← Hidden Forces
Loading summary
Transcript49 lines
- [00:01]
A
What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Jacob Siegel, a writer and editor at Tablet magazine, a veteran of the United States army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the author of the new book the Information Politics in the Age of Total Control. Jacob and I spend the first hour of this conversation tracing the intellectual and historical roots that inform the foundations of his argument about the information state. From the work of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Harold Inness, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul to James Bennegar's 1986 book the Control Revolution to the 17th century philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz and its downstream influence on the cybernetic frameworks that gave rise to the Internet. We discussed the rise of digital swarms, the anonymous movement, and what Jacob observed when he returned from Afghanistan in 2012 to find American culture being reshaped by the velocity and incoherence of online mass formation. We then examine his central thesis that the Internet, born out of Cold War Pentagon research and reconsolidated under government auspices after 9 11, had, has given rise to a third form of political regime he calls the information state, one that governs not by force or democratic consent, but by consolidating the codes and protocols of the digital public arena to engineer the public's compliance with its programs. The second hour is devoted to examining how the information state differs in kind from the analog propaganda systems of the 20th century, and why Jacob believes it is simultaneously more powerful and more brittle than what came before. We dig into the paradox at the heart of his argument that the same informational infrastructure built to extend elite control also created the conditions for the digital insurgencies now convulsing Western politics. We explored Jacob's critique of the counter disinformation establishment, his views on the concentration of private platform power, and what a coherent policy response to the dysfunctions of the modern information environment might look like, including antitrust regulation, private data ownership, and the legitimate, legitimate prosecution of foreign disinformation campaigns, while preserving the essential distinction between the speech rights of citizens and non citizens alike. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces IO subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation? Become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, discounted access to third party research and analysis, and in person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats. You can also do that on our subscriber page and if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to infoiddenforces IO and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly thoughtful and important conversation with my guest, Jacob Siege Siegel. Jacob Siegel, welcome back to Hidden Forces.
- [03:35]
B
Thanks for having me, Demetri. I'm happy to be here.
- [03:37]
A
Do you know when you were on the show last time, it would have
- [03:40]
B
been not long after the tablet essay that spawned this book was published. So maybe April 2023.
- [03:49]
A
So it was 2024. But you see, you have that touchstone. I don't. I thought it was longer. I thought it was longer than that. I think it was actually in the fall of 2024. So it's only been like two and a half years. And I've wanted you on the show since because I think you're such an important voice on the topics that we're going to talk about today. And you told me when I reached out I actually got a book coming out. Let's save it for then. So we've saved it for now. The book that is coming out, I think it's publishing the day after this interview airs, right? Or is it Publishing tomorrow?
- [04:20]
B
March 24th.
- [04:22]
A
Great. So it's going to be the day after this episode publishes. The book is titled the Information Politics and the Age of Total Control. Before we get into the book, I would love to have a brief discussion with you about intellectual foundations. And I told you that Shoshana Zuboff's book came up quite a bit in my own mind while I was reading this book, though that's not necessarily an indication of alignment. I think there are areas where you guys align in areas where maybe you depart. I know you've read the book. That book is almost a decade old. But many of the concepts that we have for thinking about some of the ideas explored in your book originate with her, and I should emphasize some of those ideas. That said, her intellectual influences seem to draw more from the American progressive and certain German academic traditions, most notably Hannah Arendt and her work on totalitarianism. You both incorporate Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon into your argument, but you seem to be much more influenced by the work of certain media theorists like Marshall McLuhan Harold Inness, Neil Postman, and of course, French philosopher Jacques Ellul, who has come up often in some of our previous conversations on this show, notably with Michael Sarcas and Paul Kingsnorth. Before we begin our discussion about the book, Jacob, I'd love to know whose work has done the most to shape your thinking on the topics we're going to discuss today.
