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Speaker 1: Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markoi Show on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: My guest today is Jacob Siegel.

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Speaker 1: Jacob is a columnist for Tablet and the author of

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Speaker 1: the new book The Information State, Politics, and the Age

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Speaker 1: of Total Control, published by Henry Holt out now anywhere

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Speaker 1: you buy your books. He also co hosts the Manifesto

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Speaker 1: podcast with the novelist Bill Clay. Hi, Jacob's so nice

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Speaker 1: to have you on.

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Speaker 3: Hi.

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Speaker 2: So I had your brother, Harry.

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Speaker 1: Siegel on just a month or two ago, and I

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Speaker 1: told him he has the very best New York accent

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Speaker 1: because it feels so familiar to me, and it's like

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Speaker 1: my part of South Brooklyn accent. And you sound exactly

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Speaker 1: like him.

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Speaker 3: You know, personally, I like that Marine Park like the

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Speaker 3: Irish accent.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's your favorite. Okay, how does that sound?

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Speaker 3: Really, it's like a higher quality to it, almost like

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Speaker 3: old James Cagney gangst their pictures.

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Speaker 1: Right, you guys sound like annoyed Jews, which is what

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Speaker 1: I would be going for.

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Speaker 3: Okay, angry Jews, not angry.

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Speaker 2: Not angry. No, No, you're not angry.

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Speaker 1: You guys are so happy. You're like, you know, completely

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Speaker 1: happy warriors. But you know, the you didn't get your

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Speaker 1: gefilta the right way this morning, and I'll tell you.

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Speaker 1: So tell me about your new book, What is the

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Speaker 1: Information State?

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Speaker 3: So I started writing this book really through this long

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Speaker 3: essay I wrote for Tablet Magazine called a God to

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Speaker 3: Understanding the Hoax of the Century Thirteen Ways of Looking

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Speaker 3: at Disinformation, which was my attempt to understand how this

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Speaker 3: relatively unknown phenomenon disinformation had gone from being a kind

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Speaker 3: of relic of the Cold War spoken about in the

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Speaker 3: context of spycraft and in the context of the Soviet

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Speaker 3: Union which no longer existed, to suddenly becoming totally ubiquitous

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Speaker 3: in the American political landscape, coincident with the rise of

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Speaker 3: Donald Trump in twenty fifteen. In twenty and sixteen, and

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Speaker 3: it seemed evident to me as I started looking at this,

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Speaker 3: not only that there was a lot of let's say,

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Speaker 3: political malfeasance and kind of partisan exploitation of this concept

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Speaker 3: to serve what were just nakedly political ends, right to

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Speaker 3: sort of discredit Trump is and whatever you thought of Trump.

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Speaker 3: It was obvious that there were these sort of inflated

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Speaker 3: charges about the power of disinformation that were being used

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Speaker 3: to sort of paint all Trump supporters as if they

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Speaker 3: were either unwitting dupes of Kremlin propaganda, or perhaps they

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Speaker 3: were even you know, something more malevolent, like you know,

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Speaker 3: actual form Asians doing active measures. And then when I

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Speaker 3: looked even deeper and sort of applied a more critical lens,

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Speaker 3: what I realized was that this phenomenon that I was seeing,

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Speaker 3: disinformation or the war against disinformation specifically, had all of

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Speaker 3: these resonances with experiences I had had as a US

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Speaker 3: Army officer and an intelligence officer in Afghanistan specifically. I

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Speaker 3: was in Iraq also earlier in two thousand and six

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Speaker 3: two thousand and seven, but I had a different, more

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Speaker 3: kinetic role in Iraq, and so I started to recognize

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Speaker 3: these kind of tactics strategies even at a deeper level,

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Speaker 3: philosophies of information warfare and information control creeping into the

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Speaker 3: American political system. And finally, to wrap it up, this

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Speaker 3: brought me to this idea of the information state as

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Speaker 3: a distinctive form of political regime which attempts to replace

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Speaker 3: the earlier structures of constitutional representative democracy based on the

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Speaker 3: procedures of law, the sovereignty of individual voters, the power

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Speaker 3: of democratic institutions. It attempts to sweep all of these

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Speaker 3: away and replace them with a form of mass information control,

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Speaker 3: whereby the powers that control the algorithms that structure our

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Speaker 3: perceptions of reality have the ability to engineer political outcomes

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Speaker 3: and social outcomes for that matter. And so power moves

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Speaker 3: away from individual voters and their votes, let's say.

