The Karol Markowicz Show: The Information State: How AI, Disinformation & Algorithms Are Reshaping Power
3/25/202629 mincomplete
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0:47Call 844 -844 -iHeart. Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
0:59My guest today is Jacob Siegel.
1:01Jacob is a columnist for Tablet and the author of the new book, The Information
1:06State, Politics in the Age of Total Control, published by Henry Holt.
1:10Out now, anywhere you buy your books.
1:12He also co -hosts the Manifesto podcast with the novelist Bill Clay.
1:17Hi, Jacob. So nice to have you on.
1:19Hi, Carol. It's great to be here.
1:21So I had your brother, Harry Siegel, on just a month or two ago, and
1:26I told him he has the very best New York accent because it feels so
1:31familiar to me, and it's like my part of South Brooklyn accent, and you sound
1:36exactly like him. You know, personally, I like that Marine Park, like the Irish Brooklyn
1:43accent. It's my personal favorite.
1:45That's your favorite? Okay. How does that sound, really?
1:47It's hard to be. It's got the, like a higher quality to it, almost like
1:52old James Cagney gangster pictures.
1:56Right. You guys sound like annoyed Jews, which is what I would be going for.
2:02Okay. Angry Jews. Not angry.
2:05Not angry. No, no, you're not angry.
2:07You guys are so happy.
2:09You're like, you know, completely happy warriors.
2:11But, you know, you didn't get your gefilte the right way this morning.
2:16I'll tell you. So tell me about your new book.
2:20What is the information state?
2:23So I started writing this book really through this long essay I wrote for Tablet
2:29Magazine called A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, 13 Ways of Looking
2:34at Disinformation, which was my attempt to understand how this relatively unknown phenomenon, disinformation, had
2:43gone from being a kind of relic of the Cold War, spoken about in the
2:49context of spycraft, and in the context of the Soviet Union, which no longer existed,
2:55to suddenly becoming totally ubiquitous in the American political landscape, coincident with the rise of
3:03Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.
3:06And it seemed evident to me as I started looking at this, not only that
3:10there was a lot of, let's say, political malfeasance and kind of partisan exploitation of
3:17this concept to serve what were just nakedly political ends, right, to sort of discredit
3:24Trumpism, whatever you thought of Trump.
3:26It was obvious that there were these sort of inflated charges about the power of
3:32disinformation that were being used to paint all Trump supporters as if they were either
3:39unwitting dupes of Kremlin propaganda, or perhaps they were even, you know, something more malevolent,
3:47like, you know, not actual foreign agents doing active measures.
3:52And then when I looked even deeper and sort of applied a more critical lens,
3:59what I realized was that this phenomenon that I was seeing disinformation or the war
4:05against disinformation specifically had all of these resonances with experiences I had had as a
4:12U .S. Army officer and an intelligence officer in Afghanistan specifically.
4:18I was in Iraq also earlier in 2006, 2007, but I had a different, more
4:24kinetic role in Iraq. And so I started to recognize these kind of tactics, strategies,
4:33even at a deeper level, philosophies of information warfare and information control creeping into the
4:40American political system. And finally, to wrap it up, this brought me to this idea
4:46of the information state as a distinctive form of political regime, which attempts to replace
4:54the earlier structures of constitutional representative democracy based on the procedures of law, the sovereignty
5:04of individual voters, the power of democratic institutions, it attempts to sweep all of these
5:10away and replace them with a form of mass information control, whereby the powers that
5:18control the algorithms that structure our perceptions of reality have the ability.
5:25to engineer political outcomes and social outcomes for that matter.
5:29And so power moves away from individual voters and their votes, let's say, and it
5:37moves up into these obscure, somewhat mysterious currents of algorithmic and informational control where the
5:46ability to determine what information somebody sees and what information they don't see is how
5:54you shape the vote that they will cast.
5:58So that in the kind of grand sense is the information state.