- [05:48]
B
The name that immediately comes to mind is James Bennegar, who wrote a book called the Control Revolution that was published in 1986. I bring him up first because I've been thinking about him a lot lately and also because I think he's gotten too little attention and he deserves greater recognition. He certainly deserves to be Read More so this book, the Control Revolution. I believe Bennegar was a communications professor at one of the UC colleges. I don't recall which one, but this book is a kind of comprehensive history and political theory of control as an epiphenomenon of the Industrial Revolution. And it produces a stunningly comprehensive history that situates information technologies and the Information Revolution, which my book is really trying to analyze. It situates the Information Revolution and the political effects of the Information Revolution as a kind of aftershock of the Industrial Revolution. And so in a very brief summary, what Boetticher argues is that the explosion of mechanical processes, of production processes, carried out through the Industrial Revolution, which was itself of course, a consequence or a follow on of the Scientific Revolution. So you have these new ways of organizing the world mentally through scientific knowledge that lead to this explosion in productivity that is the Industrial Revolution. Well, what the Industrial Revolution does is it overwhelms the capacity of human centered organizational methods to deal with this vast surplus of goods that are being produced and the processes themselves. So you have all these factories running at the same time. They have to be calibrated in in specific ways to ensure that the widgets all align and they come out the other end in the form of the good that they're supposed to be. And then at the same time, you have to allocate these goods in the proper ways that they reach the markets that they're supposed to reach, so that they reach the consumers. And the invisible hand is a kind of guiding principle, perhaps for some of this, but it also requires new technologies of information. Why information? Because, as Bennegar shows in the book, information controls processes. That's what information does at the cellular level in our bodies, and that's what information technologies do. They organize the world around them. That is one of the essential functions of information which Is something we talk about a lot, information, but is this kind of mysterious property? And so what Bennegar shows is that the Industrial revolution essentially overwhelms the capacity of human organizational systems to deal with them. And so it requires the new technologies of informational control just to get a handle on the sheer volume of goods, phenomena. And as these informational technologies evolve, they produce more information. In turn, Information technologies themselves output information, which then requires even more powerful informational technologies to control them. And this is a kind of cycle that we're still in the midst of, and which led, in some sense, maybe not inexorably towards artificial intelligence, but methodically headed towards a kind of super intelligence, a form of super informational decision making. It really starts in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution. So Bennegar's the Control Revolution was definitely an influence on me. And then at the same time, I had a pretty eclectic set of intellectual influences. In my early life, up until I was, say, 30, I had a fairly liberal, humanistic, scholasticist orientation towards people like Isaiah Berlin was an influence on me. Jael Talman, who was a kind of historian and a theorist of political utopianism. And I grew up in that sort of liberal, humanistic tradition, I would say. And then two things happened. One was my experience in the. In the army, serving overseas in the US army, sort of disillusioned me in certain ways towards certain aspects of that humanistic tradition. Not that I thought its principles were all corrupt necessarily. But let's say I encountered its limits, or I started to recognize it as a tradition that obtained to certain cultures and not others, that it wasn't universal in the way I had assumed it to be universal. And then secondly, I had this encounter with the Internet that happened, really, when I got back from Afghanistan in 2012, where I got back from Afghanistan, and something had just changed so fundamentally in the basic medium of society. I started to see things like 4chan and Anonymous, and they were weird, and I was trying to make sense of them. And then I also started to see the ways in which the larger culture around them was being shaped in this very strange, not direct process of kind of mutual formation where the media would be aghast at something 4chan had done. And then it would also absorb the sort of tropes of 4chan, and it would reify these things that 4chan was talking about by giving them so much attention. And as a consequence of that, that's when I started to read these theorists of technology, Ernst Junger by Ransom Heidegger. At that point, I Read Jacques Ellul, I read Neil Postman, I read Marshall McLuhan, I read Harold Innes, I read Paul Virilio, Mumford, Lewis Mumford. And this started to have a big influence on me later in life. It was something that I really only came to in my 30s. I hadn't paid much attention to it in college. And then that was. My sort of secular education was in these theorists of technology and media culture.
- [12:41]
A
I'm fascinated to explore this a bit more with you before we proceed to the book. This coming back into the world that it sounds like you experienced this homecoming and the opportunity to experience America in 2012 almost as an outsider, as someone that had been gone for so long. 2012 was also an interesting date because I put the date where something began to feel different or change around 2014. I've talked to other people that put 2016, but it's kind of in that window. We had the proliferation of ubiquitous mobile connectivity. Social media was embedded in the phone, and the like button, I think, was invented in the maybe 2012 or maybe 2014. I mean, around there. Can you just elaborate a bit more on what it was that you saw? Exactly, because you're describing also a change that you became aware of in American culture and society. So just elaborate a bit more on what you experienced that's relevant, especially to the work that we're gonna talk about today.
- [13:41]
B
Yeah, sure. It was two things going on in late 2012 when I got home that I noticed right away that I didn't connect them immediately. I didn't formulate something, some kind of unifying theory right off the bat. But what I noticed was the proliferation of these mass social movements, protest movements, and also the online nature of those mass social movements, which was already evident in 2012. And then secondarily, I noticed the way in which the places online that appeared to be incubating these mass social movements. 4chan, Reddit, as a kind of Reddit was a bit closer to the mainstream. 