Censorship, Power, And The Internet

But this is an area that has captivated him as an area of research and captivates us in terms of understanding where we are today in the world of censorship.

So, Joel, do you want to kick us off with the first question?

Do you think it's been hijacked or is being hijacked?

It was all about how only tyrannies and corrupt dictatorships censored social media and censored the press, and it upheld totally unconstrained free access, global access to social media companies like Facebook and to, you know, search engines, indexing services, informational services like Google, as the kind of um as the criteria for political freedom. This was the meaning of the Internet Freedom Agenda was that states that restrict internet access are categorically, definitionally unfree.

And so the US government was using its full diplomatic might, economic pressure, the kind of full assortment of soft power tools to promote the global spread and indeed the global dominance of these, what are in effect, information monopolies like Google and Facebook.

Now, of course, you know, the punchline to this story, this sort of um cruel twist, ironic twist, uh, depending on how you want to frame it in narrative terms, is that Hillary Clinton is the person who is most responsible for being the kind of face of this when she's Secretary of State.

And then only a few years later, when she runs for president, she becomes the very face of the idea that the dark forces of disinformation have so totally penetrated and taken over the internet and uh hijacked the brains of American citizens, that it's now incumbent upon the government to censor the press, to censor social media in order to uphold what is euphemistically known as um liberal democracy or election integrity.

Now, democracy, which when Clinton was secretary of the state, was equated with an open press, a

kind of open, unrestricted access to social media uh and the internet. Now it's the very reverse, only a few years later, when she's um, you know, unceremoniously defeated by Donald Trump in this offset election that that totally catches the entire kind of institutional elite, very much including the establishment press in the US off guard.

So the one actually, just to add one thing to that, what I would say is, you know, the purpose of this book, my new book, The Information State, um, which is coming out in March of 2026 from Henry Ole, you can pre-order it now. The purpose of the book is not to defend the um the earlier Clinton version of the internet.

Um, I think both Clintonian internets, both the totally optimistic internet cheerleader, internet freedom agenda that she was promoting, was, you know, in my opinion, uh very much diluted about the kind of downsides of the um informationalization of the political process.

Um, and also the response to this years later, when it came time to um decide there had to be a war against disinformation, because it seemed that the same social media companies which were supposed to be um promoting progressive politics all of a sudden became um you know much more suitable, at least in the short term, to promoting an insurgent populist in the form of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, for that matter, on the left.

Um that was a very short-sighted and um, you know, I think damaging reaction insofar as it normalized uh censorship as a kind of political value among liberals, but also the earlier version, the the Obama-Clinton version, that promoted the creation of these gigantic information monopolies like Facebook and Google as you know, the bedrocks of a new, um, more free, more prosperous digital age, which, as we know, uh as you've both written about, you know, really gutted the private sector middle

class, this digital economy. Um, that these are these are two forms of a bad idea.

Was there an economic agenda there as well, in the sense that um if we promote this, everybody's gonna need to buy American technology, and these companies are going to be American that control the global flow of things. So let's get make sure we get our market share as high as possible. Do you think that was any part of the discussion at all?

You know, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times refers to him as a virgin, politically a virgin, because he's relatively unknown. He comes to power as what is known as, you know, the Facebook campaign. This is what brings him to power. And he commands this unbelievable following in Silicon Valley from very early on. So he gives some of his first uh political speeches, his first campaign speeches in 2006 to a Palo Alto Google audience.

His relationship with the the Google crowd and and with Apple is very tight from the very beginning. And of course, Silicon Valley is um pumping, you know, a tremendous amount of money into not only his campaign to get him elected president initially, but then into the Democratic Party machinery that he builds, which is a new kind of Democratic Party, which is systematically replacing um the

old, and what was then, to be fair, already faltering, you know, FDR post-Nield New Deal version of the Democratic Party, which had already started to come along, come apart. You know, private sector labor unions obviously were in decline long before Obama came to power.

But that old version of the Democratic Party coalition, you know, uh white urbans, blacks, other ethnic minorities, private sector middle class, working class, labor unions, um, now gets comprehensively replaced by a new version of the Democratic Party, which is much more of a kind of top-bottom coalition, and places the Silicon Valley tech companies in absolute pride of place. So that's one version of political power that relates to the economic power.