6:03But the more deeply I looked at it also, the more I discovered that this
6:07was something that's been built really over centuries in the sense that these ideas date
6:13back, ideas about information control as a sort of technique for mastering the physical universe,
6:22dates back to the scientific revolution and then shows up in American politics, really with
6:28the progressive and technocratic movements, and then really in full force with the administration of
6:34Woodrow Wilson and the First World War.
6:37Were you surprised at kind of more sophisticated people falling for various hoaxes that you
6:45wouldn't imagine would fall for those hoaxes?
6:49I mean, I think the only honest way to answer that is to say that
6:53I was only surprised after I stopped falling for them.
6:59Initially, in 2016, let's say, I remember reading the accounts of Trump's ties to Putin
7:09and to the Kremlin and hearing the reports coming from politicians like Adam Schiff, who
7:16I didn't trust necessarily, but who I assumed were working within the bounds of a
7:22certain constraints of the American political system, that you couldn't simply invent a conspiracy about
7:31the president being a, or the - Russian spy, right, yeah.
7:34You couldn't invent this from all the cloth.
7:36You could exaggerate. Sure. But where there's smoke, there's fire.
7:41And then at a certain point after, I don't know what it was, the sixth
7:45or seventh time that I heard Schiff promise an imminent smoking gun revelation that was
7:52going to wrap all this up and establish it definitively.
7:55And I saw that not only was this not delivered, not only did the smoking
7:59gun never materialize, but the MSNBC hosts or whomever, the CNN hosts, you know, Times,
8:06Washington Post, didn't, it didn't seem to in any way disturb their sense of Schiff's
8:14credibility. They just reported the same story over and over.
8:17So it was only when I, you know, sort of woke up to that, which
8:23was probably, it took a year or so.
8:26I mean, I think it was 2017 before I really fully realized, okay, it's, there's
8:33nothing here and nothing of what he's promising is here.
8:36Then I could be surprised that other people by whatever it was, 2020, 2023, were
8:44still so wrapped up in this.
8:45Yeah, it was interesting because I was not a Trump fan at all in 2016.
8:50I was a third party voter.
8:52I just, I just didn't like the guy.
8:54And I still thought the people who were posting that he was, you know, basically
8:59a Russian spy, right, or compromised by Russia.
9:02I thought that was so far out.
9:04It was like, it was like calling somebody a Nazi.
9:07It had stopped mattering. It no longer registered because it was such a crazy thing
9:12to say that I couldn't take it seriously.
9:14And I was surprised that kind of people who I thought were more sophisticated purveyors
9:21of news and information would fall for it.
9:24And it does make me afraid that we would fall for other things that, that
9:29in mass, we could be lied to often.
9:33And we probably are. Are you like worried at all about the fact that if
9:38people could buy that, they could buy a whole bunch of other things too?
9:43Well, first of all, you know, that's, you're a lot wiser and more astute than
9:48I was. No, really, really to catch that, because I think you were probably in
9:52the minority. Really? At that point.
9:56But am I worried about it?
9:58I'm so worried I wrote a whole book about it.
10:00Yeah. Not only am I worried about it, but when you peel back the layers
10:07of it, you realize historically that the premise that the masses can be, can have
10:15their public opinion shaped, that public opinion is a sculptable resource, is more than a
10:23century old. And there has been a continuous refinement of techniques applied towards sculpting public
10:31opinion for more than a hundred years, not only in the United States, but across
10:36the world, that this technology of sculpting public opinion on a mass scale has a
10:43number of identifiable features. One, it always accelerates dramatically in times of war.
10:50And so if you can manufacture it kind of.
10:52false pretext of war, like an invasion of Russian trolls, for instance, you can use
10:58that as a way of accelerating this process of mass opinion formation.
11:02Secondarily, it never manages to achieve the thing that it's supposed to achieve.
11:09So human beings turn out to be remarkably difficult to enslave en masse through techniques
11:18of mind control, no matter how sophisticated the technologies, it doesn't matter if you're talking
11:25about the radio or AI, the human being remains a very stubborn subject to control
11:33in this way. It doesn't mean that you can't create massively destructive effects in a
11:40society through the effort. It doesn't mean that you can't even convince some people.
