Jacob Siegel, I'll just say it. You're one of my favorite writers. I always read a new Jacob Siegel piece when it drops. I was super eager to read this book. And you've written a book that accomplishes something I imagine to be very difficult, which is crystallizing very recent history. We're talking about just the past 20 years or so from 2006, 2007 to present, and revealing the emergence of a truly new form of governance and social control, one that people are familiar with that maybe reached its zenith during the COVID era, but which

we're still largely living under now, what you call the information state. How would you

succinctly describe the information state? Well, thank you for that introduction. Sack. I'm

honored. I think the easiest way to understand the information status as a form of government that rules through the control of technical code. It rules through the control of the digital infrastructure rather than through the prescribed mechanisms of representative government. So if liberal democracy was organized,

both around individual rights, enshrined in written documents like the Constitution, and in powers

prescribed to fiscal institutions, human institutions like Congress, the Supreme Court,

the information state shifts that sovereignty shifts the exercise of power away from those

physical institutions and written documents into the code of the Internet, essentially, into the underlying architecture of the digital

environment within which we now exercise life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So as life

itself has shifted online into this new form of digital society, we've attempted

to maintain these older constitutional principles.

And I'm not saying that the principles don't deserve to be maintained, but there is a

difficulty in the transition.

There's a gap in the application because the location of sovereignty and of power becomes opaque within this digital system. And so one more

way to think of it, maybe for reason readers, is in terms of property rights and property relations.

So, you know, pretty clearly the modern liberal system of government was in part about

protecting private property. But when you shift that model online and you begin to wonder, well, what does property mean online?

Is our data our property?

Is our speech our property online?

What is my property within this new kind of digital society?

And the very confusion around that question has created an

opportunity for forms of authority to be exercised and for forms of governmental power to be

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