unprecedented surveillance of the entire population right down to their financial transactions. The office was headquartered in a replica of the bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation that the Pentagon had commissioned years earlier, complete with doors that made ‘whooshing’ sounds. TIA “sought to anticipate signs of political instability and impending violence as if they were seismic waves that could be detected by a well-calibrated machine,” Siegel writes. “Plato described how the ancient Greeks studied the entrails of birds to divine the future in a ritual called augury. Americans harvested the innards of their databases with the same intention.” When a backlash ensued, Congress officially shut down TIA after two years, but to little effect. “When Congress ended its authorization, U.S. officials who answered to no one simply changed its branding,” Siegel notes. “The signage was scrapped as the program quietly migrated to different government offices and out into the private sphere.”

The sloppy open-endedness of the George W. Bush administration’s Global War on Terror engorged messianic technocracy. The unipolar United States would take out all the terrorists and all the states that sponsor terrorism, extend democracy across the Middle East, and lead a reformation of Islam removing all jihadist elements. “As the sole superpower after the Cold War, the United States was considered by much of the American ruling class, including its policymakers in Washington, to possess almost unlimited power to transform the provinces,” Siegel writes. “Beneath this lay the implicit premise that all societies are basically alike, only at different stages in the process of universal development.” And so, inevitably, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became quagmires much as Vietnam had been, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumseld echoing Robert S. McNamara in impotently demanding ever more data to conjure up a technological deus ex machina.

Furnishing and processing that endless flood of miscellaneous data were not just members of Washington’s national security apparatus, but Silicon Valley tech companies that made billions conducting surveillance and data analytics. “As the war on terror dragged on, there would be efforts to blame its failures on the American public, which had supposedly been whipped into a war frenzy and acted on emotion,” Siegel contends. “But that exercise in blame shifting is belied by the duration and aims of the conflict. It was not hot-blooded middle Americans out for vengeance who kept sending soldiers to Afghanistan for two decades to participate in nation-building initiatives. That was a project of political and military experts who saw more to gain from extending the war, while misleading the public about its progress, than from bringing it to an end.”

The steamrolling cult of personality that brought Barack Obama to the White House portrayed the candidate as a sort of demigod: the dazzling combination of Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Martin Luther King whose only flaw was that sometimes he could be too smart and logical, like Mr. Spock. Obama was a deft politician adept at painting himself as all things to all people, but underneath the masks was a moralizing ruthlessness that paralleled that of Woodrow Wilson nearly a century beforehand. “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 illustrates.

In short, Obama strove to transform the United States into a one-party state ruled top-down by an alliance of Democratic Party power brokers and Silicon Valley oligarchs. Saint Barack “would use the bully pulpit to push Americans toward accepting views on contentious subjects, like the health-care system, climate change, or the root causes of Islamic terrorism, that aligned with the interests of his political party,” the author argues. “Informing the public meant to him roughly the same thing it had meant to Wilson. It was an instrument of indoctrination, useful to promote acceptance of decisions that had already been made by unelected administrators serving the party of expertise.”

Obama heralded a fundamental sea-change in the nature of the Democratic party: gone were any last trappings of FDR’s ragtag New Deal coalition, replaced by well-to-do professionals in the “knowledge economy” and clients dependent on federal payouts. Ever since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, “an extensive latticework of intersecting nonprofits and NGOs” had gained power over traditional grassroots movements and advocacy. “The nonprofits provided America’s wealthiest citizens and corporations with a way to distribute largesse and influence the political system through tax-exempt cutouts,” Siegel observes. “Their value was independent of the results they produced. Employing millions of people, the nonprofit industry functioned as a jobs program for the educated professional classes who could be mobilized as a voting bloc.”

Significantly, the proliferation of such nonprofits depended on perpetuating the very problems they were supposedly created to solve. “Financed by Democratic Party donors, the nonprofits filled a para-governmental role, in which they served the interests of the party and its donors while avoiding oversight,” Siegel explains. “Solving entrenched problems, assuming solutions were even possible, was not really in anyone’s interest.” The nonprofit-industrial complex accelerated the superseding of regional elites, with variegated perspectives, with a single basically homogenous ruling class who’d passed through the same cultural and institutional bottlenecks. “As a whole, the class adhered to the tenets of progressive technocracy,” the author writes. “Yet there was nothing that its members believed in more fervently than their own providential destiny to rule, regardless of their failures.”

The increasingly cozy revolving door between the White House and Silicon Valley enabled progressive technocrats to impose broadly unpopular social views dominant among elite circles 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 notes that the term “whole of society” had originated with missions for nation building in the third world: “The fact that U.S. officials were now embracing a mechanism designed for missions in East Africa and Afghanistan suggested that they had come to see their own country through the developmental prism as a project in need of expert-led rebuilding.”

Indeed, the author continues, “In the ‘whole of’ sense, society now described a select set of stakeholder organizations brought together to execute state policy. The term became a euphemism for powerful institutions, including banks, universities, and social media platforms that did not represent the public but controlled its access to resources like financial services, social connection, and professional accreditation.”