11:45But I think what tends to happen is this kind of ongoing onslaught of information
11:52warfare drives people crazy, makes them vulnerable to all kinds of nonsense, but rarely produces
12:00the sort of neat, predictable waves of correct opinion that it's supposed to accomplish.
12:08We're going to take a quick break and be right back on The Carol Markowitz
12:11Show. It's Mojo's Summer of Joy, helping you build the ultimate summer staycation at home.
12:20Enjoy a range of luxury five -star inclusions with every M -Series home.
12:24Plus, get $65 ,000 off your build.
12:27Think premium upgrades like 900 millimeter higher appliances, ducted air conditioning, resort -style bathroom, even
12:33solar power, all included. Don't check in when you can move in.
12:37Switch to holiday mode with Mojo Homes.
12:39More summer joy. Mojohomes .com .au.
12:42T's and C's apply. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
12:46Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad -supported streaming music from Spotify and
12:51Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two
12:55combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.
12:59Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.
13:03Think podcasting can help your business?
13:05Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.
13:08Call 844 -844 -IHEART to get started.
13:12That's 844 -844 -IHEART. Where does the AI revolution fall into this?
13:18Because like, so for example, Adam Schiff, you know, says it's, you know, smoking gun
13:22any minute now, and smoking gun any minute now, and it never happens.
13:26And then you, you know, people, I assume, look at Adam Schiff and say, I'm
13:30not going to believe what he says anymore.
13:32And then you can have an AI person say it.
13:36You can have somebody who doesn't exist lie to people on a large scale and,
13:42you know, make her very attractive and show her in bikinis telling you stories.
13:49People could fall for that.
13:50And then there is nobody to be held accountable.
13:52There's nobody to say, okay, I'm not going to believe you anymore.
13:55Ultimately, in these cases, there's a political system to fall back on where power has
14:04to reside in some sense.
14:06And so as AI technologies make this question of ultimate sovereignty more and more opaque
14:14and mysterious, and how powerful is Elon Musk within the American political system at this
14:21point? How powerful are the people determining X's algorithms or Google's for that matter?
14:27No one ever talks about Google, because Google is very smartly, you know, being much
14:34more circumspect about the ways in which ideological bias and, you know, other even more
14:41subtle forms of kind of political control.
14:45They're just baked into the operating structure of Google.
14:48But we can't, in a representative constitutional system like the United States, affect the composition
14:56of Google. There's still a way to vote and to exercise sovereignty through the political
15:06system, which is ultimately what I'm saying, like, the only way to affect this.
15:13And if it's not done that way through the political system, then I think what
15:22you're going to witness is just the gradual leeching away of the meaning of rights
15:28like voting until they're essentially worthless.
15:33Because the technology, AI, is going to just slowly, it's like money being transferred out
15:43of a bank fund a penny at a time, right?
15:45Like political freedom, sovereignty is being transferred away out of individual citizens and the organizations,
15:55the civic associations that they form.
15:58It's being transferred out of those and into these sort of mass state tech configurations
16:05at a very rapid pace.
16:09Is the information state a pessimistic book?
16:13Like, do you think this can be improved upon?
16:15Or are we really in trouble?
16:18We're really in trouble, but...
16:20I'm not a pessimist, like at a very, very deep level.
16:23I'm not a pessimist. And, you know, I look at an organization like Chabad and
16:30their attitude toward technology, which is that technology is part of the process of the
16:39redemption of the entire world, that there's a reason why the Internet arrived.
16:44And yet, even though they associate the developments in the technological sphere with, you know,
16:53coming in Mashiach, they still exercise incredibly smart, in my opinion, and deliberate controls about
17:02how they interact with those technologies.
17:05So I would say it's not a pessimistic book because I'm not a pessimist.
17:10I'm a, I don't know, I'm not sure optimist would be the right word, but
17:15I'm a believer at a very deep level.
17:18However, we're in an extraordinarily dangerous moment for anyone who cares about matters like human
17:27liberty or, for that matter, the American constitutional system.
