Jacob Siegel raises important alarms in his tersely written warning, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, but at the time of this review, at least, he’s got his eye on the wrong problem. The steady deluge of information on every online individual by both private and public entities, sometimes working in tandem, does pose serious threats, and the perennial puzzle of how to balance free speech with public safety — made knottier by the rise of social media — does deserve our closest attention.

But as vital as those questions are to the maintenance of a democratic republic, they shrivel in significance beside the question of how to save the nation from a lawless autocrat and his eager henchmen. Siegel worries about Presidents Obama and Biden strong-arming social-media sites to suppress potentially dangerous misinformation about terrorism, covid, and the 2020 election; their successor has talk-show hosts taken off the air if he doesn’t like their jokes. The author is concerned that First Amendment rights are potentially imperiled by overbearing Democratic administrations, while Trump routinely violates a whole range of constitutional protections. 

Siegel presents his account as even-handed, and he is not a MAGA zealot (he recognizes the QAnon conspiracy as insanity), but he’s doesn’t always play it straight. In complaining about mainstream media largely ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, he makes the claim that the report should have been taken seriously because it was reported by the New York Post, “the oldest daily newspaper in America, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton.” True, but what’s more relevant is that it’s been owned for the last half-century by the right-wing provocateur Rupert Murdoch and was universally acknowledged as an anti-Biden mouthpiece.

The author is also often guilty of gross exaggeration. After citing the many downsides of the first 10 years of social media — including increased loneliness — Siegel graciously grants that “maybe wonderful things were happening too. The case could be made.” Yes, a very good case could be made that social media also brought people closer together and allowed for new kinds of community organization that benefited a range of human endeavors, from hobbies to politics.

Further, he grandly proclaims that nonprofit organizations “rarely made a dent” in the societal problems they are trying to solve, but rather serve principally as a “jobs program” for the educated elite. In addition to being highly insulting to the idealistic, hardworking, poorly paid people who mostly populate the nonprofit world, the calumny ignores progress made in a breathtaking variety of areas, from parks restoration to childhood hunger.

In discussing the increasingly anticipatory capacity of information technology, Siegel pronounces that if Google knows what you want before you ask, “that is a freedom indistinguishable from servitude.” I’ve found Gmail’s autocorrect irritating at times but never a form of serfdom.

The book begins with an informative and uncontroversial review of the growth of information management as an instrument of government. The prime minister to 17th-century French monarch Louis XIV was apparently the first to “weaponize” information by keeping extensive and detailed records of the Sun King’s subjects. Argues Siegel, “The dream of informational mastery…profoundly influenced the formation of modern states.”

The narrative quickly jumps forward to the 20th century, where the American military, beginning in World War II, was trying to use data technology to win wars. This drive reached an early crescendo during Vietnam, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and fellow tech enthusiasts attempted to win a guerrilla war via advanced information technology. That failure did nothing to undermine the renewed enthusiasm for information-tech warfare beginning with the Gulf War in 1991 and continuing to this day.

One of the central questions addressed by the book is the role of expertise in a democracy. Most people recognize and respect the specialized knowledge of a plumber or a surgeon, but when it comes to how to run a society, distrust of “the expert” can run deep — it obviously does with Siegel. But he offers no advice on how to prevent healthy citizen skepticism from descending into the full-blown rejection of reasoned analysis in which we’re now mired.

Siegel’s underlying call to resist the enticements of an artificial online world and pay more attention to the real world around us is well worth heeding. But that potentially unifying, humanistic plea is spoiled by the right-wing tropes he’s simultaneously peddling. He praises Trump for his “physical courage” during his attempted assassination but never mentions that the president is a profoundly stupid man who lies with almost every utterance.

The author has intertwined technocracy with progressive politics and has equal disdain for both. In keeping with conservative orthodoxy, he explains liberal efforts to improve our collective lives as an overweening desire for “control.” He never explains what we liberals want to do with all this control — the payoff is much less clear than wealthy conservatives’ goal of keeping more money by not spending it on others. It never occurs to Siegel or his ideological comrades that progressive energy may simply proceed from a desire to be helpful and kind.

William Rice is a writer for political and policy-advocacy organizations.