Jacob Siegel's The Information State Is An Important and Timely Book
Don't assume that Edward Snowden is a bad guy; it may not be that simple
Like a lot of people, I was dubious about Edward Snowden from the first time I heard his name. I make the usual — and usually correct — assumption that people in our country who are charged with serious crimes are guilty and deserving of harsh punishment.
That goes doubly for those accused of espionage.
There’s little doubt at this point of the guilt of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss. To the same degree, I don’t think anyone sane believes that Benedict Arnold was a loyal American general or that Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen weren’t in the employ of the Soviet Union. And my belief that Snowden was a villain pivoted to virtual certainty when I heard that he had run off to Russia in order to avoid government prosecution for his release of a giant stack of classified digital records.
However, of late, my confidence in these assumptions has been faltering.
What first prompted second thoughts? More than anything else it was Jacob Siegel’s excellent and timely new book The Information State. Above all else, the sometime Tablet magazine editor has provided us with a brilliantly told historical account. His subject is the gradual process by which our government and the leading technology companies have arrived at greater and greater control over the masses of data that each of us produce day by day and how these bits and bytes provide critical insights into who we are.
It is the story of the rise of the “algorithm” and how it can be employed.
Tablet editor and information age skeptic Jacob Siegel.
Siegel starts his tale with what was trumpeted as a “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.” A 1994 manifesto composed by George Gilder, George Keyworth, Esther Dyson and Alvin Toffler, it argued that the rise of the internet and the dispersal of digital information would lead to a relative weakening of the power and influence of centralized bureaucracies. But, as the rest of Siegel’s book shows, in general an opposite trend has been arising. Technocrats and governments know more and more about each of us, and their ability to snoop upon the citizenry has been continually augmented and enhanced.
In order to tell that story, Siegel goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and India and the beginnings of government record-keeping. In just a handful of pages he then moves through a philosophical history of government and its connection to information-gathering. This takes him to Louis XIV’s France, James Madison’s conception of the United States and, finally, the twentieth century.
Siegel rightly sees Woodrow Wilson as the first American leader who employed the institutions of the government in order to create an “information state.” This was achieved by the use of mass media and the routine reading of private messages and letters. Siegel notes that Wilson, like many would-be autocrats, believed that he was justified in what he did as he was aiming to fulfill a series of progressive ideals. However, this vision was not one that placed much faith in its presumed beneficiaries.
In Siegel’s words:
For the new class of professional administrators that he [Wilson] envisioned to exercise their power, it would be necessary to ‘make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right things.’ It was not that the people should be well informed in order to make sound decisions and act as good stewards of their own government. Rather, their official education would serve to make them accept whatever the technocratic experts had already determined. Proper government, Wilson was saying, would rest on propaganda.
Newspapers and radio could be called upon to tell people what they needed to hear. And once the United States had declared war against Wilhelmine Germany, Wilson directed the government to create the Committee on Public Information. It was the first American bureaucracy dedicated to the control and manipulation of information.
