By BY Renaud Beauchard
Some books explain events, and others explain the world in which events become possible. Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control (Henry Holt, March 2026) belongs firmly to the second category. A former US Army infantry and intelligence officer who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Siegel is not a theorist who stumbled upon power. He watched it operate, up close, against living populations.
That experience planted the seed for his landmark 2023 essay in Tablet magazine, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which was immediately recognized by some of the sharpest minds of our moment — N.S. Lyons, Matthew Crawford, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, among others — as something rare: a genuinely illuminating text. The book that has grown from it is not merely an expansion. It is the definitive account of how liberal democracy, understood as government by consent, was quietly displaced by what Siegel calls the information state.
What is the information state? It is a regime that governs not through legislature or courts or votes, but through the invisible digital architecture that now mediates nearly every dimension of public life. Siegel’s definition is evolutive: “a state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals” is replaced by “a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms.”
The Foucauldian resonance is deliberate and precise. This is governmentality in the strict sense, a rationality of rule that targets conduct rather than territory, that operates through security mechanisms and the management of populations rather than through the old instruments of force and law, blurring the distinction between the two. Its goal, Siegel insists, was never simply to censor, never merely to oppress. It was to rule. The kind of brazen censorship we observed during the Biden era and that is so tempting to our warring rulers again is not a bug; it is a feature of the new normal.
What gives Siegel’s thesis its particular force is the paradox at its center. The great ills the information state claims to remedy — disinformation above all — are self-referential products of the surveillance-and-attention-based internet upon which the state now depends for its very operation. The machine generates the pathology it then offers to cure. As Siegel puts it with characteristic precision, the politicians loudest in condemning platforms like Facebook or Twitter do not take the obvious step of seeking to make them less powerful.
Their aim is not to reform or rebuild the repressive infrastructure of the internet, only to make it serve their own interests. Anyone who has read Jacques Ellul will recognize the pattern immediately. In an endless vicious circle, “Technique” keeps expanding to solve the problems created by its own prior expansion. What had appeared in the 1990s as the emancipatory promise of limitless digital communication had quietly become, by 2016, the medium through which a new class of rulers managed the informational environment of their subjects.
The book’s historical architecture is ambitious, and it is here that Siegel distinguishes himself most sharply from mere polemicists without ever sounding conspiratorial. He traces the genealogy of the information State across five acts, beginning far earlier than most observers imagine. The technocratic seed was planted by Francis Bacon’s Promethean dream of extending human dominion over nature, a vision that married scientific empiricism to political will, and that dismissed classical contemplation as, in Bacon’s own phrase, “the boyhood of knowledge.”
From Bacon, the thread runs to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s most trusted minister and weapon against the Nobility of the sword, who married humanist dreams of universal libraries to the accounting practices of Europe’s merchant houses and pioneered, in the process, what scholar Jacob Solls describes as containing “the germs of modern totalitarian government growing into webs of informants and file-systems.” The information state did not begin in Silicon Valley, or even in Washington D.C. It began in Versailles.
But its decisive American flowering came during the Progressive Era, and Siegel is particularly strong on this. Faced with the genuine upheavals of industrial modernity, which brought mass poverty, mass immigration, social unrest of a scale that seemed to exceed any traditional response, American progressives drew a fateful conclusion: ordinary citizens could no longer be trusted to govern a complex society. Sovereignty would have to migrate to experts.
This is the moment Christopher Lasch identified as the birth of the professional-managerial class, the new elite that displaced the captains of industry by claiming the authority of rationality itself. Walter Lippmann said the quiet part aloud: the public was too “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish” to govern. Public opinion was raw material, to be shaped by a disinterested vanguard. Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee, created just one week after America entered the First World War) was the first official US state propaganda organ, designed to manufacture consent for a deeply divisive war.
much more here
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-digital-leviathan/
