Transcript: Jacob Siegel
An interview with the American journalist and author
Most of us are aware that the digital age we are living through is a time of incredible transformation. But we may not have contemplated what we’d like to see preserved — things like free speech. Some years ago, my guest on this week’s program began investigating political censorship. What he found was bigger, more all-encompassing, and in fact more interesting. In his new book, he argues that we have entered an entirely new political epoch, that of the information state.
Jacob Siegel is an American journalist. He is the special features editor for Tablet Magazine and co-host of the Manifesto! podcast. His new book is The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s nice to have you on the program. I’ve been following your work for some time and I read your book with a lot of interest. From what I understand, this book started as a long essay for Tablet. You thought you were reporting out a censorship story, but what you found was more interesting and more all-encompassing — basically a whole new political era. Before we get to that, I want to give our listeners background on you and your story. At the age of 20, right after 9/11, you volunteered at Ground Zero and went on to enlist and to serve in Iraq and in Afghanistan, at times as an intelligence officer. Tell us about that time, right after 9/11, and what moved you to serve.
JS: I was going to college at Boston University when the 9/11 attacks happened. I watched them in a state of stunned anticipation. As it was unfolding, the sense that something momentous was occurring was palpable, not only for myself, but I think for many people. My first instinct after I got over that sense of being stunned was to get back to New York, which I did just a few days after the attacks. My brother was already volunteering at Ground Zero. You weren’t actually allowed to go down there when I got back. There was a cordon set around the area, not surprisingly, for security reasons, for health and public safety reasons. The police and military together had set up this cordon, I believe at Canal Street. So essentially a bit north of Ground Zero, there was a choke point. I started off volunteering around Union Square. If anyone is familiar with New York, that’s probably a mile north of Ground Zero. I think there was a Salvation Army that I was working at there. It was just a logistics distribution point. At some point — I had been there only for a couple of days volunteering — I realized that all these trucks were going down with the supplies that we were collecting. I said, “I’ll just sneak onto one of the trucks.” So, me and this other guy who were working there smuggled ourselves onto one of the trucks, got down to Ground Zero. It was quite easy to do. Officially, there was this security perimeter. But it was still very chaotic in those days. Nobody was really checking for volunteers who were looking to get down there. It was not anyone’s priority.
So, we got down to Ground Zero. We found a church that looked like it needed us, where we could be useful. The church was essentially a major supply depot. People were sleeping in the pews. All of these supplies that were coming down were being organized and set up on the steps. They were going to the volunteers. They were going to the firefighters, essentially anyone who needed them. So, we just set up there. We started working. I eventually did a few different things down at Ground Zero. It was, I think, if not right at that moment in the first few weeks when I was volunteering at Ground Zero, then certainly almost immediately afterwards. I could already see where things were going. The war — I don’t think the contours of it were clear yet — but it was obvious that the country was going to war. The thought crystallized in my head that I couldn’t see a reason why I shouldn’t be a part of that. That was really the clearest motivation that I had.
I had competing motivations. I was a young man. I wanted to go test myself. I was a patriotic young man. I wanted to serve my country. I wanted to avenge this attack. All of those things were more or less real, but the clearest imperative was that if other people were going, I couldn’t see why I should be exempt from that. If there was going to be a war and Americans my age were going to serve in the war, then what sense would it make for me to not be a part of that? How would I justify that to myself? I couldn’t. So, very shortly thereafter, I enlisted. By 2006, I was in Iraq, where I spent a long time. I was in Iraq for almost 15 months during the most violent period of the war there, what was known as the Iraqi Civil War. That period of the civil war was taking place. The intra-Sunni-Shia violence was very intense, intra-Iraqi violence. It was also during the period of the surge. So, it was a fateful, pivotal time in Iraq.
