Keen On America

“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 Siegel

Jacob 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 argues that the Obama administration elevated the war on terror’s surveillance apparatus into an art of progressive government — not as Orwellian censors but through a sprawling network of NGOs, fact-checkers, and media organisations that made authoritarian control look like liberal consensus. Ben Rhodes, one of the principal architects of the Information State, called it the echo chamber. Trump’s version is cruder, more monarchical, more wannabe Orwellian. But the infrastructure, Siegel says, is the Internet itself. Digital society has spawned its own form of government regardless of who’s in charge. This Kafkaesque system grows more powerful despite failing at everything it claims to do. You may not be interested in the Information State, but it sure is interested in you. Such is politics in the age of total control.
 
Five Takeaways

•       The War on Terror’s Tools Came Home: Siegel was an intelligence officer in Afghanistan with drones, sensors, Palantir, and predictive databases at his fingertips — and couldn’t get a straight answer about what America was trying to accomplish. Within a few years of returning, those same tools were being used on American citizens. The information state was born in Herat and Kandahar.
•       Obama Built It. Trump Inherited It. Neither Owns It: The Obama administration elevated the war on terror’s surveillance tools into an art of government — not as Orwellian censors but through a progressive gloss of rationality and correct social ideals. Trump’s version is cruder, more monarchical, more direct. But the infrastructure is the Internet itself. Digital society spawns its own form of government regardless of who’s in charge.
•       The System Grows More Powerful by Failing: This is the Kafkaesque horror at the heart of the book. A system that never achieves its stated goals — winning in Afghanistan, rationalising society, controlling public opinion — yet continues to grow larger and more powerful. If a system is rewarded for failing, the system itself has become the purpose.
•       Twitter Under Musk Is a Horrifying Factory of Schizophrenia: Siegel is no Musk apologist. He thinks the early campaign against mass censorship was a good step. But the result — Musk’s Twitter — is social dissolution, not liberation. Removing government control didn’t solve the fundamental problem of how we mediate social relations online.
•       The Human Subject Has Been Diminished: The digital world has relocated human agency into opaque systems. The crisis of the American man — and, Siegel concedes, of the American woman too — is bound up with a technological transformation on the order of the printing press. Industrial-era social relations cannot persist under digital conditions. The information state is the first draft of what comes next.
 
About the Guest

Jacob Siegel is a contributing editor at Tablet magazine and co-editor of the anthology Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He served as a US Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Information State is published by Henry Holt.
References:

•       The Information State by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt, 2026) — the book under discussion.
•       Episode 2845: Let’s Ban Billionaires — Noam Cohen on the Know-It-Alls and the theft of civilisation. Siegel’s argument from the other side.
•       Episode 2847: America’s Suez Moment? — Soli Özel on the Iran war. The information state meets real war.
About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:00) - Introduction: the wages of bitterness and the information state

(02:52) - Brooklyn, Boston University, and the unfocused student

(05:05) - September 11 and the American man who enlisted

(06:02) - Anatole Broyard, not Nathan Zuckerman

(08:09) - McCarthy, the Red Scare, and the fertile fifties

(11:17) - Iraq, Afghanistan, and the disjunction between technology and war

(14:44) - Palantir, drones, and the dream of total control

(15:45) - The war on terror’s tools come home to America

(17:00) - Obama’s progressive information state: not Orwellian, worse

(20:35) - Six Espionage Act prosecutions and the echo chamber

(28:09) - Trump’s quasi-monarchical version vs. Obama’s sprawl

(32:10) - Gramsci, cultural hegemony, and the single national ruling class

(34:02) - The Kafkaesque horror: a system that grows by failing

(43:50) - Twitter under Musk: a horrifying factory of schizophrenia

(44:32) - The crisis of the American man and the diminished human subject

“If the regime doesn’t lose, it wins.” — Soli Özel

It was just past midnight in Istanbul when I reached Soli Özel. The Pentagon had just announced it was deploying 3,000 soldiers — the 82nd Airborne — to the Gulf. Özel — professor of international relations at Kadir Has University, columnist, and one of the most trusted analysts of Middle Eastern politics — is blunt. This might, he warns, be America’s Suez moment.
In 1956, Britain and France — two spent imperial powers that refused to accept they were spent — were humiliated in Egypt. Trump is a noisier, more corpulent Anthony Eden. The difference between then and now is that the US and Soviet Union were ready to replace the European colonial powers. Today, no great power can take America’s place in the region. But its prestige is diminished, its ammunition depleted, and when it called on NATO allies to help open the Strait of Hormuz, nobody volunteered. Russia and China, Özel suggests, are winning on every front without sending any of their crack regiments to the front. It may also be midnight for a declining United States in the Middle East.
 
