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Hidden Forces

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control | Jacob Siegel

Hidden Forces

Demetri Kofinas

Business, Government

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2026

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In Episode 470 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jacob Siegel — writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, U.S. Army veteran, and author of The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control — about the intellectual and historical roots of his argument that the internet has given rise to a fundamentally new form of political regime, one that governs not through force or democratic consent, but by controlling the codes and protocols of the digital public arena.

The first hour traces the theoretical and historical foundations of Siegel's argument, from the media theory of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul, to James Beniger's 1986 work 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.

They discuss the rise of digital swarms, the Anonymous movement, and what Siegel observed when he returned from Afghanistan in 2012 to find American culture being reshaped by the velocity and incoherence of online mass formation. The hour closes with an examination of his central thesis: that the internet — born out of Cold War Pentagon research and reconsolidated under government auspices after September 11th — has given rise to a third form of political regime he calls the information state.

The second hour examines how the information state differs in kind from the analog propaganda systems of the 20th century, and why Siegel believes it is simultaneously more powerful and more brittle than what came before. They 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 — and explore Siegel'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 prosecution of foreign disinformation campaigns, while preserving the essential distinction between the speech rights of citizens and non-citizens alike.

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Episode Recorded on 03/16/2026

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Gaffinus, and you're listening to Hidden Forces,

0:06.0

a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens, to challenge consensus

0:12.2

narratives, and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world.

0:18.1

My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Jacob Siegel, a writer and editor,

0:22.9

a tablet magazine, a veteran of the United States Army who served in Iraq and Afghanistan,

0:28.3

and the author of the new book The Information State, Politics in the Age of Total Control.

0:35.2

Jacob and I spend the first hour of this conversation tracing the intellectual and historical roots that inform the foundations of the control. Jacob and I spend the first hour of this conversation, tracing the intellectual

0:39.0

and historical roots that inform the foundations of his argument about the information state,

0:44.1

from the work of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innes, Neil Postman,

0:49.3

and Jacques Lule, to James Benegger's 1986 book, The Control Revolution, to the 17th century philosophy of

0:56.1

Godfrey Leibniz, and its downstream influence on the cybernetic frameworks that gave rise to the

1:01.1

internet. We discussed the rise of digital swarms, the anonymous movement, and what Jacob observed

1:06.7

when he returned from Afghanistan in 2012 to find American culture being reshaped by the velocity

1:12.6

and incoherence of online mass formation. We then examine his central thesis that the Internet,

1:19.7

born out of Cold War Pentagon research and reconciled under government auspices after 9-11,

1:26.1

has given rise to a third form of political regime he calls

1:30.1

the information state, one that governs not by force or democratic consent, but by consolidating

1:36.1

the codes and protocols of the digital public arena to engineer the public's compliance with its

1:41.7

programs. The second hour is devoted to examining how the information state differs in kind from the

1:48.2

analog propaganda systems of the 20th century, and why Jacob believes it is simultaneously more

1:54.1

powerful and more brittle than what came before.

1:57.4

We dig into the paradox at the heart of his argument that the same informational infrastructure

...

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