I got back and then five years later, I was in Afghanistan in 2012 in a very different war, in a very different phase of the war. Iraq had been this extremely volatile, violent, kinetic period of the war during the surge and the civil war. Then in Afghanistan in 2012, I got into the Afghanistan war just as it was transitioning to what was known as the train-and-assist period of the war. Obama had come into office promising to end the Iraq War, which he did, and promising to win the Afghanistan War. This is the part that people forget. It was a dual promise. He was going to get us out of the bad war and he was going to win the good war, as it were. This was the campaign promise. The way he tried to do that was with this fairly ill-conceived surge in Afghanistan. Long story short, it was an abject failure, the surge in Afghanistan, for a whole number of reasons. But after that ended, instead of ending the war in Afghanistan, he transitioned it into what was known as the train-and-assist period, which ought to be familiar to some listeners from Vietnam also, where there was a similar series of phases in the Vietnam War. There was the advisory phase, then there was the major combat phase of the war, the counterinsurgency phase, and then it went back in its waning years to an advisory phase. Something similar happened in Afghanistan.
I bring this up to say that when I got there in 2012, we thought the war was going to end soon. We were training the Afghan national security forces, who were supposed to take over responsibility. The whole purpose of this kind of train-and-assist model was we would transition areas one by one. Where I was in western Afghanistan was supposed to be one of the first areas fully transitioned. By transitioning, we would be able to extricate ourselves from the war. The problem was that the Afghan forces who we were training had neither the will nor the operational competency nor the logistical setup necessary to do any of these things. So, the whole thing was essentially based on a kind of fiction, which is that there was this independent, autonomously operating thing, the Afghan national security forces, that could be given responsibility for these things that we, the Americans, wanted it to do. But no such force really existed independent of us. It was a projection of what the U.S. wanted in Afghanistan. It wasn’t an independently existing reality there. I realized that not long after I got into Afghanistan. It wasn’t some obscure secret that you had to delve into the nether regions of Afghanistan to discover. It was right there on the surface. The forces we were supposed to train, half of them wouldn’t show up at any given time. It was obvious that their priorities were not our priorities. Yet we continued to go through the motions and there was this fiction of the progress of the war. That really began a period of me thinking deeply about the relationship between American domestic politics, American war policy and information technologies, which I was using daily in Afghanistan — these awesomely powerful databases that I had access to as an intelligence officer, informational databases, programs like Palantir that subsequently became both famous and somewhat notorious, all manner of drones and sensors, all of this stuff. I got back from Afghanistan in 2012 and that’s when my writing career took off in earnest.
TH: We’ll come back to this question of the disconnect between the informational systems and what you were seeing on the ground — which actually happened in Vietnam as well, as you write about in your book. But first, I want to give people a sense of your writing career. In between deployments, you had a couple of lost years. You recently wrote about this, about that period in your life, losing friends overseas and the grief of that. You ultimately signed up for a free writing course for veterans. You published an anthology of fiction from veterans on the War on Terror. How did you make the leap from that into the world of journalism?
JS: Fiction was what I had always wanted to do. Those had been my ambitions as a young man — to be a writer, to be an artist. I felt that was natural to me in some way that journalism didn’t feel natural, though it was the family business. Maybe it felt unnatural because it was the family business and I needed to distinguish myself. I pursued writing fiction and I would have continued to pursue writing fiction if it offered a career. Frankly, my transition into journalism was driven by practical considerations. It wasn’t a deeply considered pivot in my aesthetic preferences or my ideological convictions or anything like that. I needed work of a more serious kind that could support me. As you mentioned, in the period between Iraq and Afghanistan, I drifted. I was active duty in the army doing training stuff for a while. I went to various army schools. I went to Ranger School. I took some short-term work here and there. I was a real estate agent. I did some construction work. I did all sorts of things. None of it amounted to anything like a sustainable career. When I got back from Afghanistan, it seemed in my early 30s that I ought to consider that.