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Speaker 4: And it moves up into these obscure, somewhat mysterious kinds

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Speaker 4: of algorithmic and informational control, where the ability to determine

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Speaker 4: what information somebody sees and what information they don't see

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Speaker 4: is how you shape the vote that they will cast.

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Speaker 4: So that, in the kind of grand sense, is the

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Speaker 4: information state. But the more deeply I looked at it, also,

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Speaker 4: the more I discovered that this was something that's been

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Speaker 4: built really over centuries, in the sense that these ideas

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Speaker 4: date back. Ideas about information control as a sort of

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Speaker 4: technique for mastering the physical universe dates back to the

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Speaker 4: scientific Revolution, and then shows up in American politics really

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Speaker 4: with the progressive and technocratic movements, and then really in

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Speaker 4: full force with the administration of Woodrow Wilson in the

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Speaker 4: First World War.

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Speaker 1: Were you surprised at kind of more sophisticated people falling

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Speaker 1: for various hoaxes that you wouldn't imagine would fall for

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Speaker 1: those hoaxes.

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Speaker 3: I mean, I think the only honest would answer that

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Speaker 3: is to say that I was only surprised after I

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Speaker 3: stopped following for them. Initially in twenty sixteen, Let's say

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Speaker 3: I remember reading the accounts of Trump's ties.

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Speaker 5: To Putin and.

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Speaker 3: Hearing the reports coming from politicians like Adam Schiff, who

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Speaker 3: I didn't trust necessarily, but who who I assumed were

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Speaker 3: working within the bounds of a certain certain constraints of

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Speaker 3: the American political system that you couldn't simply invent a

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Speaker 3: conspiracy about.

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Speaker 1: The president being the Russian right, Yeah.

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Speaker 3: You could exaggerate, but where there's smoker's fire. And then

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Speaker 3: at a certain point after I don't know what it was,

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Speaker 3: the sixth or seventh time that I heard Shift promise

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Speaker 3: an imminent smoking gun revelation that was going to wrap

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Speaker 3: all this up and establish it definitively. And I saw

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Speaker 3: that not only was this not delivered, not only did

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Speaker 3: this smoking gun if materialize, but the MSNBC host or

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Speaker 3: remember the CNN hosts, Know Times, Washington Post didn't. It

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Speaker 3: didn't seem to in any way disturb their sense of

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Speaker 3: Shift's credibility. They just reported the same story.

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Speaker 5: Over and over.

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Speaker 6: So it was only when I, you know, sort of

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Speaker 6: woke up to that, which was probably it took a

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Speaker 6: year or so. I mean, I think it was twenty

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Speaker 6: seventeen before I really fully realized, Okay, it's there's nothing

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Speaker 6: here and nothing of what he's promising is here.

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Speaker 3: Then I could be surprised that other people, by whatever

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Speaker 3: it was twenty twenty twenty twenty three, were still so

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Speaker 3: wrapped up in this.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it was interesting because I was not a trump

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Speaker 1: band at all in twenty sixteen.

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Speaker 2: I was a third party voter.

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Speaker 1: I just I just didn't like the guy, and I

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Speaker 1: still thought the people who were posting that he was,

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Speaker 1: you know, basically a Russian spy, right or compromised by Russia.

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Speaker 1: I thought that was so far out. It was like

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Speaker 1: it was like calling somebody a Nazi. It had stopped mattering.

