We're constantly told that disinformation is everywhere and that it's ruining our democracy. But what if the war on disinformation itself is really just a weapon to squash any and all legitimate dissent?
The Information State is an incisive examination of how we reached the point where anything that contradicts the dominant narrative is automatically labeled dangerous disinformation. Tablet writer Jacob Siegel charts how the technological infrastructure that was built out by the unprecedented cooperation of government and big tech companies to export the global war on terror has been turned against America's own citizens. Instead of competing for voters' support, the Information State uses censorship, mass surveillance, and control over digital networks to manipulate public perceptions in an effort to engineer reality. Such measures may be necessary to protect America's "cognitive infrastructure," as one senior government official claimed, but they are fundamentally incompatible with democracy and freedom.
In short, we've brought the information war home to reinforce consensus and police dissent. This unholy alliance between government and technology, combined with the hyper-polarization of the Trump-era and the isolation of the Covid pandemic, supercharged the fight against disinformation, a trend that is only accelerating in the age of AI. The Information State traces the development of that idea and the technologies built to realize its aims. It moves from the origins of computers in the 16th-century discovery of binary code through the invention of the modern Internet as a warfighting tool for the Pentagon. Finally, it shows how the Obama administration created a "whole of society" complex to fight disinformation that systematically merged state and corporate power into a public-private leviathan.
An urgent, necessary book that sounds the alarm on where our society is headed if we don't relearn how to think for ourselves and ask searching questions about what's labeled as disinformation in the public square, The Information State will change the way you think about the world around you. Jacob Siegel is a contributing editor at Tablet. He served as an officer in the US Army National Guard. From 2006-2007, he deployed to Iraq for 15 months during "the surge." In 2012 he deployed to Western Afghanistan. He co-edited and contributed the lead story to Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War, the first anthology of fiction by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. Since 2013, he has worked as a journalist covering war, surveillance, technology, and the convulsions in the American scene.