I mean, the the the people who are still behind the the Democrats tend to be on the software side, but what's happened is there the tech bros, I think, have, you know, I think part of what happened is, and maybe this is part of the story we need to tell, is when there began to come both antitrust moves, which in some ways I'm supportive of, um, but also um when they're they're like, for instance, on in AI, I think we had this discussion the other day.

They said, well, there's gonna be two companies who are gonna do AI. Well, every venture capitalist and entrepreneur and and all the other companies are saying, we don't want this. So what I'm really concerned about is what what changed, and I think Marshall's making a good point. Silicon Valley in in uh 2008 was solidly for the Democrats and Obama by 2024, uh, that had begun to unravel. What do you think caused that?

What what changed the nature of the information industry to become more bifurcated than a a solid front?

play in America? Is it can we look at it as being the equivalent of other private industries like uh manufacturing, for instance? And the answer in brief is no, because from the very beginning, the tech industry, the high-tech industry, especially in the form it takes after World War II, is a strategic industry.

So from the very beginning, it is tied into the military defense sector um in America in a way that is not simply relational, but is, in other words, it's not just that it's mutually beneficial, um, but that is uh generative of the of the products it's creating because the government, the US government, is actually providing the strategic direction.

So one of the most obvious examples of this is the radar industry um and the microchip industries, which come out of this uh intense research, industrial, military, scientific apparatus that's built up to win the second world war, that's phenomenally successful, we should add, in winning the second world war. It's a it's a an experiment that succeeds um in enormous and decisive ways.

So, especially in terms of developing new anti-aircraft technologies to deal with the very uh powerful, very deadly uh German Luftwaffe, the Air Force, and then these technologies that are developed during the war and the kind of research uh triangle that's developed to first fund these technologies from the government.

Um, so the government provides the direction, then the uh research laboratories, often at universities, uh, do the kind of uh RD and the analytical work, and then they in turn are connected directly to commercial companies who then take these products to market, and this then comes back to the government. The government gets these products that it can then use in warfare. That's the World War II model.

It continues through uh the Cold War and is in fact intensified in some ways in the Cold War, and then something happens. What happens is that for reasons that I describe in detail in my book are but are beyond the scope of this talk, the internet, which begins as a military research project, that you know, the origins of the internet are which I go into detail about, are really in Vietnam.

Um, and you know, it's both a uh a Cold War project that's intended to provide a communication system that can survive uh nuclear warfare and allow America to retain a command and control system even in a nuclear exchange, but it's also from the very beginning tied into the idea of building what its kind of uh conceptual father, JCR Lickleiter, describes as a universal library, so a repository of all knowledge.

And by mastering this database of all knowledge, which the US is going to create, it'll be able to anticipate political and threat developments across the world. This is in the very origins of the internet, there's this idea. And Lick Leiter talks about creating a man-machine symbiosis, right? This is how he sees the internet. So that's the model that we have for most of the 20th century.

And then this strange thing happens, which I said is beyond the scope of our talk now, which is that this incredibly powerful uh military uh research weapon uh research tool, however you want to look at it, um, but something that's clearly military in its origin and applications, gets privatized. Um, first it gets handed off to a

non-military uh branch of the government, the National Science Foundation. And then the internet, which began as this military research project, gets privatized and commercialized. And when that happens, that's when we get the real origin of what we think of as this kind of libertarian Silicon Valley hacker culture, um, where, you know, the government not only needs to leave us alone so that we can innovate, but the government's a kind of obsolete technology. You know, this is the Well, exactly.

And that suddenly created a massive distributed network that still connected everybody, which is really fascinating. You know, that still hadn't happened before in human history.

Where this early version of the Mac personal computer is advertised as being a bulwark against tyranny, a bulwark, you know, own an Apple computer so that you can fight Big Brother.

one you know, one word or one phrase. And what that does, what the war on terror does, is reconnect the central government, the national security complex, directly to the emerging tech behemoths, and and that's you know, Google at the time, certainly, but then very shortly after, um Facebook as well, Amazon's well and with the with the with Palantir as playing.

Let's say 60 years, um, uh maybe 70 at this point, actually. But so DARPA uh funds this project called Total Information Awareness post-9-11, which is the government's attempt to build what it calls a database of databases. So it's going, it's it's the super Google that's going to consume all information everywhere.

