Jacob Siegel
Inside the Panopticon

We have known about the staggering scale of ongoing state mass surveillance, previously associated with regimes such as China or East Germany, since Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013. A year later, the scholar Shshana Zuboff theorised “surveillance capitalism”, a form of extraction which relies on the commodification of personal data, that underpins our online existence. Covid-era mass contact tracing, along with the monitoring and suppression of civilian communications as “disinformation”, documented in the 2022 Twitter files, should have made the pernicious nature of the “information state” widely understood.

Yet most civilians are oblivious to the reality of living in this information state. Few think that arrests of individuals for social media posts amount to state overreach, and hardly anyone is upset that their mobile phone is constantly sharing data with the security apparatus. Thriving on this disengagement, the technological infrastructure built to make society ostensibly safer and more rational has steadily replaced democratic freedoms with systems of digital control. 

Instead of vying for popular support, the information state uses censorship and algorithmic manipulation to shape public perceptions and engineer reality. An alliance between government and tech business formed to wage the war on terror has evolved into an unholy new kind of technocratic state and turned against its biopolitical subjects. 

How can we make politics in this panopticon? Jacob Siegel’s The Information State highlights the risks facing a society unwilling to think for itself and asks whether the information of the information age can ever be a substitute for truth.

Join the writer and former US Army officer Siegel in a conversation about the rise of the data-fuelled control state, the encroachment of military technologies in civic life, and the role of political thought under surveillance.