Digital Leviathan

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel. Henry Holt, 336 pages. 2026.

Every so often a political book arrives that reshapes how we understand the ground beneath our feet. Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control is a serious contender for that distinction. Built on a formidable scaffolding of intellectual history, a commanding grasp of the literature on technology and power, and reporting drawn from his widely read 2023 Tablet essay, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” Siegel has produced a book that is at once a sweeping history of technocratic governance, a detailed exposé of the counter-disinformation apparatus, and an urgent meditation on what it means to live in a society organized around information as its ruling principle.

Siegel’s central argument is sweeping. He contends that a new form of political regime has emerged in the United States—one that “replaces the democratic principle of consent with control.” This information state “governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public’s compliance with its programs.” It is neither the classic authoritarian regime that imposes its will by brute force nor the liberal democracy that rules through the consent of the governed, but a third form of political organization, a “digital leviathan” that operates through the monopolization of attention. In place of the cinematic spectacles of twentieth-century revolution, the information state works fractionally, adjusting perceptions at the level of algorithmic code. Twin pillars—censorship and propaganda—undergird its power, justified as defensive measures against the specter of disinformation.

Siegel takes his reader from Francis Bacon and the scientific revolution through Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s seventeenth-century experiments in statecraft, from Woodrow Wilson’s wartime propaganda apparatus to the cybernetic theories of Norbert Wiener, from the counterinsurgency laboratories of Vietnam to the founding of Google and Facebook. He draws on a rich constellation of thinkers—James Beniger, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman—to argue that information is not simply a neutral commodity but the fundamental instrument of control. As he puts it, channeling Beniger’s underappreciated 1986 study The Control Revolution: “Information performs a clear universal function, which is to increase the level of organization in systems. It does this by reordering physical objects and processes. That is: information controls.”

The history of modernity, in Siegel’s telling, is the history of information technologies progressively tightening their grip on human affairs. Each new medium—printing, radio, television, the internet—extends control over a wider domain while collapsing the distances of space and time. Siegel is particularly illuminating on the work of Harold Innis, whose 1950 Empire and Communications theorized that “materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character.” Siegel reasons that a civilization built on information—which travels at the speed of light and collapses all distance—should be “highly centralized but also extremely anti-hierarchical.” Anyone who has observed the American empire in the twenty-first century—administering globe-spanning control while ritualistically venerating marginalized identity groups—will recognize the diagnosis.

The historical arc Siegel traces through part one will be familiar in broad outline to readers of Postman’s Technopoly or Ellul’s The Technological Society. Siegel is especially incisive on the progressive origins of technocratic governance. The turn-of-the-century progressives, he shows, fused a strain of Protestant religious utopianism with a veneration of scientific technique and engineering, producing an ideology that sought “to invent industrial-strength tools of social control.” Their program included enforced eugenics, prohibition, race-based immigration restrictions, and, crucially, “the expert cultivation of enlightened public opinion.” The sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross put it with bracing candor in 1896: “This form of coercion is suited to the type of man created by modern life.” This sentence could have been written yesterday by any number of Silicon Valley executives.

Siegel’s chapter on Woodrow Wilson’s wartime propaganda machine demonstrates how the Committee on Public Information, the world’s first modern state propaganda agency, established patterns that would recur a century later in the war on disinformation—the militarization of civic life, mass censorship, the recruitment of intellectuals and journalists to a totalizing crusade. Siegel wants us to see that “almost every tactic and slogan of the modern anti-disinformation campaign reprised patterns established a century earlier during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.” The progressives of Wilson’s era and the counter-disinformation experts of our own share a fundamental conviction: the public cannot be trusted to sort truth from falsehood on its own. Siegel quotes Ellul’s lapidary formula: “It is information that creates the problems that propaganda will exploit and to which it will claim to offer solutions.” The information state feeds on the very pathologies it claims to cure, a paradox that gives the book its central tension and its considerable power.