And by all information everywhere, I mean everything from uh library records, you know, of taking out books to commercial transactions, to you know, commercial internet surfing habits, to uh biometric data that's fed into a database. All of this is going to go into one database, and that database then is going to do what's called predictive analysis. And this is what Palantir is founded to do. And it's essentially augury, you know, it's a form of augury.

You know, the the ancient Greeks would uh assemble the entrails of birds to divine signs of the future, and this is the sort of and then sacrifice a few people,

you know.

So, what the Bush administration does is it creates what uh Shoshana Zuboff calls a state of surveillance exceptionalism. The state of surveillance exceptionalism allows these technology companies to become the behemoth information monopolies that they are under the premise that doing so advances U.S. national security interests in a time of war. And that, you know, there are reasonable arguments for some of this, um, but uh we get the consequences now.

So that creates the conditions for this tremendous growth. Then what Obama does when he comes into office is he takes this unbelievably powerful globe-spanning machinery of surveillance and control, and he totally rebrands it by attaching it to his own new party vertical and progressive politics. He takes what the Bush administration had effectively assembled to fight the war on terror.

I don't mean every instrument of fighting the war on terror, but I mean the kind of infrastructure in terms of this new military-industrial complex. And then Obama brings it inside of the party and he he attaches it to his version of progressive politics, which from the beginning stresses informational hygiene, as you might call it. The idea, as Obama expresses in an early speech to a Google crowd, when he says, you know what, what the public needs is just more facts and reason.

We need the, you know, these are busy people out there. When they get bad information, they do crazy things like, I don't know, opposing my healthcare plan or like not voting for me or whatever, speaking to gods and guns. And if we get them the good information, the right information, they'll make the right decisions.

I I I don't know for sure, but uh I do know for sure that he expressed this view a number of times, and then this new machinery of informational control, as you might call it, which is really you know the combined sort of uh reality-shaping power of the social media companies, Google as the dominant search engine, uh, together with a few other key internet hubs, they now create a machinery by which it is possible to centrally shape, if not outright dictate, what information the public receives.

Now, there's one more step just to complete the answer to the question Joel asked, and that is the next thing that happens. So now Obama has taken this internet machinery built in large measure as a uh you know kind of extension of the US national security state. Then it goes commercial. Obama now makes it appealing to liberals, to progressives, and then the next step is

that machinery, the internet, swallows the media. The traditional press goes into a state of total collapse, and it is effectively swallowed whole by these social media companies. So anyone who worked in journalism over the last two decades can tell you not only that the industry has gone through an absolutely massive contraction, you know, something like more than half of all jobs are gone over the last two decades, journalism jobs, local journalism is effectively wiped out.

You get this massive centralization of journalism in hub cities. Those hub cities happen to be directly connected to the tech industry and the kind of billionaire uh financiers. And um and now, if you want to get a story read, you know, initially Facebook has to promote it, has to show up in Facebook's newsfeed, has to show up in a Google search, it has to be promoted on Twitter. So the social media companies become the publishers effectively.

They swallow the news business whole, they become the publishers. And all of that sets up the situation in which, when faced with what is perceived as an existential threat in the form of Donald Trump, this new machinery of combined military, media, commercial, governmental, information control can be used in a very tightly coordinated way to advance one party's interests at the expense of another party's interests and to really comprehensively censor the news that's reaching Americans.

And just to provide an anecdote that illustrates the extent of this, I, you know, most people are aware of the fact that the New York Post story, the New York Post, the longest continuously running um print newspaper in America, founded, or might be the second longest running, founded by Alexander Hamilton.

And the New York Post, many people know, it's coverage of Hunter Biden's laptops, which was really about the sort of corrupt business deals that the Biden family was involved in, um, which was clearly intended as a kind of political October surprise to hurt Biden's chances in the elections. The the social media companies censored uh coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. People know this.

What they might not know is Twitter actually censored private direct messages in which people were sending links to the New York Post story. So here you have a social media company. A social media company that rose to popularity, uh, you know, because of promotion done by the star of Dude, Where's My Car, Ashton Culture, and it's censoring private messages

sent by people sharing legitimate news reporting, whatever you thought of Trump versus Biden, totally legitimate news reporting done by a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton. So it's just the clearest possible example of the inversion of the traditional news pyramid.

But the determinants, like the keywords telling the algorithm what it's scanning for, was obviously developed by humans.