4chan was a bit closer to the nuclear core of this new culture. I noticed the way in which they had an approach to ideology and to political belief, cultural identity that was totally different from the sort of standard model of identity formation that was supposed to be operative in a liberal democracy like the U.S. so, in other words, there was no direct anchoring of an individual expressing a belief to the belief that they were expressing. And the effect of this was that because you could express a particular thought without having that thought or that opinion be something that you had to carry around as part of Your immediate social identity or familial identity or individual identity. What it meant was that there was a willingness to express not only more and more extreme beliefs, but beliefs that were less and less tethered, let's say, to direct achievable political objectives or social objectives in one's day to day life. So I'll give you an example, a fairly obvious example. People who are part of the Anonymous movement, which got pretty celebratory media coverage in the press initially and was greeted as this kind of wonderful liberatory movement. What I notice about people involved in Anonymous was that they could simultaneously position themselves as advocates for sexual assault victims at one moment and then be terrorizing some young kid the next day online. And this created no dissonance within the movement. And furthermore, it created no dissonance for the most part, in the broader media coverage of the movement. And so what I started to notice was that it was possible to channel something that was incubated in these sort of online hot houses into the larger media through spectacle, through sort of outrage, by monopolizing attention. And then once you had monopolized that attention, it was extremely malleable what you could do with that broader attention. Once you had captured that larger audience, There was no obligation to be coherent, to follow through on the specific political program that was supposedly underwriting the action being taken. You could just quickly move on to the next thing that you wish to channel through this kind of digital swarm. There was something very amorphous about it that related to the speed of digital formation. The speed. It wasn't just about the anonymity. I think people got too hung up on the anonymity at the time. It was also about the velocity at which these messages were being proliferated. And the velocity was destabilizing to more settled political identities and more settled political movements. But it was also thrilling. And because it was also thrilling, it captured this larger audience within the establishment media. Now, perhaps that larger audience initially paid attention through outrage by doing stories about how, by being aghast at the horrible thing that 4chan had done. But a day later it would offer laudatory coverage to Anonymous, for instance, without ever really stopping to examine how much overlap there was between these two movements. And without ever really stopping to probe whether a group of Anonymous characters online who were leading these digital swarms, supposedly as advocates for sexual assault victims, as they did in the case of Steubenville, I remember happened in 2014, whether that sort of mass digital swarm might have second order effects that were not as Salutary as its supposed role as advocates for sexual assault victims. This was the rise of the digital swarm, in other words. And the rise of the digital swarm was both weird and had all of these sort of bizarre and eccentric aspects. All of a sudden, furry was a word that entered popular culture. All of a sudden, someone could claim to be both a fascist and a LGBTQ activist. There was no need for internal coherence at all. And in fact, the more incoherent, in a way, the more powerful the claim, because it took away the immediate counterattacks. The incoherence became its own kind of defense in a way, or its own method of propagation. And this was apparent to me on a kind of instinctual level. Right when I came back from Afghanistan in 2012, I noticed it, and then I spent the next several years trying to make sense of it, figuring out, what does Anonymous have to do with 4chan? What do both of them have to do with Occupy Wall Street? What do they have to do with the smartphone, with this new social media world that was being created? And what does all that have to do with the rise of the Islamic State and ISIS's blitzkrieg campaign through Syria and Iraq and its capture of Mosul, which took place in 2014? How are all of these related? That was the question I spent years wrestling with.
- [20:27]
A
Well, that's going to be one of the questions I'm going to ask you, how they're related, some points of clarification. So is it fair to say that what you saw was a higher tendency towards mass formation through the Internet?
- [20:40]
B
I saw a higher speed of mass formation. So, yes, a higher tendency, but the speed itself, I think, was a defining characteristic.
- [20:50]
A
But also there was a transience to the formation. Right. That's why swarm is such a great word, coming together and dissolving almost instantaneously. The lack of internal intellectual coherence. So, first of all, is your working assumption or your belief that most of this was exogenously directed, or was it an endogenous feature of the system that people were spontaneously coming together around these ideas, in some cases, contradictory ideas?
- [21:20]
B
I think it's much harder to speculate about the exogenous characteristics because they tend to be cloaked in secrecy. What we can say for certain is that the system itself is vulnerable to exogenous manipulation, and that there was clearly some exogenous manipulation, even if the broader movement was an organic tendency. And I'll give you a clear example of this from Anonymous itself. Anonymous became very good at carrying out DDoS attacks. In other words, Attacks on servers became a kind of characteristic of the group, and they would essentially simulate the appearance of a swarm being involved in the attack. It would appear that thousands of servers were attacking one server. In fact, what had happened was there were a couple of key players within the movement who were able to commandeer other people's computers essentially to carry out these attacks. So what appeared to be a mass movement was in fact, in the form of these attacks, an imitation or a simulation of a mass movement that depended on the blurry boundary in the kind of digital realm between avatars of a person in the form of their computer and the person themselves at the same time. However. So that's an instance of an exogenous manipulation that had a outsized effect in terms of media coverage. Because Anonymous became known for these kinds of DDoS attacks, and they were a symbol of its power as a group, that they could shut down Scientology, for instance. At the same time, there was a real underlying social phenomenon, social formation, but it wasn't capable of carrying out the kind of coherent, directed actions that were attributed to it.
- [23:24]
A
Have you ever read Peter Pomerazev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible?
- [23:28]
B
I read excerpts of it and I read the original foreign policy piece that I think it came out of, but not the whole book.
- [23:36]
A
Because even though his experience was different from yours, from the standpoint that he worked in post Soviet Russia in the TV industry, and the book is really about what happened to him, actually, that book may have been been his experience in Russia and the book Propaganda. This is not propaganda. Was. The book might have actually been the part two where he described his experience returning to the UK after leaving Russia in 2014, I believe, and beginning to see everywhere the same phenomena that he was experiencing in Russia and trying to connect the dots. What was it that he was experiencing? There are some parallels there. So I'd encourage you to read the book maybe, and then we could perhaps talk about it, whether it's on the show or offline. Thomas Ridd also wrote this book called Active Measures, and I had him on the podcast. And it was a history of certainly Soviet era intelligence operations. There was some commentary about US intelligence, but just speaking to what he explores on the Soviet side, he described a culture whereby intelligence operations and disinformation, misinformation, Active Measures, whatever, all this stuff was done in such a way so that even the intelligence community itself didn't know what was true. And so everyone kind of became enmeshed in this ever perpetuating, ever changing lie and all of underlying Reality came under question at any given moment, even by the people who were actively shaping it. And it feels like, in response to my answer about how much of this was exogenously directed versus endogenously spontaneous, you're kind of channeling the same observation, which is that in this environment and within the information state that we're going to talk about, there is no clear demarcation between truth and fiction, because it's in some sense, an active battlefield of disinformation. Is that a fair assessment, or is that taking it too far?
