Keen On

“What conclusion do you draw if you see a system that continues to grow more powerful despite failing at the things it says it’s going to accomplish?” — Jacob SiegelJacob Siegel grew up in Brooklyn, studied history at Boston University, enlisted in the US Army after September 11, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, as an intelligence officer, he had the latest drones, sensors, Palantir databases, and predictive models at his fingertips — but still couldn’t get a coherent answer about what, exactly, America was trying to accomplish in its war with the Taliban. To him, the technology was as extraordinary as the incoherence of the war.In his new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, Siegel argues that within a few years of coming home, those same tools were being used on American citizens. This “Information State” was born in Herat and Kandahar. It came home to our iPhones.But Siegel’s Information State isn’t the conventional leftist critique of Big Tech. Siegel argue