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Speaker 1: It no longer registered because it was such a crazy

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Speaker 1: thing to say that I couldn't take it seriously. And

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Speaker 1: I was surprised at kind of people who I thought

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Speaker 1: were more sophisticated purveyors of news and information would fall

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Speaker 1: for it, and it does make me afraid that we

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Speaker 1: would fall for other things that and mass we could

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Speaker 1: be lied to often and we probably are. Are you

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Speaker 1: worried at all about the fact that if people could

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Speaker 1: buy that, they could buy a whole bunch of other

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Speaker 1: things too, Well, first of all, you.

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Speaker 3: Know that's you're a lot wiser and more STU. That

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Speaker 3: was really to catch.

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Speaker 6: That, because I think you were probably in the minority

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Speaker 6: at that point.

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Speaker 3: But am I worried about it? I'm so worried I

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Speaker 3: wrote a whole book about it.

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Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I not only am I worried about it,

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Speaker 6: But when you peel back the layers a bit, you

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Speaker 6: realize historically that the premise that the masses.

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Speaker 3: Can have their public opinionship that public opinion is a

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Speaker 3: sculptible resource, is more than a century old, and there

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Speaker 3: has been a continuous refinement of techniques applied towards sculpting

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Speaker 3: public opinion for more than one hundred years, not only

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Speaker 3: in the United States but across the world. That this

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Speaker 3: technology of sculpting public opinion on a mass scale has

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Speaker 3: a number of identifiable features. One, it always accelerates dramatically

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Speaker 3: in times of war, and so if you can manufacture

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Speaker 3: a kind of false pretext of war, like an invasion

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Speaker 3: of Russian controls, for instance, You can use that as

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Speaker 3: a way of accelerating this process of mass opinion formation. Secondarily,

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Speaker 3: it never manages to achieve the thing that it's supposed

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Speaker 3: to achieve. So human beings turn out to be remarkably

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Speaker 3: difficult to enslave on mass through techniques of mind control,

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Speaker 3: no matter how sophisticated the technologies. It doesn't matter if

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Speaker 3: you're talking about the radio or AI.

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Speaker 5: The human being remains a.

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Speaker 3: Very stubborn subject to control in this way. It doesn't

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Speaker 3: mean that you can't create massively destructive effects in a

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Speaker 3: society through the effort. It doesn't mean that you can't

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Speaker 3: even convince some people. But I think what tends to

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Speaker 3: happen is this kind of ongoing onslaught of information warfare

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Speaker 3: drives people crazy, makes them vulnerable to all kinds of nonsense,

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Speaker 3: but rarely produces the sort of neat, predictable waves of

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Speaker 3: correct opinion that it's supposed to accomplish.

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Speaker 1: We're going to take a quick break and be right

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Speaker 1: back on the Carol Markowitz Show.

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Speaker 2: Where does the AI revolution fall into this?

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Speaker 1: Because, like so for example, Adam Schiff, you know, says

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Speaker 1: it's you know, smoking gun any minute now and smoking

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Speaker 1: gun any.

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Speaker 2: Minute now, and it never happens.

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Speaker 1: And then you you know, people I assume look at

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Speaker 1: Adam Schiff and say I'm not going to believe what

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Speaker 1: he says anymore. And then you can have an AI

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Speaker 1: person say it. You can have somebody who doesn't exist

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Speaker 1: lie to people on a large scale and you know,

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Speaker 1: make her very attractive and show her in bikinis telling

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Speaker 1: you stories.

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Speaker 2: People could fall for that.

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Speaker 1: And then there is nobody to be held accountable. There's

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Speaker 1: nobody to say, Okay, I'm not going to believe you anymore.

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Speaker 3: Ultimately, in these cases, there's a political system to fall

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Speaker 3: back on where powerfuls to reside in some sense, and

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Speaker 3: so as AI technologies make this question of ultimate sovereignty

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Speaker 3: more and more opaque and mysterious. And how powerful is

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Speaker 3: Elon Musk within the American political system at this point?