- [25:34]
B
No, I think that's very astute, and I think you made the kind of critical connection at the end there, which is to observe that there is no clear demarcation between truth and falsehood doesn't mean that those categories no longer exist. It means that the medium in which they are contested, which is increasingly the online space, is a medium that itself breaks down the boundaries between military and civilian. And so there have always been two ways of contesting the truth. One way is internally within a society where you have debate, you have competitions for political power, you have the rise of grassroots movements, et cetera, and all of these represent competing ideas of the truth in some sense. Simultaneously, you have warfare between nations or between factions within a nation that's also a way of competing to determine what's true. The famous adage that the victor determines the truth, the victor writes history, is perhaps overstated, but not by much. It's still basically true. And what happened over the last, really half century, let's say, is that what is fundamentally a military technology, which is the Internet, became the essential medium through which all discourse, all political discourse, social discourse, commercial discourse takes place. And so features that were once specific to the world of espionage became generalized and universalized. And what you're describing that Pomerantsev writes about echoes a statement made by the author of the U.S. containment Policy during the Cold War, the famous Cold War intellectual George Kennan, author of the Long Telegram, and really the primary architect of American policy during the first half of the Cold War in particular. What Kennan described was the results of a sprawling espionage complex, a sprawling secrecy bureaucracy producing a wilderness of mirrors within which it became virtually impossible not only to distinguish between truth and fiction, but to distinguish between active measures carried out by one's own government and active measures carried out by a hostile government. And I think, increasingly, this is not simply a problem of runaway bureaucracy, which was the context in which Kennan was describing it and in which this late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan later wrote about. The problem of secrecy. It's becoming a social phenomenon. It's become universalized so that none of us can escape it. It's not just the spooks and the politicians and the professional political officials who have to wrestle with these things. It's all of us. And that really at its essence, I argue, is a technological phenomenon. It's not that there's no agency for political actors, but I think at its most fundamental basis is technological.
- [28:55]
A
So I'm actually so glad that you brought this up because this is actually a point of confusion for me having read the book, as it isn't entirely clear how much of this is a story about technology and how much of it is a story about other causal factors, whether those factors stem from a general cultural or spiritual decline or a decline in journalistic ethics or something else. For example, in the book you bring up the complicity of mainstream news organizations and helping to make the case for the military intervention on behalf of the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq war. And in that case, as in others, it seems that many of the causal elements that you identify as being present in the information state were also present then before any of the technological infrastructure we're talking about today had come into broader use. So my question is how much of this is really a technological story versus the result of a multi decade decline in journalistic ethics as an example, or the result of a decline in shared belief systems? The Cold War wasn't just a military war. It was an ideological war between communism and capitalism. And that was an important part of the context in which the analog propaganda model was developed and refined. And may partly explain the rising appeal of nihilism that we saw spring up in US pop culture immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, even within the United States. I mean, you and I are roughly the same age, you probably remember this. And as my listeners know, I think that the strain of nihilism has resurfaced and it's taken a much darker turn in recent years as many of these larger ideological and religious frameworks that once gave people a sense of meaning have continued to break down, while at the same time people's self awareness about the power of narrative and how to wield it has grown. So given everything that you've written about in the book Jacob, which highlights so many of these non technological factors, how much of this at the end of the day is really a technological story?
