Information rage

Hello and welcome to “Extremely Online” — a weekly column where I’ll be exploring all the dark subcultures of social media and the unsettling implications of the internet.

As the online editor of The Critic, I occasionally feel as if I should do more research on who is actually reading us. Where do you all live? How old are you? Are you Pepsi people or Coke guys and gals?

The problem — or, perhaps, a problem — is that I feel like this kind of research would be a huge waste of time when I could be trying to commission and edit more and better articles. 

Jacob Siegel’s new book The Information State is about how institutions — and, especially, governments — have gathered, managed and controlled information. 

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Siegel writes, elites saw the chance to “transcend politics altogether” as “enlightened rationality was leading people to drop their differences and accept a single universal standard of truth”.

This, claims Siegel, is “the inner logic of technocracy”. More than a hundred years on, it was also evident when Barack Obama claimed that if you give people “good information” they will make “good decisions”. “And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.”

Siegel himself has a wealth of information on the problems with this approach. Firstly, of course, it is often very difficult to know what is true. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, public health authorities made radically different claims at different times. “Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities,” though, Siegel writes, “Experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science.”

Secondly, there is the problem of distinguishing between the descriptive and the normative. A lot of political disagreements are not reducible to disagreements about what is true but about what is good or desirable. We have often been prevailed upon to “believe the science”, as Siegel writes, but believing in the value of science as a method of establishing what is true and plausible is different from knowing what should be done with the results. 

Thirdly, and relatedly, there is the problem of individual freedom. The collection and control of information can of course breach our rights, as Siegel illustrates with elegant discussions of COINTELPRO and the NSA scandal. But in the context of an “information state”, this is normalised and excused by the technological reductionism that shrinks us down to manipulable data.

Siegel takes special aim at managerial liberalism in his book — the Democratic Party, media organs like the New York Times, and social media platforms in the mid-2010s. Future attempts to address this theme may well put more emphasis on the pivot much of Big Tech has been making towards the Trump administration. Peter Thiel, whose company Palantir works with militaries and government agencies on data analysis, has been a supporter of Trump and a mentor to JD Vance. Still, Siegel does not propose that the “information state” is party political — commenting, in his introduction, on how various politicians will decry the effects of social media, for example, only inasmuch as they can be directed against their specific interests.

I think Siegel might overstate the extent to which modern governments can be described as “technocratic”. While there is such a thing as a religious belief in science , there is also such a thing as science being used to sacralise belief. When blatant pseudoscience is used to prop up egalitarian narratives, for example, it is very clear what is the chicken and what is the egg. (I’m sure someone could fill in the gaps for a right-wing equivalent to this.)

Siegel also left me with questions as well as answers in his discussion of “disinformation” and the discourse that surrounds it. I agree with Siegel about how the fear of “disinformation” can be used, consciously or otherwise, to promote authoritarianism — either when accurate claims are pathologised or when the importance of inaccurate claims is exaggerated. But we are still left with liars and bullshitters and we still have to do something about them. Siegel makes the valid point that when government is “opaque and manipulative”, paranoia thrives. But credulity and opportunism are still fundamentally human. We should not lose sight of how pervasive they can be, and of the perils of overcorrection, but the problem remains even if the treatment has been damaging. 

Ultimately, an online age, with a globalised economy, makes it impossible to imagine the end of the information state (except inasmuch as one imagines the apocalypse). But we must do our best to reshape its premises — to challenge the idea of elite informational omnipotence, to elevate critical thinking rather than just to prohibit error, and to uphold privacy as a virtue in itself. 

With AI becoming the mutant child of the information age — conceived from human data yet appearing to have developed powers of its own — this is potentially a futile endeavour. But who knows? I don’t want to fall prey to the sort of informational overconfidence I’ve just lamented. “The future stays mysterious,” writes Siegel at the end of his book. In this, it resembles the present and the past.

Anyways, who are you? Where do you live? Are you a Coke or a Pepsi kind of person?