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Speaker 3: How powerful are the people determining X's algorithms or Googles

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Speaker 3: for that matter. No one ever talks about Google because

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Speaker 3: Google is very smartly, you know, being much more circumspect

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Speaker 3: about the ways in which ideological bias and you know

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Speaker 3: other even more subtle forms of kind of political control.

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Speaker 3: They're just baked into the operating structure of Google. But

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Speaker 3: we can't in a representative constitutional system like the United States,

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Speaker 3: affect the composition of Google.

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Speaker 5: There's still a way to vote and.

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Speaker 3: To exercise sovereignty through the political system, which is ultimately

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Speaker 3: when I'm saying, like, the only way to affect this,

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Speaker 3: And if it's not done that way through the political system,

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Speaker 3: then I think what you're gonna witness is just the

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Speaker 3: gradual leaching away of the meaning of rights like voting

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Speaker 3: until they're essentially worthless because the technology AI is going

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Speaker 3: to just slowly. It's like money being transferred out of

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Speaker 3: a bank fund of penny at a time, right like

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Speaker 3: political freedom, sovereignty is being a way out of individual

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Speaker 3: citizens and the organizations specific associations that they form. It's

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Speaker 3: being transferred out of those and into these sort of

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Speaker 3: mass state tech configurations at a very rapid pace.

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Speaker 1: Is the information state a pessimistic book, like do you

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Speaker 1: think this can be improved upon?

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Speaker 2: Or are we really in trouble?

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Speaker 5: We're really in trouble.

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Speaker 3: But I'm not a pessimist, or like, at a very

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Speaker 3: very deep level, I'm not a pessimist. And you know,

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Speaker 3: I look at an organization like Khabad and their attitude

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Speaker 3: toward technology, which is that technology is part of the

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Speaker 3: process of the redemption of the entire world, that there's

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Speaker 3: a reason why the Internet arrived.

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Speaker 5: And yet even.

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Speaker 3: Though they associate the developments in the tech technological sphere

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Speaker 3: with coming in Musha, they still exercise incredibly smart in

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Speaker 3: my opinion, and deliberate controls about how they interact with

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Speaker 3: those technologies. So I would say it's not a pessimistic

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Speaker 3: book because I'm not a pessimist. I'm an I don't know,

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Speaker 3: I'm not sure optimists would be a right word it

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Speaker 3: would be the right word, But I'm a believer at

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Speaker 3: a very deep level. However, we're in an extraordinarily dangerous

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Speaker 3: moment for anyone who cares about matters like human liberty

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Speaker 3: or for that matter, of the American constitutional system.

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Speaker 1: A question I ask all of my guests is what

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Speaker 1: are you most proud of in your life?

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Speaker 5: Such a question I had to think about this. Can

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Speaker 5: I tell you?

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Speaker 3: Can I go through some options that I thought about?

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Speaker 1: Okay, please, So there's no wrong answer here. You know,

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Speaker 1: you can just say I'm most proud of my book,

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Speaker 1: the Information State.

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Speaker 2: It could be anything.

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Speaker 3: No, I'm not most proud of my I like my book.

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Speaker 3: I'm very proud of my book.

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Speaker 5: But it wouldn't I don't think my book.

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Speaker 3: Would crack the top five. No. I completed Ranger School,

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Speaker 3: which is a very difficult, especially infantry school in the

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Speaker 3: US Army, and I did it when I was not

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Speaker 3: either in the active through the Army. I was in

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Speaker 3: the National Guard. I wasn't really young anymore when I

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Speaker 3: was twenty nine when I went through, and so I

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Speaker 3: had a sort of and I was a chainsmoker. I

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Speaker 3: quit right before I went to Ranger School. But in

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Speaker 3: other words, like I had to train myself to get

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Speaker 3: through Ranger School.

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Speaker 5: And most of.