- [30:53]
B
I follow McLuhan in the belief that technology never creates anything ex nihilo. What technologies do is they magnify or in McLuhan's term, extend characteristics that are intrinsic to human beings. So the lever extends the power of a muscle. An airplane extends the power to jump through the air, to leap or a bird's flight in the animal sense. And artificial intelligence, a global artificial intelligence system, extends the power of human decision making, faculties and cognition as well, as McLuhan pointed out, the nervous system itself. So AI maybe tilts more towards the cognitive functions of decision making. Whereas the electrical world, the 20th century electrical world, really magnified the nervous system, the sensory apparatus of the body, as it does this, as it magnifies one tendency or amplifies one tendency intrinsic to human beings, it reduces or obsolesces others. And it also tends to retrieve things that were obsolesced and appeared to disappear from past technological epochs. And this is a kind of process that's developed in McLuhan's work, and I think it's essentially correct. So I would say that there's no need to choose between human causal factors and between technological effects, but that the rate of change is the clearest indication of the impact, the disproportionate impact of the technology relative to those human factors. The fact that we are cycling through one crisis after another at such a blinding rate that we can barely keep up with them. The fact that the kind of grand narrative formation that you're describing now appears to undergo some sort of significant reformulation and reversal, abrupt reversal a few times a month at this point is itself a phenomenon of digital speed. That's why I come back to velocity as the characteristic of this system that I'm describing. But as I lay out in the book, and as I show through this history that I trace in the book, the development of this informational system, the development of this political, technocratic apparatus has its roots in a desire to extend man's control over the universe and to rationalize social phenomenon in the same way that mathematics rationalizes the abstract field of numbers, in the same way that the empirical method rationalizes how we approach cause and effect in the mechanical, deterministic universe. Digital technology, which really has its roots in the 17th century. This is why I talk about Gottfried Leibniz in the book. It's why I spend time there. Because this is really the philosophical, theoretical origin of, of the digital universe that we now live within. It begins with both a mathematical breakthrough, which is the binary code, the insight, the discovery that all mathematical processes can be replicated through 0 and 1, which for Leibniz is as much a religious breakthrough as it is mathematics. He believes that he's approaching the sublime divine code of the universe through binary math. And he also believes that having discovered this sublime divine code, that it is going to yield processes whereby all arguments can be settled mathematically. So human disputations, political disputations, theological disputations will all yield to this universal binary that is digital, because that's what digital runs on is this binary math. It'll all yield to digital mathematics that's in the 17th century. And he invents a sort of primitive computer that he calls the stepped reckoner, a kind of calculator. But he doesn't get very far towards achieving this with his physical creation. But a few centuries later, the godfather of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, cites Leibniz as really his greatest influence. And he describes cybernetics as essentially a continuation of the work done by Leibniz. Why is this important? Because Wiener provides the backbone, theoretically, for the work done within the Pentagon that leads to the creation of the Internet. So this leap that I'm making from a 17th century Theoretical work to the Internet and the effects of the Internet is drawn out for you, not just by me in my book, though obviously I would recommend people read it in the information state. It's drawn out by the architects of this, including Norbert Wiener. And so what this leads to is a global communications technology, which is what the Internet starts as, that attempts to subject the entire planet to a grid of rational control. Now, I don't say that the reasons for doing this were necessarily nefarious or conspiratorial. In other words, during the Cold War, the creation of a global communications infrastructure of this sort made a great deal of sense because you had this game of nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the Soviet Union, within which fractional minor errors of calculation with missile technologies could lead to a nuclear apocalypse, right? So it became incredibly important to cover the entire globe in this kind of computerized grid of control to ensure that A, your own nuclear warheads would fire at the precise moment you needed them to, if it came down to that, and B, that your detection technologies would, would be able to detect an incoming nuclear warhead so you could maintain your second strike capability and then keep your comms up so you were still able to communicate and do command and control even in the event of a nuclear war, so that, you know, you can understand how they arrived at that. And it wasn't out of a desire to create a totalitarian system of control. Finally, simultaneously with this nuclear brinksmanship, the Cold War is also a narrative contest, as you mentioned. And in this narrative contest, where each of the two superpowers is trying to present its own ideological worldview to the undecided nations of the world, to bring them into its camp, while discrediting the other nation within that, having a global communications infrastructure becomes an incredibly powerful tool to spread this message. So there's a rational, explicable basis for how we built this thing that we now live inside, but the effect is that we now live inside of it. And society, such as it is, is no longer constituted in the way that Tocqueville described. Through a slow accretion of bottom up civic associations and voluntary associations, increasingly all of that has been swept away. And so this hollowing elf, this rise of nihilism that you were describing, is there human responsibility for that? Of course there is. But the technological medium in which that decline now occurs, which is this digital universe, has vastly accelerated it while stripping away effective counter responses to it. So instead of one kind of old print media institution getting wiped away or discrediting itself and being replaced by another responsive, locally based set of media institutions, increasingly what we have is the old print age liberal era institution gets swept away, often due in no small part to the corruption and decline of the people running it. But once it's swept away, what replaces it is not voluntary associations responsive to human beings, in particular political communities. What replaces it is some kind of global simulation of society conducted through the digital medium. And in that sense, what I think that while there's still manifestly human agency and human responsibility, the medium in which all of this is occurring is the technological medium.
- [40:19]
A
So I want to start to pull quotes from the book so we can discuss it more specifically. But I do have a question, because hearing you talk now reminds me of a feeling that I got while reading the book, which is that the book feels very much like a lamentation, and it feels like there's an undertone of futility that comes through. In other words, it feels like when reading your book that you don't believe anything can be done. In fact, there's a moment in the book where you equate government to government regulation, government in the pejorative sense, so as to sort of reject the possibility that we can even do anything about what we're talking about today through our government institutions. And I got the same feeling from you when you were last on the podcast and I tried to challenge you on that. So how would you describe your. First of all, did I accurately characterize what you feel like is the tone of the book. And how would you characterize your sense of individual and social agency when it comes to the subject matter that we're talking about today?