The dystopian implications appeared unlimited: “No borders could demarcate and contain the information empire. Its ideology was globalitarian, in Paul Virilio’s phrase, fusing the classic imperial ambition to rule territory with the twentieth-century totalitarian states’ ambition to dominate the inner life of its individual subjects.”

And yet, even after Edward Snowden’s devastating revelations of unlimited data exploitation by the emergent new nexus of power, what was left of the establishmentarian press took essentially no interest in holding arbitrary power to account. “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. For journalists and other members of the new American ruling class, Obama would always be ‘one of us.’”

Such was the stark presumptuousness of the Obama era that elite technocrats imagined they could dictate the beliefs of hundreds of millions of citizens through media manipulation and domestic information operations based on those designed for wartime enemies. “Controlling the narrative promised authorities a cheaper, faster means of minting legitimacy. And for a while it seemed to provide that, until the currency began to crash,” Siegel writes. With the administrative state having abandoned any credible claim to democratic legitimacy, the disenfranchised electorate turned in desperation to populism in the form of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Democratic power brokers managed to smother the Sanders campaign in its crib (and Sanders eventually revealed that he was but a technocrat in democratic socialist clothing) but they were largely too arrogant and incompetent to realize that Trump might actually win, although the Clinton campaign did work alongside rogue FBI agents to subvert the intelligence process and manufacture insinuations that Trump was working for the Russians. The appropriate response to Trump’s shock victory would have been for elite technocrats to do some soul-searching about their tyrannical overreach and to try cultivating a sense of shame, but they proved incapable of that. “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.”

In the waning days of the Obama administration, resentful of the electorate and convinced that Trump represented one last four-year bump in the road before Democrats would forever hold power in the United States roughly equivalent to that of the Chinese Communist Party, Obama and leading Democrats conspired to kneecap the new administration before it even entered office. The Global Engagement Center, an office recently established under the State Department ostensibly to counter foreign disinformation, was expanded into a “whole-of-society campaign to align the most powerful actors in the public and private sectors with the policies of the ruling party… [which] effectively created an official government office for coordinating the resistance to Trump,” Siegel explains.

The administration didn’t stop there. In his final weeks in office Obama personally ordered a bogus intelligence community assessment of Trump to advance the false Russian collusion narrative that shills like Rachel Maddow could be counted upon to hype. On the same day that snake oil was released, Obama’s chief of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson unilaterally seized control of U.S. election infrastructure for the administrative state with the dubious and overblown rationale of preventing Russian cyberattacks. Perhaps the Russians really were plotting to subvert American elections, but elite technocrats beat them to it.

Hillary Clinton lost to a loudmouth game show host because of thermostatic reaction to Obama’s overreaches and that she was an unappealing candidate with an off-putting air of entitlement who ran a lazy data-driven campaign that barely bothered to get out of Brooklyn. Instead of accepting those hard facts and going back to the drawing board, progressive technocrats opted to blame social media for not censoring Trump and his voters enough. To Mark Zuckerberg’s credit, he did briefly resist the massive pressure campaign to introduce a censorship regime to Facebook, but within weeks of the election Obama strongarmed him into abandoning his former commitment to neutrality on the platform in favor of a new focus on fighting so-called “fake news.”

Conveniently volunteering to help Facebook police the information space was an ostensibly non-partisan NGO called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), in fact a front group for the Democratic Party, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and Big Philanthropy. “Unconstrained by congressional oversight or the Constitution, the IFCN did not require any statutory authority to pressure a company like Facebook into accepting its edicts,” Siegel writes. “Rather, the large tech platforms sought to inoculate themselves from government regulatory pressure that would affect their profits and from the threat of lawsuits from the NGO sector by accepting the authority of the fact-checkers… What the IFCN offered was not fact-checkers in the traditional sense, but a cadre of compliance officers who would scour the Internet, flagging anything that threatened the interests of the ruling party.”

A parallel effort focused on bullying Twitter into advancing the false Russiagate narrative, including by banning or throttling accounts purportedly spreading Russian propaganda. Twitter’s internal investigation determined that the allegations were untrue and the accounts being targeted were legitimate human users who happened to lean right. Nonetheless, Twitter executives kept that fact private, normalizing social media as a playground for federal agents to manipulate discourse, spread propaganda, and encourage Americans to be hateful and fearful of their fellow citizens who happened to have voted for a different candidate.

“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.”

A vast and lavishly funded counter-disinformation industry arose virtually overnight, ostensibly aimed not only at eliminating disinformation and misinformation, but also a new category known as malinformation, which comprised statements that were true but delivered with malicious intent, as if that could be objectively quantified. Cynical as the industry sounds, Siegel argues that “most anti-disinformation crusaders were not cynical opportunists and power-mad schemers. Following the social and career incentives of the knowledge class, they became earnest believers in their mandate to regulate the public’s thought and speech. In the moralizing style of their politics, they resembled a modern temperance movement.”