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Speaker 3: Most graduates of Ranger School, which is a very high

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Speaker 3: failure because it's so intent and difficult. You know, the

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Speaker 3: average soldier going through is either straight out of Ranger Battalion,

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Speaker 3: so like nineteen twenty, just like hard charging young men

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Speaker 3: or their infantry officers, right out of the Infantry basic course,

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Speaker 3: where they've gone through essentially a four month preparatory period

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Speaker 3: where the Army is just training.

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Speaker 5: Them to get away from rangers.

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Speaker 3: Bool whereas I at the time was a chain smoking

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Speaker 3: freelance writer living in Prospect Heights, Brooke.

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Speaker 2: What made you do it?

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Speaker 3: What made me do it? I had something to prove

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Speaker 3: to myself and I had already been I had already

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Speaker 3: done a deployment in Iraq at that point, and one

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Speaker 3: of my soldiers in Iraq was a Ranger Battalion veteran,

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Speaker 3: and it made an impression on me. And then many

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Speaker 3: of the soldiers and officers I most respected had an

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Speaker 3: Into TAB and it meant a lot, you know, it

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Speaker 3: sort of established like a baseline of resilience, toughness, confidence.

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Speaker 3: So I wanted it, and it was difficult, but I graduated,

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Speaker 3: I got my TAB. So I thought about saying Ranger School,

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Speaker 3: but ultimately I decided that having my children is what

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Speaker 3: I'm most proud of, and raising them, but also having

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Speaker 3: them choosing to choosing to be a father, to commit

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Speaker 3: my life to my family in that way, which had

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Speaker 3: the most you know, we're talking about like technologies to

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Speaker 3: shift people's opinion, but nothing in my life shifted my

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Speaker 3: way of thinking more.

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Speaker 5: Than having kids.

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Speaker 3: It was a radically consciousness shifting experience. So I'm proudest

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Speaker 3: of being a.

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Speaker 5: Father that much too.

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Speaker 2: That's a great answer. I love it.

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Speaker 1: It could be a two part answer. Anything goes here

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Speaker 1: on the Carol Marcowitz Show. We're going to take a

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Speaker 1: quick break and be right back on the Carol Marcowitz Show.

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Speaker 1: My other question that I ask all of my guests

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Speaker 1: is a forward looking question. And I know that you're

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Speaker 1: you said your book is not optimistic. It's not pessimistic.

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Speaker 1: Maybe it's just the way things are. But give us

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Speaker 1: a prediction about the next five years, and it could

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Speaker 1: be about anything at all.

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Speaker 2: It could actually veer into art or music or anything.

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Speaker 3: You want, oh art of music.

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Speaker 2: That could be anything. I don't want to I don't

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Speaker 2: want to lead you. You could five year prediction about anything.

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Speaker 3: I think it all relates to actually, because one of

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Speaker 3: the things that's happening and we're seeing this play out

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Speaker 3: and the kind of mob mentality around the Epstein story

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Speaker 3: is that the.

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Speaker 5: Arrival, the real.

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Speaker 3: Arrival of digital technology as a kind of cosmology unto itself.

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Speaker 3: Any sufficiently powerful technology generates its own universe of consciousness,

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Speaker 3: affective dimension of feeling, thought, experience. This is what the

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Speaker 3: great media theorist Marshall McClue and meant when he spoke

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Speaker 3: about the Gutenberg galaxy that the printing press. The Gutenberg

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Speaker 3: printing press wasn't just a means of you know, utilizing

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Speaker 3: typeset to print books. It generated a new galaxy of

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Speaker 3: political forms, emotional forms, literary forms, artistic forms.

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Speaker 5: We're seeing that now with.

