Tyranny Through Technology
https://freebeacon.com/culture/tyranny-through-technology/
Publish Date: 2026-03-29 05:02:00
Source Domain: freebeacon.com
George Orwell, in his immortal 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature,” delineates a distinction between two types of attackers of intellectual freedom, both real but one in a sense more real than the other. “On the one side,” he writes, “are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy.” This distinction is at least as useful in the age of Trump and social media.
The new book by journalist Jacob Siegel, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, is a structural and historical examination of the ways that in the information age, with the help of the right kind of journalists and officials working to craft narratives, the practical enemies of freedom triumph over its theoretical friends. And more ambitiously, it is an examination of the ways that information technology actually necessitates this process.
The internet, Siegel argues, has for practical purposes created a totally new form of depersonalized tyranny that is hard to understand in terms of Americans’ previous, legalistic notions of political power or censorship. After all, the most powerful entities today, in terms of shaping the public understanding of reality, are not usually government ones. As an American, for instance, I am theoretically protected from much government censorship by the First Amendment, and the norms of my society guard against government agencies doing too much overt domestic propaganda outwardly seeking to change my mind one way or another. But practically, as a modern information worker who spends hours online almost every single day, what I see and do not see as I seek to understand the world around me is determined in very large part by powerful forces whose interests and doings are not particularly apparent to me. Somebody in San Francisco could almost certainly cause me to become very worried about, say, the fact that men and women these days ain’t like they…