17:32A question I ask all of my guests is, what are you most proud of
17:37in your life? Such a question.
17:41I had to think about this.
17:42Can I tell you, can I go through some options that I thought about?
17:47Okay. Please. So. There's no wrong answer here.
17:52You know, you can just say, I'm most proud of my book, The Information State.
17:56It could be anything. No, I'm not most proud of my book.
17:58I like my book. I'm very proud of my book.
18:01But it wouldn't, I don't think my book would crack the top five.
18:06No, I completed ranger school, which is a very difficult, essentially infantry school in the
18:17U .S. Army. And I did it when I was not either in the active
18:22duty army. I was in the National Guard.
18:24I wasn't really young anymore.
18:25I was 29 when I went through.
18:29And so I had a sort of, and I was a chain smoker at the
18:33time. I quit right before I went to ranger school.
18:37But in other words, like I had to train myself to get through ranger school.
18:44And most of, most graduates of ranger school, which has a very high failure rate
18:50because it's so intense and difficult.
18:52You know, the average soldier going through is either straight out of enlisting in ranger
18:58battalion. So like 1920, just like hard charging young men or their infantry officers right
19:06out of the infantry. Basic course where they've gone through essentially a four month preparatory
19:12period where the army is just training them to get ready for ranger school.
19:16Whereas I at the time was a chain smoking freelance writer living in Prospect Heights.
19:23What made you do it?
19:26What made me do it?
19:27I had something to prove to myself.
19:29And I had already been, I had already done a deployment in Iraq at that
19:35point. And one of my soldiers in Iraq was a ranger battalion veteran.
19:42And it made an impression on me.
19:44And then many of the soldiers and officers who I most respected had a ranger
19:50tab. And it meant a lot.
19:53You know, it sort of established like a baseline of, resilience, toughness, toughness, competence.
20:01So I wanted it and it was difficult, but I graduated, I got my tab.
20:06So I thought about saying ranger school.
20:08And, but ultimately I decided that having my children is what I'm most proud of.
20:15And raising them, but also having them and choosing to, choosing to be a father,
20:26to commit my life to my family in that way, which had the most, you
20:34know, we're talking about like technologies to shift people's opinion.
20:38But nothing in my life, but nothing in my life shifted my way of thinking
20:41more than having kids. It was a radically consciousness shifting experience.
20:50So I'm proudest of being a father and having my children.
20:54That's a great answer. I love it.
20:57It could be a two -part answer.
20:58Anything goes here on the Carol Markowitz Show.
21:00We're going to take a quick break and be right back on the Carol Markowitz
21:04Show. It's Mojo Summer of Joy, helping you build the ultimate summer staycation at home.
21:12Enjoy a range of luxury five -star inclusions with every M -Series home.
21:16Plus get $65 ,000 off your build.
21:19Think premium upgrades like 900 millimeter higher appliances, ducted air conditioning, resort style bathroom, even
21:25solar power, all included. Don't check in when you can move in.
21:29Switch to holiday mode with Mojo Homes.
21:31More summer joy. Mojohomes .com .au.
21:34T's and C's apply. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?
21:38Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad -supported streaming music from Spotify and
21:43Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two
21:47combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.
21:51Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.
21:55Think podcasting can help your business?
21:57Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.
22:00Call 844 -844 -iHeart to get started.
22:03That's 844 -844 -iHeart. My other question that I ask all of my guests is
22:11a forward -looking question. And I know that you said your book is not optimistic,
22:17it's not pessimistic, maybe it's just the way things are.
22:20But give us a prediction about the next five years.
22:24And it could be about anything at all.
22:26It could actually veer into art or music or anything you want.
22:31Oh, art and music. It could be anything.
22:34I don't want to lead you.
22:36You could have a five -year prediction about anything.