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Speaker 3: Digital technology as well, which you know has been around

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Speaker 3: for I mean, digital technology itself has been around for

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Speaker 3: effectively a century at this point, a little less than

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Speaker 3: a century, but the effects of mass universalized digital technology

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Speaker 3: as the essential medium through which we communicate do politics,

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Speaker 3: do sports, do dating, do everything? Digital technology as the

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Speaker 3: medium of existence is resurrecting ways of life that are fundamentally,

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Speaker 3: at this stage more medieval in their orientation than what

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Speaker 3: we might think of as modern. Certainly they're not print

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Speaker 3: age modern print age. Modernity was about reason and rationality

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Speaker 3: and the exercise of sovereign individual rights, and that's not

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Speaker 3: what the medieval world was structured around. Those are not

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Speaker 3: the values that the medieval world was structured around. Hierarchical

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Speaker 3: senses order. It was structured around hierarchies of fealty and

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Speaker 3: duty that are quite different from the more individualistic, reason

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Speaker 3: based world that we've been living in for the past

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Speaker 3: five hundred years, and which is coming apart at you know,

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Speaker 3: nuclear speeds before our eyes. So my prediction is that

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Speaker 3: the art will look a lot more medieval as you know,

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Speaker 3: the short end for it meaning a cult based in

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Speaker 3: mystery and revelation rather than based in rationality and reason,

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Speaker 3: and that even technology and science will follow that same pattern.

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Speaker 3: So technology and science AI is the perfect example. We

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Speaker 3: already have black box AI technologies that are inscrutable to

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Speaker 3: the people who designed them, right, the people who program

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Speaker 3: AIS don't understand how they work. It's functionally indistinguishable from magic,

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Speaker 3: and that in a word, is medieval.

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Speaker 5: That's what I mean.

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Speaker 2: So interesting.

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Speaker 1: I can tell you I have definitely never gotten that

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Speaker 1: answer before, and some answers do repeat on the five

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Speaker 1: year prediction question. Jacob, it has been so nice talking

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Speaker 1: to you. I've been reading you for a long time.

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Speaker 1: I've been a big fan. Leave us here with your

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Speaker 1: best tip for my listeners on how they can improve

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Speaker 1: their lives.

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Speaker 3: Try to be patient with your children.

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Speaker 5: That's taken me some time to really learn.

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Speaker 3: I mean patience is what it really means is to

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Speaker 3: give your presence to your children, like we talk about

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Speaker 3: being present, but I think what that really means is

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Speaker 3: you can be present with yourself, but then you have

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Speaker 3: to give that presence to your children. One other thing quickly,

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Speaker 3: because I just learned this and it's amazing. There's a

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Speaker 3: famous book of like Mussol or Jewish ethics by this catalyst,

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Speaker 3: Rabbi the Raumkams. This book called Me, and he says

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Speaker 3: this amazing thing, which is there's a lot of context,

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Speaker 3: but essentially he says that in order to be a

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Speaker 3: good person, to really serve God, you have to devote

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Speaker 3: I think it's an hour a day, he says, to

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Speaker 3: being watchful over yourself and your actions and evaluating how

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Speaker 3: you acted. Because it's not enough to want to be good.

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Speaker 3: You have to apply strategies to be good. But what

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Speaker 3: he says that makes it so brilliant is it can't

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Speaker 3: be any longer than an hour. In other words, if you.

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Speaker 1: Say three hours laying awake at night not not not

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Speaker 1: the best.

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Speaker 3: For that not only is it not the best, but

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Speaker 3: you're not it's not contributing to you being a better person.

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Speaker 3: It's taking you in the other direction.

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Speaker 5: So you have to.

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Speaker 3: Control, you have to subordinate that self critical mood to

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Speaker 3: the higher goal right, which is.

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Speaker 5: To the service of guidance. Is the way they're on

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Speaker 5: top puts it.

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Speaker 2: I love it.

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Speaker 1: Only one hour of self criticism per day, friends, no

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Speaker 1: more than that.

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Speaker 2: I love it. He is Jacob Siegel.

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Speaker 1: Check him out at tablet and get his new book,

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Speaker 1: The Information State, Politics and the Age of Total Control.

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Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on the show, Jacob.

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Speaker 5: Thanks Carol, it's great to be