From Sumerian scribes to the Patriot Act, government is the management of information by institutions. A state’s reach is proportional to its institutional grasp, and that grasp is defined by its capacity for centralizing and analyzing information. Where the reach of information leads, the grasp of institutions must follow, or government will lose its grip on its subjects.

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The American Revolution arose in a society with weak institutions but strong informational capacity. Governmental authority was on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean. The reach of the British state was irregular even in the British Isles. The bureaucracy and technologies that made the Royal Navy the largest industrial unit in the 18th-century world coexisted with a largely unregulated and untaxed domestic populace.

Meanwhile in the American colonies, a highly literate public filled the informational shortfall with local print such as Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. London’s institutional reach could not beat the informational grasp of the colonial knowledge infrastructure, so London lost its grip before the French intervened to ensure that Britain lost an empire. To see how that colonial knowledge infrastructure shaped the political settlement that followed the American Revolution, we need only read the Federalist Papers.

The American regime became a decentralized federation that protected the rights of the sovereign individual. There was nothing self-evident about this outcome. The American Revolution was a product of unique informational and technological conditions. The print revolution had translated the Bible into English and then circulated republican theorists, ancient and modern, through the presses. The Protestant Reformation had sacralized private perception against established authority, and then fused with older English customs and laws protecting private property and limiting executive authority.

Change your technology and information systems, and individual perceptions and political systems will change too. This is why Plato forbids musical innovation in the frozen utopia of Republic. Like America’s first political cartoon, “Join, or Die,” which was first published in the Philadelphia Gazette, it is a leading indicator of political change. It follows that the Information Age, which began after 1945 as the military innovations of World War Two were applied to civilian and commercial formats, would create its political image, the Information State.

The Information State

Jacob Siegel’s The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control is a path-breaking exploration of how the Information Revolution rewired the American regime — and what that might mean for American democracy. Tocquevillian in reach and grasp, it might be called Technology in America. I think it is the most important political analysis of recent years.

In 2017, Siegel told me, he started to notice “a striking phenomenon which appeared under a number of different guises across our media and politics, initially in talk about ‘fake news,’ and then in talk about ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation.’ These presupposed a set of premises which were being taken for granted in public political discourse, but which seemed quite novel to me.”

Siegel doubted the narrative that “disinformation” had invaded the American political system and swung the 2016 elections. He doubted the Democratic and liberal media line that Donald Trump and other “foreign subversives” were an existential threat to American democracy. He doubted the orchestrated panics that followed: Black Lives Matter, the origins of COVID-19, transgender rights, the cult of the Palestinians, and the fusion of these causes into the permanent revolution of the “Omnicause.”

He also recognized these informational techniques from his service as a U.S. Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beneath the hyperbole about infiltration by “toxic memes and bots,” Siegel told me, he saw the patterning of “tropes that related to counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and........

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