Jacob Siegel returns to talk about his new book The Information State: Politics and the Age of Total Control, which explains why the war on disinformation is a continuation of the War on Terror using repurposed counterinsurgency tools, and the replacement of bottom-up civic institutions with top-down algorithmic control. They cover how Obama's administration built the censorship infrastructure that defined the Trump era, the role of the CIA in fabricating Russiagate through the Intelligence Community Assessment, how COVID censorship was far more radicalizing than Russiagate because it touched people's everyday lives, how tech platforms concentrate power by eliminating private property rights, why younger generations don't care about privacy because they’ve grown up under constant surveillance, and why freedom in the digital age must be found within the system rather than outside it. They also discuss how the rise of AI will follow a familiar historical pattern seen in moments of extraordinary technological change—like the printing press or early mass communications—which typically brings massive social upheaval, often bloody and marked by war, but through which humanity ultimately survives; the only way out is through.
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