By 2020, federal and quasi-federal pressure had long since decisively tilted the digital media playing field to disfavor conservatives and especially the populist right, and then operatives got the chance to exploit the Covid crisis to systematically loosen ballot integrity standards in key states. When the Trump campaign dropped its October Surprise that fall, with the New York Post reporting that Joe and Hunter Biden were implicated in a serious corruption scandal regarding crooked deals with foreign governments, the counter-disinformation industry leapt to unprecedented action. Not only did the vast majority of legacy press outlets totally ignore the scoop, but social media platforms systematically censored and suppressed the story online, going so far as to delete links to the story in users’ private direct messages. Twitter even suspended the Post’s account for daring to retweet its own accurate reporting.

“An influential segment of the technocratic elite appeared to see censorship as a noble act,” Siegel suggests. “To them, the public had forfeited its privilege to think for itself by making irresponsible decisions like voting for Donald Trump. Censorship might have certain unfortunate connotations, but it was necessary to protect democracy from the people.”

Was the 2020 election “stolen,” as many MAGA diehards allege? The question isn’t answerable, as it’s impossible to quantify to what extent censorship and propaganda shaped voters’ decisions, and there will never be definitive numbers for the amount of illegal ballot harvesting enabled by mass voting through the mail. But it’s safe to say that it was indeed rigged to some extent, and that Joe Biden entered office with a big fat asterisk. That likely explains why the administration leaned so hard into defining the January 6 riot at the Capitol as an “insurrection” rather than a protest gone bad: the real insurrection had taken place among elite technocrats throughout the previous four years, and proved an infinitely more salient threat to constitutional government. Alas, that insurrection was just getting started.

The pandemic in particular enabled an orgy of ever more arbitrary abuses, with wildly shifting rationales justifying the day’s top-down directives but subject to reversal at any notice. “Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science,” Siegel writes. “The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.”

The information regime revealed itself to be a new kind of sovereign. “An effort to extinguish the public’s unruly beliefs had spawned a single digital apparatus of law, punishment, culture, and government that policed the political arena and crouched inside its subjects’ inner lives, where algorithms worked to invisibly edit their desires,” Siegel describes. Without the slightest compunction, the Biden administration demanded ever more surveillance, censorship, and control. “Individuals accused of spreading misinformation were treated as vectors of disease, like pathogens who needed to be isolated from their peers and rooted out.”

And yet the tireless efforts to stamp out dissent did not lead to social harmony and support for the ruling party, but the rolling collapse of the establishment’s credibility and legitimacy. “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,” Siegel speculates. “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.”

In seeking to manufacture a new, tidier reality out of whole cloth, with zero regard for the electorate’s sensibilities, elite technocracy comprehensively discredited itself and shattered the nation’s ability to agree upon basic facts. “As the ruling party separated itself from the nation at large and pursued divisive and unpopular goals, it lost not only the consent of the governed but its tether to a shared reality,” Siegel writes.

The first major crack in the firmament of the information state was Elon Musk’s decision to purchase Twitter in 2022, ending the disinformation industry’s monopoly on public discourse and enabling a furious backlash that had been gathering like a storm. Soon, the Twitter Files revealed what the ruling class had inflicted upon those they considered their subjects. “Opening up Twitter’s internal records presented concrete proof of systematic public-private collusion to censor or otherwise influence public discourse on nearly all of the most contentious political issues of the past decade,” Siegel explains. “They presented a starkly revealing portrait of how familiar institutions secretly colluded to control public opinion and engineer the political arena.”

Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance demonstrating his diminishment once and for all, despite the insistence of the mainstream press that he was sharper than ever, further torpedoed whatever shreds of credibility the information state still retained, and Kamala Harris was not a skilled or substantive enough candidate to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. When Donald Trump reentered office in 2025, he acted swiftly to demolish the centralized mechanisms of controlling discourse. “By mid-April, the administration had mostly dismantled the enormous counter-disinformation machine that Obama had set in motion nine years earlier as he left the White House.” And yet, Siegel notes, “much of the technical infrastructure, while dormant, remained fundamentally intact.”

“The Internet remained an arena of mass surveillance and collective psychosis,” the author writes, and even though the government was no longer directing social media companies’ use of algorithms, “those platforms remained venues for continuous propaganda and information operations, which ensured that public life remained a hostile and paranoid place and preserved the tempting possibility of a future public-private fusion.”

Elon Musk did not purchase Twitter out of the goodness of his heart, at least not exclusively, but because he had much to gain from owning Twitter (renamed X) as a vast living trove of information. “What all the posting on X added up to finally was more communication, more information, feeding into the same digital maw. In this case, however, the maw was Musk’s, and he was using the data for the same purpose as every other ambitious tech CEO and government the world over at that time: to train artificial intelligence.”

Siegel concludes with a warning: humanity may have won a bit of ephemeral breathing room from algorithmic total control, but governments and tech companies alike are racing to “planetary AI that will absorb all existing knowledge” and enable novel forms of control not yet imagined. “From the rubble of the old information state, the outline of a new one takes shape.”

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