Thread with excerpts from "The Information State" by Jacob Siegel (2026). Thesis: The Information State is a new form of political regime that "governs by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena, which it uses to engineer the public’s compliance."
Siegel traces what he calls the information state to the GWOT, when the 1990s libertarian ethos and hostility to the state of tech was replaced with a public-private infrastructure for, initially, mass surveillance and debanking of potential terrorists.
However, tech staid away from domestic issues or governing discourse, until Obama, beginning with a strong partnership between the White House and Google.
Initially, this was focused outside the US, with the White House/State Department partnering with tech companies to promote democratization in other countries, starting with keeping Twitter online to support (pre-existing) Iranian protests in 2009.
In 2010, the Clinton State Dept was strongly in favor of Internet freedom, believing it to be a force for democracy and good (total reverse of seven years later), including allowing tech companies into export-controlled markets.
The concept of a "whole of society approach," the totalitarian ideal of getting every public and private institution (companies, NGOs, academia, media, schools) coordinating a political push, was pioneered by the Obama admin in Afghanistan.
This faith in the Internet as a force for democracy peaked in 2011 with the Arab Spring, which US-funded NGOs + tech companies were heavily involved in. Kind of bizarre, since Hosni Mubarak was a US ally. Also note State Dept people endorsing Che Guevara.
Google, even more than other tech companies, basically became a part of the USG during the Obama administration.
Three 2014 events - Euromaidan, the invasion of Crimea, and ISIS's capture of Mosul - popularized the idea of "hybrid warfare," which killed faith in the Internet as democratizing and legitimized ~unlimited narrative control as necessary for national security.
The institution of "fact-checking" also began as an anti-terrorism initiative, with USG putting out "terror facts" to fight ISIS.
Obama's Iran nuclear deal was not popular when it was made. Almost overnight, an entire legion of (fake) experts sprouted up in seemingly independent institutions (media/NGO) linked to the Democratic Party to be quoted by reporters saying it was great.
The sheer scale of Russiagate (Trump as actual Russian asset) mania, with top figures in almost every venerated media/academic/security institution in the country endorsing it in 2016. Easy to forget, since it was brushed under the rug after it fell through.
Russia hysteria provided a clean way for US libs, the national security state, and the EU to reclassify Trump/Brexit/dissent as a form of war (which could then be prosecuted relentlessly outside the normal bounds of politics).
Russiagate was a literal conspiracy cooked up by the Clinton campaign and voluntarily participated in by both the FBI, much of the natsec state, tech, and media. It threatened to turn the US into a one-party state where the security chiefs decide acceptable candidates.
As revealed by Lee Smith, the FBI knowingly fabricated evidence and asked Christopher Steele (who produced the fake dossier for the Clinton campaign) to put his name on it to justify spying on the Trump campaign. CIA officials (Brennan) also got in on it.
In the last few weeks of the Obama Admin, Obama created and expanded the Global Engagement Center, ostensibly to fight foreign disinformation. With Russia as an excuse, it quickly expanded to coordinating the closure of the entire domestic Internet.
Unlike Google or other major tech companies, Facebook had to be threatened/coerced, which it was because it allowed Trump to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Obama personally threatened Zuckerberg into sweeping censorship in November 2016.
Conveniently, the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) popped up the same day, allowing Zuck (and other social media platforms) to delegate deciding what was true or not to a third party.
The IFCN, of course, was closely linked to the Democratic Party, and functioned as ideological compliance officers or commissars more than "fact-checkers."
The FBI coordinated meetings between tech companies, "fact-checking" NGOs, and journalists to censor under the guise of fighting foreign disinfo.
Hamilton 68, a govt-backed org, created a dashboard claiming many regular conservative Twitter users were Russian bots. They got enormous (positive) press for these claims, and Twitter knew they were false but kept silent so as not to alienate their parent org, ASD.
The conceptual universe used by the disinfo industry. Disinfo was knowingly false statements, misinfo was mistaken, and malinfo was true but "demonstrated malicious intent," a very useful way of pathologizing inconvenient facts.
The rapid expansion of disinfo organizations, many of which pivoted after decades of working on freedom of speech and expression.
The constant transfer of personnel between the different arms of the information state (tech, intelligence/security state, NGOs, academia, media) blurred the boundaries between them.
Several disinfo orgs, such as Hamilton 68 and New Knowledge (which perpetrated a false flag against Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race) were genuine conspiracies perpetrating knowing psyops (disinfo, ironically) against the public.
The utility of NGOs, which allowed the government to do things that would be illegal for formal state agencies to do, like censor tens of millions of social media posts per month.
The successful collusion between media orgs, tech companies, and the FBI to suppress the (entirely true, reported by a major corporate org) Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020. Twitter suspended the NY Post account for tweeting their own article, and Facebook banned DMs of it!
The lockdowns put the information state into overdrive and brought it into the physical world and the lives of apolitical normies.
The disinfo apparatus constantly censored anything that went against expert (or "expert") guidance... but expert guidance changed constantly during the pandemic, so that what was yesterday's forbidden crimethink became today's party line.
Again, this included censoring entirely factually correct statements, provided they were deemed, by a handful of fact-check orgs, harmful.
The demolition in Canada of what was left of the distinction between public and private spheres, the core of liberal society, in favor of mass debanking during the trucker protests.
Disinfo censors tended to come from fields like counterterrorism, journalism, academia, and epidemiology. Notably, all of these fields have a terrible recent track record. Thus it's not surprising the disinfo complex completely failed at its own stated goals.
Tech platforms + associated NGOs/journos/intelligence are neither fully public nor fully private, but effectively another branch of government capable of implementing policy autonomously.
Anyways, you can buy the book here:
amazon.com/Information-St…
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