- [41:21]
B
Let me start with the last point. Individual and social agency are all important in a sense. I think that's all there is. I'm not a nihilist. I'm not even anti technology. I'm not somebody who positions myself politically, theologically, philosophically in opposition to technology. However, I believe that the situation, the world we are now living in, it is presenting us with an extraordinarily dire challenge to a form of human freedom and human agency which I grew up valuing and believing in. And I wanted to present that challenge in the starkest possible terms because I believe it is stark. And I didn't want to go through a kind of throat clearing exercise to explain that I'm not a Luddite, that I don't counsel despair, that I believe that the choices people make are meaningful and impactful. I didn't want to do that, not because I don't believe in it, but because I wanted the book not to be. I'm sorry if the effect that it has on somebody is to suggest that what they do doesn't matter. Because I think that ultimately that's all that matters. However, the way in which we channel our sense of what matters into meaningful political action, that transaction liberalism, the modern liberal era, let's say, just broadly speaking, the last 500 years or so, offered a series of processes through which institutional processes, social relationships, through which the individual's sense of responsibility could be channeled into action. Electoral politics is one example of that. Joining voluntary civic associations is another example of that. Membership in a church or a synagogue is another example of that. Almost across the board, all of these means through which we translated our sense of agency into meaningful action have been obliterated. It's not that you can't find the residue of them, but the residue of them is not enough to create substantive change across the system in a way that would redound to the benefit of people, broadly speaking. So what I'm saying is that in ways that were actually rather difficult to notice because they happened not only somewhat gradually, but they also happened through technologies and phenomenon that were presented to us and in fact appeared to be extraordinarily powerful and liberating and fun and creative in their potential, that being the sort of digital world of the Internet that those technologies have rapidly replaced, but somewhat invisibly replaced the basic mechanisms of political sovereignty through which we exercised that agency and they have relocated those mechanisms from places like the voting booth and like the journalistic institution into platforms that govern the public through their control of opaque algorithms.
- [44:45]
A
So can I interrupt you? Because you're very good at describing, in very eloquent terms, aspects of the problem. Where I want to pin you down is when it comes to whether you think solutions exist and what those solutions are. Because I mentioned Paul Kingsnorth is another person, for example, who mentions Jacques Ellul in our conversation. His view is largely that society is too far gone. He lives on an island off the coast of Ireland. He makes his own manure. He prays every day, and he's kind of just in communion with God, and that is sort of his source of salvation. He thinks there's no real way to do anything. Ted Kaczynski also felt the same way, and he was sending pipe bombs in the mail. Other people think that there are solutions in lobbying the government or in voting in a new populist president, whatever. I understand there are no perfect solutions, and I'm not purporting to have them. But I'm curious, really, to understand here. Do you think solutions are possible within civic organizations and civic life? And if so, what are the mechanisms and means by which to achieve them?
- [45:54]
B
I mean, no, largely no, because. Which civic organizations? What civic life? It's gone already. You can't wish it back. It largely doesn't exist anymore.
- [46:05]
A
I would disagree. You know what? I'm glad we did this exercise, because I wanted to actually understand a little bit better where you fall. And I think this will be an opportunity to. We'll have an opportunity to dig into this after we've established some foundation from the book. So let's do that. And then certainly in the second hour, we'll cover this aspect.
- [46:22]
B
Let me just try and answer a little bit more of what you just said, Doug, because it's a big challenge, and I don't want to leave it totally unanswered. I have a lot of respect for Kingsnorth. I think he's a fascinating and insightful writer. That's not my position at all. I don't advocate retreat or asceticism.
- [46:39]
A
You're a fan of indoor plumbing.
- [46:41]
B
I'm not only a fan of indoor plumbing. I'm a fan of society. I'm a fan of civilization.
- [46:46]
A
Well, I think he's a fan of civilization, too. He would say that peak civilization was the Middle Ages.
- [46:51]
B
I think that his position is that civilization has entered a period of inexorable decline, and it can't be saved at this point. And so therefore it's best to retreat to a position from which one is capable of saving that which is sacred, because otherwise nothing will be saved.
- [47:10]
A
Correct.
- [47:11]
B
And that's not my belief. I have a more Jewish view. I think King's north belongs to the Anglican Church now.
- [47:18]
A
Orthodox Christian.
- [47:19]
B
Orthodox Christian. That makes a lot more sense. Of course, Not Anglican. Okay, so that makes more sense. My own view is that the Torah is not only the Hebrew Bible. The Torah is not only a profession of religious beliefs, it's a statement of prophecy and of social organization. Essentially everything is contained within it, and it enjoins people to specific social obligations. And how one attempts to carry out those social obligations is of course a subject of millennia long debate. And its, you know, there's great rabbinic debates about this and there are debates between religious people and secular people, et cetera, but there is a very clear direct social basis. And that social basis is not something that I'm prepared to issue or to just throw away in the American context. Also, I don't see how it's possible to simply retreat. What I'm suggesting is, is that the old methods of exercising political power have had their agency, their effectiveness sapped by this new infrastructure, which is the Internet, and that therefore the only way to deal with this is through the Internet. And I have argued explicitly that it's not simply through regulations that aim at protecting free speech, that there needs to be a fundamental restructuring of the political economy of the Internet. And I've made the argument, I co wrote an article with John Robb for Tablet magazine arguing for data rights as a way to approach this, that individuals.
- [49:07]
A
But those happen through public policy. They don't happen through the marketplace.
- [49:11]
B
Absolutely.