The second and third parts of the book turn from intellectual history to political narrative. Siegel argues that Barack Obama was the “Silicon President” who consummated the marriage between the Democratic Party and the tech industry, building a coalition of bankers, tech workers, and university employees—“the trifecta of the new knowledge economy”—and constructing a new mode of governance that fused public and corporate power. Obama’s unique insight, Siegel argues, was to see how the digital environment could be used to implement sweeping policy changes that circumvented the normal legislative process. Siegel meticulously documents how a sprawling apparatus of government agencies, NGOs, academic centers, and tech platform “trust and safety” teams coalesced into what amounted to a privatized censorship regime.

The details are damning. The Election Integrity Partnership collected over 859 million tweets for analysis and flagged nearly 22 million as “misinformation incidents” in the span of nearly four months. The Virality Project recommended that platforms take action against “stories of true vaccine side effects”—specifically, “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.” The FBI ran what amounted to an information operation to preemptively discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election, warning tech executives about a Russian “hack and leak” that the bureau knew was no such thing. Hamilton 68, the widely cited “Russian influence dashboard,” was exposed by Twitter’s own internal review as flagging accounts that were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots” but simply “generally right-leaning users.”

These are not minor scandals. They represent, as Siegel argues, a systemic assault on the informational prerequisites of self-governance. When the government covertly pressures private companies to suppress information because it might lead citizens to reach conclusions that officials find inconvenient, something fundamental has broken in the democratic compact. The Harvard-coined concept of “malinformation”—defined as truthful information that is nonetheless deemed harmful—amounts to an official designation for “factual statements that authorities found objectionable.” Siegel’s reconstruction of this process, drawn from the Twitter Files, court documents, congressional testimony, and original reporting, constitutes a genuine act of public-interest journalism.

A book this ambitious inevitably opens questions that it does not fully resolve. Siegel’s account of the populist revolt draws productively on Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public to describe how digital networks eroded institutional authority, but the framework could be applied more symmetrically. The same digital medium that enabled government censorship and elite information control also enabled the frictionless spread of genuine misinformation and conspiratorial thinking. A fully realized account of information and power would hold both dynamics in view, recognizing them as twin products of the same technological transformation. Similarly, Siegel’s treatment of January 6 is factually careful—he notes that the riot was “disorganized and ineffectual” and that the Black Lives Matter protests of the previous summer were “orders of magnitude larger and more destructive”—but it might have been strengthened by a fuller engagement with the constitutional dimensions of the event. Siegel is persuasive that the ruling class weaponized January 6 to justify an expansion of domestic surveillance and censorship. Yet acknowledging the genuine peril of an attempt, however chaotic, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power would not weaken this point; it would make it more difficult to dismiss.

The Information State invites comparison to a growing and distinguished shelf of books on the intersection of technology, surveillance, and democratic governance. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) offered a comprehensive account of how tech companies extract behavioral data to predict and modify human conduct, but Zuboff’s analysis remained largely confined to the corporate sector. Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley (2018) documented the military origins of the Internet with a polemical energy that anticipated some of Siegel’s themes. Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society (2015) examined the opacity of algorithmic governance, while Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? (2013) diagnosed the concentrating tendencies of what he called “Siren Servers.” The closest analogue in spirit and method may be Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement (2020), which similarly attempted to rewrite the narrative of postwar American politics by arguing that the administrative state had progressively displaced constitutional governance (Caldwell’s endorsement appears on Siegel’s dust jacket). Siegel draws generously and effectively on all of these, weaving them into a narrative that is more historically ambitious than any of its predecessors.