Five Takeaways

•       The Negotiations Were Going America’s Way: According to the Omani foreign minister, Iran had accepted conditions firmer than the original JCPOA. The war was a choice, not a necessity. The question is who convinced the president: the Venezuela precedent, which suggested quick regime decapitation, or the Israelis, who wanted not just a deal but the regime’s destruction. Nobody told him that Venezuela and Iran have nothing in common.
•       If the Iranian Regime Doesn’t Lose, It Wins: Iran has escalation control. Its defensive resilience has exceeded every analyst’s expectations. It struck the Ras Laffan gas refinery in Qatar — three to five years to repair. It hit radars, data centres, refineries. Nobody thought they could do this. If the regime survives, it emerges emboldened, more autocratic, and the entire Gulf security equation changes permanently.
•       This May Be America’s Suez Moment: In 1956, Britain and France — two spent imperial powers — were humiliated in Egypt. The difference: the US and Soviet Union were ready to take their place. Today, no great power can replace America in the region. But its prestige is diminished, its ammunition depleted, and when it called on NATO allies to help open the Strait of Hormuz, nobody volunteered.
•       The Moral Debate America Isn’t Having: The decapitation strategy — assassinating an entire generation of foreign leaders — crossed a red line that should never have been crossed. The American debate is about preparedness, Israeli influence, and whether Trump can find an exit. The moral question is taking the back seat. The rest of the world has noticed.
•       Russia Wins. China Waits. Nothing Will Be the Same: Oil prices from the sixties to over a hundred. Russia has more room in Ukraine. China is happy the US can’t pivot to Asia and is depleting ammunition reserves meant for a Taiwan scenario. Relations between the Gulf countries, Israel, and the United States will be reconsidered, redefined, and never the same.
 
About the Guest

Soli Özel is a professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, and a columnist for Habertürk. A member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he has taught at Johns Hopkins SAIS, UC Santa Cruz, and Yale, and was a Fisher Family Fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. He writes regularly for Project Syndicate.
References:

•       Episode 2843: The Philadelphia Story — Richard Vague on how America’s first bank was created to fund war. The connection between banking, debt, and war hasn’t changed.
•       Episode 2842: Symbolic Capitalism vs. Symbolic Democracy — this week’s TWTW on whether capitalism permits democracy. The Iran war is the test.
About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

“The problems start when I conclude that only an uninformed, unintelligent, or evil person could hold the view that you hold.” — Julia Minson

In a sneak preview of the 2028 Presidential election, Andy Beshear called JD Vance the most arrogant politician in America. Vance’s spokesperson fires back that Beshear is chasing headlines. Just another disagreeable day in American public life. So how can we make conversation more civil? How to disagree more agreeably?
In her new book (out today) How to Disagree Better, the Harvard public policy professor Julia Minson argues that disagreement is not conflict. You and I can see the world differently and have a completely civil conversation about it. The problem is when we decide the other person is stupid, evil, or both.
Minson’s test case is her own family. Her father-in-law is a retired Army veteran who served in Vietnam and Korea and has voted Republican his entire life. Minson is a first-generation Russian immigrant who came to Denver as a teenager. They disagree on immigration, on ICE, on most of what divides America. The problem, she confesses, is that they don’t actually know why the other believes what they believe because they’ve spent years avoiding the subject. So Minson and her father-in-law make the worst assumptions about each other.
Her deeper argument is about the danger of silence. The loudest disagreements get the headlines, but the more dangerous problem is the people who don’t dare to speak up — the junior person in the corporate meeting sitting on their hands while a bad decision gets made, the teenager who walks out of the room, the patient who leaves the doctor’s office. Minson is honest about the limits of how to disagree better: Putin wouldn’t read this book. Some disagreements are not between equals. But most of ours are — and we’re terrible at them because we’d rather go to the dentist than spend twenty minutes talking to someone who disagrees with us. Let’s hope Minson has sent How to Disagree Better to both Andy Beshear and JD Vance.
 
Five Takeaways

•       Disagreement Is Not Conflict: You and I can see the world differently and have a completely civil conversation about it. The problems start when I conclude that only an uninformed, unintelligent, or evil person could hold the view you hold. That’s when disagreement becomes conflict — and it’s usually based on inaccurate information about the other person’s motives.
•       We Fill In the Blanks with the Worst Possible Story: When people avoid a topic, they don’t actually know why the other person believes what they believe. So they make assumptions — and what they assume is negative. Grandpa doesn’t like immigrants because he’s a racist. That probably isn’t how grandpa would explain himself. Most conflict is bred in misunderstanding.
•       Vulnerability Persuades. Bragging Doesn’t: If Minson says “we should let in more immigrants because my life as an immigrant is wonderful” — that sounds like bragging. If she says “I struggled to find acceptance and I want to make it easier for others” — that resonates. Sharing why a topic matters to you, especially the vulnerable part, changes the conversation.
•       The Real Problem Is Silence, Not Shouting: The loudest disagreements get the headlines. But the more common and more dangerous problem is people who don’t speak up because they’re afraid the disagreement will turn into drama. In corporations, in families, in classrooms — the junior person sitting on their hands while a bad decision gets made. That silence has real costs.
•       Putin Wouldn’t Read This Book: Minson is honest about the limits. Her book is for people who want better relationships with people they disagree with. It’s not for autocrats. Some disagreements are not between equals. Some people have made clear what their goals are, and thoughtful conversation is not one of them. The book works best where diplomacy already should.
 