So I took a job at The Daily Beast, where my brother was at the time. He got me the interview. They had a new — what was known then in the digital journalism world — “vertical” they were setting up. So, newspapers had sections, websites had verticals. This was an interesting time in journalism and Tina [Brown], the founder of The Daily Beast, really was ahead of the curve in some ways. The whole revenue model of journalism was in free fall. It was collapsing. Tina [Brown], who had previously been the editor of The New Yorker and is a storied figure in journalism, was pivoting The Daily Beast towards what’s known as the event model in journalism. In other words, rather than relying on subscribers or advertisers to support a print publication, a number of websites — The Daily Beast was one of the first to do this — began to put on these large events. You could draw advertisers and sponsors into these events. Often the sponsors were people who were working in the field that the event was about. Conflicts of interest were shoved to the side. This was a new era. The Daily Beast had a military- and veterans-related event they were putting on called The Hero Project. They hired me to be the editor of the vertical that went along with this event that they were putting on. I’m appreciative for the opportunity they gave me, but it was a strange fit for me. I was probably not the ideal person to be doing that, but I made the most of it at the time and pretty quickly transitioned myself out of that into doing more general reporting. It was also — this was 2013, 2014 — when the major protests in American cities were beginning. The season of protest was beginning. I just went out and started covering that more or less on my own, without anyone assigning me to it. I pretty quickly made that my beat. I became useful to the publication because I was covering it and covering a few other things, national security-related things. That’s really how I got into journalism in a serious way.
TH: Tina Brown is a very famous editor. This period that you’re talking about is something we’ve talked about a lot on this podcast — that I cover in my book that’s coming out soon — is this collapse of the business model and how it completely hollowed out the infrastructure of our media. There are some fascinating quotes in your book from Ben Rhodes about this.
JS: Ben Rhodes was one of the top advisors to Barack Obama and his main speechwriter. They had such a close relationship; there was what was known as a mind meld between Rhodes and Obama. Rhodes was much younger, but they saw the world in much the same way. Rhodes, in 2016, gave a lengthy interview to one of my colleagues at Tablet, David Samuels, in which he described this new method of conveying White House policy through what he called the echo chamber. He was talking specifically about how the White House had sold the Iran deal, which was the signature foreign policy initiative of the second Obama administration, this grand alliance with Iran through the vehicle of this deal over Iran’s nuclear program. What he meant by the echo chamber was that because journalism had been hollowed out in the way you’re describing — and that you talk about in your new book, I take it — reporters no longer had independent sources to know what was going on in other parts of the world. Because in a nuts-and-bolts way, the foreign desks at the major publications had their budgets slashed by half, in some cases eliminated altogether. This was 2016 we’re talking about. Everything he described is even far more advanced at this point. But the foreign desks were gone. So, the kinds of veteran journalists who had spent decades cultivating sources, who knew people in the embassies in these other countries but also in private business, lawyers, so on and so forth, who had a way of touching the reality of these places, spoke the language, all of that was gone.
In Rhodes’s phrase — I’m going to paraphrase here, I forget the exact quote — this had been replaced by 27-year-olds who knew literally nothing about the world. That’s pretty close to an exact quote. This is Obama’s top aide saying this. “They know literally nothing about the world, these 27-year-olds, and they’ll run with what we give them.” If the old journalist was some crusty reporter who had spent years cultivating sources, who had a somewhat antagonistic or skeptical relationship to political officials — the new paradigmatic journalist was a 27-year-old, more or less fresh out of journalism school, whose only real experience was covering a political campaign. Their only real experience was this very insular world of political messaging and political operatives. They were the fodder that Rhodes used, along with ideologically aligned NGOs and nonprofits, to create this echo chamber that essentially astroturfed false consensus on issues. It established this self-enclosed world within which Rhodes could promote his own messaging. He could promote the White House political objectives as if they were an objective reality, as if they were an independent reality that the experts were all ratifying. The journalists would just run with the messaging on this. That was the echo chamber. The whole thing was premised on the fact that journalism as an independent check on power had more or less ceased to exist.
TH: One of the big themes of your book is this sense of unreality. I want to read a quote about where we are now: “New information constantly appears, but its message is never finalized. The individual seeing the information cannot confidently interpret it because they are aware that more information is coming. Something is being communicated, but they cannot say what it means.” What a striking description. The book does a great job of chronicling the history of how we got here, all the players, big and small. I want to pull some of the threads that I found fascinating. I want to start with the roots of the progressive movement, which you say combined a religious impulse with a technological one. Walk us through what that looked like and why it set the stage for what we’re now experiencing.