22:38I think it all relates, actually, because one of the things that's happening and we're
22:45seeing this play out and the kind of mob mentality around the Epstein story is
22:53that the arrival, the real arrival of digital technology as a kind of cosmology unto
23:04itself. Any sufficiently powerful technology generates its own universe of consciousness, an affective dimension of
23:14feeling, thought, experience. This is what the great media theorist Marshall McLuhan meant when he
23:21spoke about the Gutenberg galaxy, that the printing press, the Gutenberg printing press, wasn't just
23:28a means of utilizing typeset to print books.
23:32It generated a new galaxy of political forms, emotional forms, literary forms, artistic forms.
23:42We're seeing that now with digital technology as well, which has been around for –
23:50I mean, digital technology itself has been around for effectively a century at this point,
23:55a little less than a century.
23:57But the effects of mass universalized digital technology as the essential medium through which we
24:07communicate, do politics, do sports, do dating, do everything.
24:11Digital technology as well. Digital technology as a medium of existence is resurrecting ways of
24:19life that are fundamentally at this stage more medieval in their orientation than what we
24:26might think of as modern.
24:27Certainly, they're not print age modern.
24:30Print age modernity was about reason and rationality and the exercise of sovereign individual rights.
24:40And that's – and that's not what the medieval world was structured around.
24:44Those are not the values that – the medieval world was structured around hierarchical senses
24:50of order. It was structured around hierarchies of fealty and duty that are quite different
24:58from the more individualistic, reason -based world that we've been living in for the past
25:03500 years, which is coming apart at nuclear speeds before our eyes.
25:10My prediction is that the art will look a lot more medieval as the short
25:19end for it, meaning occult based in mystery and revelation rather than based in rationality
25:29and reason. And that even technology and science will follow that same pattern.
25:36So technology and science, AI is the perfect example.
25:40We already have black box AI technologies that are inscrutable to the people who designed
25:48them. Right. The people who program the AIs don't understand how they work.
25:53It's functionally indistinguishable from magic.
25:55And that, in a word, is medieval.
25:58That's what I mean. So interesting.
26:01I can tell you I have definitely never gotten that answer before.
26:05And some answers do repeat on the five -year prediction question.
26:09Jacob, it has been so nice talking to you.
26:12I've been reading you for a long time.
26:14I've been a big fan.
26:16Leave us here with your best tip from my listeners on how they can improve
26:20their lives. Try to be patient with your children.
26:29That's taken me some time to really learn.
26:35I mean, patience is what it really means is to give your presence to your
26:43children. Like, we talk about being present, but I think what that really means is,
26:47like, you can be present with yourself, but then you have to give that presence
26:52to your children. One other thing, quickly, because I just learned this, and it's amazing.
26:57There's a famous book of, like, Musa, or Jewish ethics, by a Kabbalist rabbi, the
27:04Ramchal. There's this book called Mesilad Yasharim.
27:08And he says this amazing thing in it, which is, there's a lot of context,
27:12but essentially he says that in order to be a good person, person to release
27:18from god you have to devote i think it's an hour a day he says
27:23to being watchful over yourself and your actions and evaluating how you acted because it's
27:28not enough to want to be good you have to apply strategies to be good
27:32but what he says that makes it so brilliant is it can't be any longer
27:36than an hour right like in other words if you sit around three hours laying
27:40awake at night not not not the best for that not not only is it
27:44not the best but it's you're not it's not uh contributing to you being a
27:50better person it's taking you in the other direction right so you have to control
27:55you have to subordinate that self -critical mood to the higher goal right which is
28:03um to service of god is the way the wrong problem puts it i love
28:10it only one hour of self -criticism per day friends no more than that i
28:15love it he is jacob siegel check him out at tablet and get his new
28:18book the information state politics in the age of total control thank you so much
28:23for coming on the show jacob thanks carol it's good to be it's mojo summer
28:30of joy helping you build the ultimate summer staycation at home enjoy a range of
28:36luxury five -star inclusions with every m -series home plus get 65 000 off your
28:41build think premium upgrades like 900 millimeter higher appliances ducted air conditioning resort style bathroom
28:48even solar power all included don't check in when you can move in switch to
28:53holiday mode with mojo homes more summer joy mojohomes .com .au t's and c's apply
28:58this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human