[The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, Jacob Siegel, March 24, 2026, Henry Holt and Co., 336 pages.]
Jacob Siegel visualizes that, in an information-state form of government, a republican form of government’s ultimate control by voters would get replaced by the digital monopolization of voters’ attention, adjustment of voters’ perceptions, and conditioning of voters to see certain outcomes as inevitable.
Siegel writes that, for thousands of years, people put rules into place to limit technologies’ powers, but these limits started getting eroded with the coming of the scientific revolution. Politicians like James Madison noted the importance of opinions. Artists began writing more about people’s thoughts. Under Woodrow Wilson’s lead surrounding World War I, government and media experts stepped up control of people by jailing them as usual, but also by making it the Progressive ideal to develop and exploit propaganda.
During World War II, information technologies began being developed significantly and applied to ballistics, codebreaking, and nuclear weapons. By the Vietnam War, information collection and analysis were guiding high-level operational decision-making. Siegel notes that these efforts were easily frustrated, and in the real world the war was lost. But in the government world, technologies kept being funded and the developments were increasingly relied upon by experts to assist with management tasks. The Gulf War was seen as proof of concept.
The government-supported information technologies were soon developed far further for substantial civilian applications, and these applications in turn then also got exploited by politicians. Barack Obama had strong general appeal to many voters, but Siegel emphasizes that Obama pioneered in using Silicon Valley computing and social media technologies to build up a coalition of traditional Democrat-supporting organizations like labor unions and to instead appeal directly to individual voters.
As under Wilson’s lead, under Obama’s lead once he was in office, the excesses grew substantially. Voters eventually grew ready to push back, and an electoral majority elected Donald Trump. The information state had grown throughout Obama’s tenure, and then during Obama’s few lame-duck weeks the information state also suddenly expanded further and dug in further. Government bureaucrats, government-supported supposedly non-governmental organizations, and media collaborators then became significantly effective at disrupting Trump’s operations, both under his initial Republican Congress and during the covid/election op.
Some turning back of the information-state tide did come during Biden’s term with Elon Musk’s purchasing Twitter and purging and redirecting it. Siegel saw Trump’s winning of a second term as a further shift.
A history is a good thing, and readers will find this work an impressive start. Siegel hooks readers by holding out the danger of the information state, and Siegel’s telling is dense with information. Many readers are eager for a look inside recent years’ massive cancellations and clear attempts at control, and these readers and even more are fearful that control will only tighten.
Certainly the impact of information technologies on societies has been elemental and vast. Curating information, grabbing attention, and grabbing emotions have been tools since the dawn of spoken stories. These same approaches have kept getting reinstantiated using newer technologies. And yet, in response, human behavior has been complex and resilient.
To his credit, Siegel anecdotally notes some instances when, despite massive resources, the desired control wasn’t achieved. Still, for my taste, Siegel overdoes the storytelling about the people who seek to control us, at the expense of not fleshing out pictures of people’s responses.
Readers would benefit greatly from explorations of our vulnerabilities and defenses, and from much more consideration of what outcomes were attributable to the developing information-state technologies. To reasonably project how future developments might play out, readers need more information from other sources or from future more-comprehensive treatments.
Averting tyranny will be worth the study and worth the practice. We will need to stay tuned.