It was happening before, but but you know, I mean, whatever you know, Trump's authoritarian aspects are, the the internet is not being controlled the way it was. But what I was wondering um is are we seeing and when Trump, you know, it will go away at some point. Um, when Trump is gone and the establishment is back in power, um will we see something in the US as we are now seeing in Europe, where and and and the UK?

I assume you've been following that uh and and obviously the worst case in China. Um, are those the the models that we may be going towards?

But I want to address something else because this is really crucial. I agree with Joel. I think we have seen a decrease in censorship online that's dramatic. And yet, as if to prove the point that the disinformation warriors were making all along, the internet is as psychotic and destructive to democratic politics as it's ever been. I mean, the social internet. So, what we've seen is that the sort of language of free speech and the language of anti-censorship has been in part absorbed into a

new kind of political apparatus, I would say, headed by Elon Musk and headed by Twitter, in which um, you know, you can uh sort of promote schizophrenia in the public sphere at like at a nuclear scale, and then defend this in the name of free speech.

And my argument has always been, going back for uh more than half a decade now, the argument I have always made is that a focus on anti-censorship is not enough because the fundamental structure of the internet is damaging to democratic self-government in ways that, you know, I think the two of you have outlined in terms of the ways that it has eroded the middle class basis of the economy. For instance, there are analogs to that.

Um, the ability to have a kind of reasoned discourse between citizens of a democratic polity where you argue over things and and compromise and negotiate and reach some form of consensus, is not possible in a global information system. I'm not somebody who's like uh anti-technology on absolutist grounds. I don't consider myself a Luddite or anti-technology at all.

But I think that the internet as a global information system, that is one which from its inception was intended to face national borders, is incompatible with the national sovereignty that's necessary for you know sovereign democratic nations to exercise.

Because I'm I'm trying to build an audience of the largest number possible. And so my my job as an editor is to figure out what is it that the most people will read and then publish that, right? Today, the algorithms are exactly making the opposite argument. The the algorithm's role as the new editor is what do people read? Each person, each individual person.

Well, and the point is that in the old days, when you were looking to massify the number of people reading, then you had to choose to optimize for

that. Today we're finding it's actually not a zero-sum game. It's not either in the paper or not in the paper. It's these people like this and these people like this, right? This started off this whole world of uh collaborative filtering started with uh Amazon and saying if you like this, then you're gonna like that. So the point is that the algorithms are now building niche audiences. Right. And then their job is to say, how do I build the most number of members of that niche?

We'll let somebody else worry about the other niche. That guarantees polarization, that guarantees fragmentation. And that's what the problem is that we're facing.

They just, you know, if if if all your information is coming essentially from NPR and CNN and New York Times, you're on a different planet than somebody.

Um, in terms of the media in particular, or uh sort of in terms of of the idea of free speech and the and and censorship and a rapid, I think that there's going to be a collapse in the currency of free speech.

affect their own lives, you know, in the sense of the republic that you know Tocqueville describes it, civil society in the sense of what Tocqueville calls the slow and tranquil action of society upon itself. Um that kind of speech can only occur at a certain pace and scale, right? So it requires people who share a set of common premises, who are willing to listen to each other.

It requires a pace of um discourse that allows for the absorption of new information and a kind of uh dialogue pace, that's not what the internet is. You know, I simply don't accept that this is about free speech at this point. I was anti-censorship, I'm still anti-censorship when it's being applied um to the press.

But the idea that a global schizophrenia machine, which is what the sort of social media has become, Twitter in particular, is some sort of uh bastion of free speech, is absurd to me. I don't support it at all. And you know, I would like to see these monopolies brought to heel. And so, unfortunately, however, if that doesn't happen, and I I'm sorry to say I think it's unlikely that that'll happen, what you're going to have is more and more noise pumped into this informational system at scale.

Especially as AI makes it possible to not only produce convincing facsimiles of different voices, but to target those voices at different audiences in the way you were talking about, Marshall, but now at scale, because it's being driven by AI, when that happens, what you're going to have is a kind of collapse in the value of free speech.

What's the point of participating in any sort of uh speech-based exchange if you can never judge the uh judge the worth of of what you're hearing because you don't know if it's coming from an actual human being or or a bot. And and that'll be very bad for uh democratic society.

Again, Henry Holt is publishing it. It'll be available in March 2026. You can pre-order it now. Thank you so much, Jake, for being part of the Feudal Future podcast. We look forward to having you back.