What sets Siegel apart is the depth of his intellectual-historical ambition and the quality of his prose. The passages on Bacon, Colbert, and the scientific revolution are genuinely learned. His reading of Ellul and Innis is not decorative but structural—these thinkers provide the conceptual grammar for his analysis of digital power. On the philosopher Byung-Chul Han: “Because of its fleeting relevance, information pulverizes time. . . . The generally short term nature of the information society is not conducive to democracy.” On Václav Havel’s parable of the greengrocer who hangs a communist slogan in his shop window: “The sign in the window, like the hashtag slogan posted to Twitter, functions as what in game theory is called a Schelling point.” These are not just felicitous phrases but genuine acts of intellectual synthesis.

The information state, Siegel demonstrates, did not emerge from a vacuum of elite malice. It grew out of material conditions: the destruction of intermediate institutions like labor unions, local political parties, churches, and civic associations that once mediated between the individual and the state. Factory jobs peaked in 1979 and then entered a decades-long decline. The information economy offshored manufacturing, deregulated finance, and produced a new class structure in which the winners were those who trafficked in symbolic manipulation rather than physical production. As Siegel notes, “Google, despite being five times larger than General Motors, employed a quarter as many people.” Apple relocated its entire production operation to countries with “virtually nonexistent labor laws.” Steve Jobs delivered the verdict to Obama himself: “The jobs aren’t coming back.” What replaced the country’s decimated institutions and workforce were “the global social media networks” and the billionaire-funded NGOs that served as transmission belts for ruling-class preferences.

The “whole of society” framework that Siegel documents so effectively is, at bottom, the political expression of a society in which the organic institutions of democratic life have been liquidated and replaced by administered simulations. Joel Kotkin, whom Siegel cites approvingly, called it a new “age of oligarchy” characterized by “the diminished role for small business, greater concentration of financial assets, and a troubling decline in home ownership.” The information state, in other words, is not merely a political phenomenon. It is the superstructure of an economic order in which the spoils flow overwhelmingly to a credentialed professional class that occupies the commanding heights of finance, technology, media, and government. The counter-disinformation complex was, among other things, this class’s mechanism for insulating its authority from democratic challenge.

The Information State does not engage extensively with the role of right-wing media infrastructure—Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, the vast ecosystem of talk radio and online influencers—in shaping the information environment. This is understandable given the book’s focus on the state and its corporate partners, but it means that the landscape Siegel describes is somewhat incomplete. The counter-disinformation apparatus did not emerge in opposition to an untouched public sphere; it emerged in an environment where competing forms of narrative management had long been operative. Likewise, Siegel is convincing that the scale and significance of Russian social media operations were overstated by officials and journalists who had reasons of their own for inflating the threat. But his argument would benefit from a sharper distinction between the reality of foreign influence operations (which were real, if modest) and the politically motivated campaign to weaponize them (which was immense and destructive).

The Information State is that rare achievement in contemporary political writing: a book of ideas that also tells a gripping story. Siegel takes the long view, and his lens brings into focus patterns and continuities that no other account has captured with comparable clarity. The book ends with a warning that should give readers across the political spectrum pause. As Siegel observes, even as Trump steps away from the counter-disinformation apparatus, the underlying technical infrastructure of the information state remains “fundamentally intact.” The internet remains an arena of mass surveillance and algorithmic manipulation. And as artificial intelligence promises to become “the most powerful technology that has ever existed,” the race to control its informational output will make the battles of the past decade look quaint. “From the rubble of the old information state,” Siegel writes, “the outline of a new one takes shape. Yet it seems likely that AI will depart from the technocratic methods of control and move into strange new dimensions. The future stays mysterious.”

That closing note of genuine uncertainty is perhaps the wisest thing in the book. For all its moral clarity about the abuses it documents, The Information State is finally a book about a problem for which no one—not the populists, not the technocrats, not the billionaires who now own the platforms—has yet found a durable solution. The question is not whether information controls, because it obviously does. The question is who will wield that control, and to what end, and whether any democratic polity can long survive without answering it. Siegel has not resolved this question. But he has, with uncommon intelligence and moral seriousness, helped us to see it clearly. That is no small thing.