About the Guest

Julia Minson is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and founder of Disagreeing Better, LLC. Her research focuses on the psychology of disagreement. How to Disagree Better is published by Portfolio/Penguin Random House.
References:

•       How to Disagree Better by Julia Minson (Portfolio, 2026) — out today.
•       Disagreeing Better — Minson’s consulting practice and research hub.
•       Episode 2845: Let’s Ban Billionaires — Noam Cohen on the Know-It-Alls, where the disagreement is rather less agreeable.
About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

“AI is a theft of knowledge. I can’t believe we as a society allowed this.” — Noam Cohen

Ten years ago, Noam Cohen came on the show to ask if it was “Too Late to Save the Internet from Itself?” Back then, this early Silicon Valley critic was a New York Times writer. He was, as it turns out, a “premature anti-technologist” — Cohen’s phrase, borrowed from the premature antifascists who were called communist for opposing Hitler before it was fashionable. We should have listened to him. Now a freelance writer, Cohen describes himself, without self-pity, as a casualty of the internet revolution. The big media world that employed him barely exists anymore. And tech’s Know-It-All elite that he warned us about are richer than ever.
His 2017 book The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball is now back with a new introduction, triggered by that infamous photograph of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration. Cohen’s argument hasn’t changed — history has caught up with it. These weren’t businessmen attending a president’s ceremony, Cohen says. Trump, he fears, is their vessel. Like the tech titans, Trump doesn’t believe in regulation, doesn’t believe in democracy, believes only he can solve it. That’s the same thing Musk says. And Zuckerberg. And Altman. Even Amodei. They are all Know-It-Alls.
 
Five Takeaways

•       We Were Premature Anti-Technologists: Cohen’s phrase, borrowed from the premature antifascists who were called communist for opposing Hitler before it was fashionable. In 2017, he and I could see the consolidation of power. We should have been listened to. We weren’t. Cohen is now a freelance writer whose wife has the steady income. He describes himself, without self-pity, as a casualty of a media world that no longer exists.
•       Trump Is Their Vessel: That photograph at the inauguration — Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Musk — wasn’t businessmen attending a ceremony. Trump doesn’t believe in regulation, doesn’t believe in democracy, believes only he can solve it. That’s the same thing Musk says. And Zuckerberg. And Altman. They’re all unique founders who believe only they can fix the world. They have more in common with each other than with any of us.
•       Stanford’s Eugenics History Explains Silicon Valley: Lewis Terman brought the IQ test to America and built a programme around identifying “gifted” children. His son Fred turned Stanford into the Harvard of the West by importing venture capital. The idea that intelligence can be measured, that the smartest should breed, that society should be run by its cognitive elite — that’s the soil Silicon Valley grew from. It’s also why Jeffrey Epstein was a natural fit.
•       AI Is a Theft of Civilisation: They hoovered up all of human knowledge without permission or payment. Copyright is meaningless. The result isn’t intelligence — it’s replication. John McCarthy dreamed of creating a being three times smarter than Einstein. What we got is a machine that regurgitates our own words and calls it thinking.
•       There Shouldn’t Be Billionaires: Cohen’s conclusion after ten years of watching the Know-It-Alls consolidate power. AI and social media are utilities and should be nationalised. Wealth inequality at this scale is inherently destabilising. California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax and Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s are signs that the tide may be turning. But only if the next election produces a party willing to claw it back.
 