- [49:11]
A
In other words, government has a role to play. Okay, so I absolutely do want to discuss this. This is great, but let's hold it for the second hour because I think it's important to get through some additional pieces of information and establish a foundation here from the book, both for me, but most importantly, Jacob, for the audience who hasn't actually read it. So in the book's introduction you write that most of us are familiar with the distinction between authoritarian regimes that impose their will by force and democracies that govern through the contest of their citizens. The information state represents a third form of political regime. It governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public's compliance with its programs. Such a state rules by monopolizing attention in place of the cinematic spectacles of 20th century propaganda. It dictates the parameters of user experience on social media and other shared online domains by fractionally adjusting the public's perception and conditioning people to see certain outcomes as inevitable. Help me understand this distinction. What is the difference between the political regime in an information state versus an industrial democracy, like the kind say we lived in the 1990s or the early 2000s? If that's the template.
- [50:30]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's an easy comparison because it's one within living memory. Look, I think we've actually discussed a lot of this, that the industrial democracy was a system in which power was distributed between different institutions. And many of those institutions were responsive to particular segments of the polity through some form of voluntary association, whether it was churches or labor unions. The people bought into those voluntary associations. Those voluntary associations lent their power and legitimacy to political movements or political parties. Those political parties then participated in the government and in a kind of distribution of power within the government. Let's say in the kind of New Deal model, since that's the last regnant model, the New Deal model it would be you would have labor boards, you would have labor union participation, you would have ownership participation, all of which was being channeled and directed from above by a centralized political authority acting democratically.
- [51:46]
A
Sorry to interrupt, Jacob, hold on. Let's just clarify something so we're on the same page. What you're describing is the pre mass media world.
- [51:52]
B
No, no.
- [51:53]
A
Okay. Because the dominant conduit through which propaganda propagated in the pre digital era was mass media. It wasn't the churches, it wasn't local chapters of Masonic lodges. It was cbs, abc, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post. These were the organs of propaganda. It wasn't local organizations, of course. So the reason I say this is. That's what I'm trying to understand.
- [52:17]
B
The New Deal is very much the mass media era still.
- [52:21]
A
It's the beginning of mass media, with radio, obviously, and of course we had the press. So that's fine. You can answer the question however you want it. I just wanted to make sure that we were on the same page about the role of mass media, Because I don't know if you're familiar, for example, with Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent, but he in that book develops what he calls the propaganda model. And he has a series of filters through which state power flows into the media organs. And that's how the government controls society or the elites control society. And you're making a similar argument not functionally, but you're making a similar argument in the book. And this is an important point of departure from Shoshana Zubop's book, which is really about how private power influences people's decision making and increasingly controls society for capitalistic ends. Your book really tries to describe how sources of political power and class systems of elites are able to control society through these digital technologies. And what I'm trying to understand is really what is the distinction between how the system worked in the. And there's a reason I picked the 1990s, because it's far enough along where we have these systems of mass media, but we don't yet have an organized Internet. We don't have the large platforms which sit in the middle of all the Internet traffic and the social media algorithms that increasingly organize and herd people in digital space. That's the distinction I'm trying to draw, if that makes sense.
- [53:44]
B
It absolutely makes sense. So, Manufacturing Consent, the phrase is actually borrowed from perhaps the most influential intellectual of the first half of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann. So it's actually Walter Lippmann's phrase. And I discuss Lippmann in the book. And Lippmann famously also gives us the idea that, what is propaganda? How are people moved by the pictures in their heads, the pictures in our heads? And Lippmann talks about this and formulates this in the context of the First World War. And I deal with this extensively in the book. There's a reason why I open the kind of modern historical section of the book with Woodrow Wilson and the First World War and the creation of the first American Propaganda Office, which is the Committee on Public Information, which Walter Lippmann tried out for, wanted to head. Eventually, Wilson picked a progressive journalist named George Creel to head it, and it was known as the Creel Committee. But this was actually a post that Walter Lippmann was also in the running for. So this notion of mass media and propaganda has been around for more than a century at this point, really about 150 years. And it tracks pretty closely to the beginning of the Progressive Era and the Industrial Revolution, because that's when these mass medias first develop. But throughout the 20th century, there was a continuity in the institutional basis of society, which I believe served as an effective counterforce to the powers of mass media and propaganda. It's not as if propaganda hadn't existed in the era of radio or television. I write about this in the book. But because there was still a kind of middle tier of civic associations, because there was still a degree of voluntarism in participation in society, because people still went to different places to work, because the media itself was still distributed across the United States and had a local basis in character. There were effective counterweights to the centralizing tendencies of propaganda. It was there, it was not yet dominant. The Internet begins the process of sweeping these away. The Internet accelerates the natural tendencies toward decline within those institutions. The journalism industry, for instance, was already in trouble when the Internet started to come around. It was going through a kind of period of financial trouble that is too long to get into a year, but had to do with some bad bets made on the Asian markets and the Asian financial crash, which impacted the journalism industry. But all of that's happening prior to the rise of the Internet. The decline of labor unions obviously starts taking place before the rise of the Internet. The decline of all kinds of voluntary associations. What ends up happening with the Internet is the rapid, seemingly unstoppable acceleration of this decline, which