About the Guest

Noam Cohen is a former New York Times technology columnist and the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017; revised edition with new introduction, 2026). He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
References:

•       The Know-It-Alls by Noam Cohen (The New Press, revised 2026) — the book under discussion.
•       Episode 2842: Symbolic Capitalism vs. Symbolic Democracy — this week’s TWTW on the $10 trillion AI startup and whether capitalism permits democracy.
•       Episode 2836: Is Elon Human? — Charles Steel on Musk’s curious mind, referenced in the conversation.
•       Episode 2835: Why Dario Amodei Might Be the 21st Century’s First Real Leader — the Amodei question Cohen answers with a flat no.
About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

“We read so as not to feel alone.” — C.S. Lewis (possibly)

Dan Turello is a cultural historian of medieval Italy, a much published photographer, and the author of the new Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans. I’m sceptical. Especially the promise (or illusion) of better humans. But Turello’s definition of technology goes back further than most — all the way to the original fig leaf. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did, he reminds us, was cover their bodies. Technology, then, in Turello’s framing, is everything that extends beyond the human body. Clothing is technology. Double-entry bookkeeping is technology. The iPhone is just the latest chapter of our technology story that began at the beginning.
His most surprising argument is that our current tech anxiety has medieval roots. St. Francis of Assisi was what he calls a trust-fund kid “avant la lettre” — his father being a wealthy 13th century silk merchant at a time when northern Italy was Silicon Valley. Francis sold some of his dad’s silk, gave the money away, stripped naked before a bishop, and founded a counterculture movement. The first tech backlash, Turello suggests, wasn’t against AI. It was against double-entry bookkeeping. Dante, writing a generation later, idealised an earlier, simpler Florence — what scholars call “paleolithic chic.” No makeup, no ornate clothing, no fleeing to immoral cities. Sound familiar?
On AI, Turello goes a bit Saint Francis on us. Large language models, he fears, generate material without lineage — you can’t trace where the ideas came from, can’t triangulate the sources, can’t validate against reality. Technology is about power, Turello argues — about who controls the storyline. Making us better humans, then, requires recovering a sense of agency. Thus he argues that we should stop outsourcing our thinking, our writing, our photography to machines. Dante wrote the entire Divine Comedy without Claude. These days, we can barely write an email without a little help from our friends at ChatGPT. Machiavelli donned the robes of the past to think and write. We might try putting ours on too. But then isn’t that a tech solution too?
 
Five Takeaways

•       St. Francis Was a Trust-Fund Kid Who Invented Counterculture: His father was a wealthy silk merchant in 13th-century Italy, at the dawn of Europe’s commercial revolution. Francis sold his father’s silk, gave the money away, stripped naked before a bishop, and founded an order that rejected the mechanisms of early capitalism. The first tech backlash wasn’t against AI. It was against double-entry bookkeeping.
•       Technology Is Everything Beyond the Naked Human Body: Turello’s definition goes back to Genesis. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, the first thing they did was cover their bodies. Fig leaves are technology. Clothing is technology. The iPhone is just the latest iteration of a metaphysical problem that’s been destabilising us since the Fall.
•       Dante Wrote the Divine Comedy Without Being Able to Edit: He penned an entire macrocosm of the medieval world from memory, without the ability to rewrite in any meaningful way. Turello thinks Dante would be concerned that we’re losing our memories, our ability to tell a coherent narrative for our lives, and that our existence has become too fragmented. We can barely write an email without ChatGPT.
•       LLMs Generate Material Without Lineage: Technology is about power — about who controls the storyline. Large language models produce text without traceable sources, without verifiable origins, without lineage. You can’t triangulate where the ideas came from. That’s not intelligence. That’s a crisis of provenance.
•       Agency Still Matters: Turello’s hope for humanity is that we recover a sense of agency — the belief that our choices, friendships, relationships, and communities are ours to shape. The alternative is technological determinism: the machine decides. Machiavelli donned the robes of the past to think and write. We might try putting ours on too.
 
About the Guest

Dan Turello is a writer, cultural historian, and photographer. A Technology and Humanity Fellow at Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Future of Mind, AI & Society, his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans is published by Columbia University Press.
References:

•       Connection: How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans by Dan Turello (Columbia University Press, 2026) — the book under discussion.
•       Episode 2840: What Came First: Stories or Language? — Kevin Ashton on storytelling preceding language, a natural companion.
•       Episode 2839: Have Our iPhones Eaten Our Brains? — Nelson Dellis on memory, cognitive atrophy, and outsourcing our minds.
•       Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — referenced in the conversation on technology and power.
About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

 
Chapters:

(00:00) - Introduction: has technology made you a better human?

(03:22) - The iPhone vs. the decisive moment: Bresson and photography

(05:39) - The orange cushion: an ode to imperfection

(06:27) - St. Francis of Assisi: the first tech critic

(07:22) - 800 years of tech anxiety: from double-entry bookkeeping to AI

(11:27) - Žižek, capitalism, and the love-hate relationship with technology

(13:50) - Fig leaves to iPhones: technology as everything beyond the naked body

(15:00) - Marinetti, Svevo, and the mammoth: technology as relationship

(17:54) - Walter Benjamin, The Matrix, and who controls the storyline

(20:51) - Bresson’s decisive moment vs. Nietzsche’s blow it up

(22:25) - Agency under attack: reclaiming embodied experience

(25:47) - Machiavelli donning the robes of the past

(28:44) - Nost...