is already ongoing through September 11, 2001, and then is fed this kind of hyper accelerant through what Shoshana Zuboff in her book calls surveillance exceptionalism. So after 2001, the private Internet. So just to take a quick step back, as I discussed earlier, the formation of the Internet and the digital architecture that now mediates most of our lives and certainly mediates our consumption of the news and our access to commercial marketplaces, et cetera, this really began functionally as an outgrowth of Pentagon research. That doesn't mean that it was only ever intended for war making purposes. From the beginning, J.C.R. licklider, the director of DARPA who headed up the program that culminated in the creation of the Internet. Darpa, saw it as a universal library and as a way of melding academic researchers together in a process of man machine symbiosis, where they would all be feeding data into these centralized databases and it would lead to an explosion in human intelligence, something like artificial intelligence. So there are these two aspects, the military aspect relating to the Cold War, which we discussed earlier, and then a kind of progressive belief in the flowering of human potential through the growth of these informational systems that ends up getting broken off from the military starting in the 1980s and then accelerating in the 1990s as the Internet gets privatized. So our idea of Silicon Valley as this kind of libertarian subculture, this hacker subculture, this place that believes in untrammeled individual freedom and wants to be left alone by the government, really starts to develop in the late 70s, accelerates through the 80s and 90s and creates this sort of modern mythos of the garage engineer, Bill Gates, et cetera. Then September 11, 2001 happens, and there is this reconsolidation of what is now the private commercial Internet under the auspices of the federal government. This happens immediately after 2001 through what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance exceptionalism. So Google, the rising social media companies, all participate in this. The telecoms all participate in this. I'm not going to chronicle it all here, but it's a story that Zuboff tells and that I also tell in my book how this occurred. What that meant was that the degree of free, neutral space in a society, the arenas in which individuals could interact outside of the purview of state power, began to vanish. And this is a concept, speaking of Zuboff, that is all important to Hannah Arendt. This is the very essence of what Hannah Arendt considers political freedom is those spaces within a society that are not being molded by state power, in which voluntary associations can occur, and as Arendt says explicitly, even forms of discrimination which are themselves an exercise of human proclivity and human freedom. So this happens starting after 2001, and then takes another massive leap forward during the Obama administration, both through the policies of the Obama administration and through two new technologies, the smartphone and social media, which takes the Internet from being a kind of set of websites that you go to passively and turns it into this immersive environment that people live inside of. When that happens, the distinction that you're making between state and private power, the distinction between Hannah Arendt's idea or Zuboff's idea, or let's just say the distinction between Zuboff's idea of the threat coming from predatory private capital, and maybe the more chomsky concern about government power. This distinction itself is effaced because the social media platforms on which most social interaction now occurs are themselves brought directly under the influence of the government. And that is something that makes this kind of differentiation no longer meaningful.
- [62:07]
A
Okay, great. So let me make some observations so that people have an idea of what we're going to discuss in the second hour, and then we'll move it over to the premium feed. I think one difference that we have, and this is something I want to get into in the second hour, is you seem to ascribe more power to the modern. It's not really a propaganda. The world we live in today, it's really content moderation. It is more fundamental than that. It seems that you think that the information state has currently more power in shaping public perception and public narrative than the previous system that Herman and Chomsky described. And I would argue that it actually has less, manifestly less now, maybe it has the tools to become more proficient at it, but currently it's not as proficient. And it seems to me that part of the distinction that you're making is that the state applied pressure to media institutions in the past in a more indirect way, whereas by 2020 it was operating within some of these institutions in more formal capacities. So in the book, you write about the FBI having a dedicated Slack channel with Twitter executives and the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency that was created by
- [63:19]
B
the cisa, Department of Homeland Security.
- [63:21]
A
Department of Homeland Security, that was effectively a front company to manage censorship. And certainly the platforms do seem much less concerned about government censorship than their legacy media organizations were. And that probably just reflects the fact that, you know, if you were a journalist at the Washington Post In 1970, you had a certain level of professional responsibility. You had a sense of, I'm a journalist, you know, I have a job to do, God damn it, you're not going to tell me what to say. And there was also a collective sense of these media institutions are sacred. There's the Fourth Estate, et cetera. Whereas these platforms are just out to get as much money as possible. They could give two shits about media ethics. They're there to make money. And if the government is in a position to scare them with changing how they regulate them, they're going to do whatever the government says. So I think that's going on as well. But it seems to me that they've lost control of the narrative, irrespective of the facts that you describe. It seems to me that we are living in a much less well controlled narrative machine than existed in 1990. So I want to again dig into that distinction a bit more, understand your pushback to my critique or to my pushback. And then I also want to get into what does a proper response look like? Because I think there are regulatory responses that are possible. It seems that you don't think those are. And I want to maybe challenge you along those lines as well and hear what you have to say. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access the second hour of today's conversation with Jacob, head over to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our Premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app. Just like you're listening to this episode right now. Jacob, stick around. We're gonna move the second hour of our conversation onto the Premium Feed.
- [65:24]
B
Looking forward to it.
- [65:26]
A
If you wanna listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to HiddenForces IO, subscribe and join our Premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website @HiddenForces IO, you can follow me on Twitter Cofinas, and you can email me @InfoiddenForces IO. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.