The supreme irony of technocratic politics is that it requires a charismatic figurehead to reach its full potential. Daniel Bell picked up on this in his study of post-industrial society when he remarked that “no matter how technical social processes may be, the crucial turning points in a society occur in a political form.” A culture of deference to machines does not eliminate human control over politics. Instead, it concentrates power in the hands of ever fewer people, pushing politics back toward an obscure kind of absolutism. “It is not the technocrat who ultimately holds power,” Bell concluded, “but the politician.” Barack Obama was that politician.

Yet Obama appeared pragmatic to a fault, almost Spock-like in his unflappable rationality. The furthest thing from a leader interested in overhauling the basic conventions of America’s constitutional democracy. Perhaps that explains why many Americans persisted in viewing him as a moderate even as he oversaw the most radical transformation of their political system since the New Deal. Arriving at the dawn of the social-media age, Obama possessed a vision his contemporaries lacked. He saw how the digital environment could be leveraged to change the public’s patterns of thinking and enforce sweeping and unpopular policies in a country of more than 300 million people. On platforms like Facebook, state and corporate power could be fused together into a new governance structure, one that gave party officials unprecedented power to regulate the information people consumed and the choices they made.

That Obama could actually achieve this vision testified to his exceptional political talents and his image as a figure of bold yet unifying change. He just got it. That was his appeal. While other leading Democrats were still talking about salvaging the war in Iraq, Obama promised to end it. He was the leader who would rescue the country from Wall Street after the 2008 financial crash (in reality, he rescued Wall Street from the crash, at the expense of the country). For voters sick of George W. Bush’s blustering Texas twang and ongoing military occupations, Obama offered a kind of national redemption. Instead of macho swagger, here was a cool customer from Chicago by way of Hawaii. His speeches were measured but uplifting. To many Americans he offered just what his iconic campaign posters promised: Hope.

Partly this had to do with Obama’s special connection to America’s history and to his own past. He was largely unknown, a first-term Illinois senator with no legislative accomplishments to speak of when he ran for president. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd called him “the 46-year-old virgin.” In fact, he was the son of a white Christian mother and white grandparents who raised him in Hawaii, and a Muslim father from Kenya. Starting in adolescence, he immersed himself in black American culture, an identity that he both inhabited and promised to transcend as the first post-racial president. In his autobiographies, he employed a novelistic approach to facts that played on the deeply American right to self-invention. It seemed a real possibility, as Obama entered national office, that Americans might transcend the sins of their past through the character he had created and embodied.

If one aspect of Obama’s appeal connected America to its past, another, equally important aspect, pointed at its future. In his second book, 2006’s The Audacity of Hope, Obama recounts a pilgrimage to California in 2004. “The most memorable part of the trip was a visit that I paid to the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search engine company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.”

Toward the end of his tour, Google executives brought the future president to see a rotating three-dimensional display of the earth. Lights flashed on a pulsating globe to represent the locations of Google searches going on at that moment, with different colors to indicate the multitude of languages used by the searchers. Switched to a different setting, the display showed the traffic patterns for the entire Internet. The sight of it brought Obama to a reverie: “The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which the boundaries between men — nationality, race, religion, wealth — were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light.” 

The agent of the transcendental, evolutionary process Obama witnessed was information — the same mysterious, intangible substance that now fueled the entire digital economy. Mastery over information appeared to be the universal formula for exercising power and imposing one’s will over adversaries. Whether it was warfare, commerce, or national elections, whoever controlled the digital code, as Google did and Obama intended to, held the keys to the planet’s future.  

Past American presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, had also invoked wondrous technologies in the language of spiritual ecstasy. Even by that standard, Obama’s description was impressive. Fusing the image of Google as demigod and bringer of light with the familiar dream of a harmonious global village, it foreshadowed a political formula in which progressive social goals advanced a technocratic will to power.

In response to 9/11, the Bush administration had pushed policies like the Patriot Act, fueling a period of extraordinary growth in Silicon Valley that turned the top tech companies into global monopolies and overseers of a sprawling surveillance empire. But being good for business did not make Bush a popular figure in the Valley. He remained an old-money East Coast establishment Republican, distinctly uncool by the standards of the new elite. If you were hosting a dinner in Napa, mixing with Internet startup founders and venture capitalists, hip conceptual artists, and popular intellectuals, Bush walking in would have ruined the mood.

Obama was the star of those parties. He was a conductor of many instruments. In one register he could imitate the cadences of a black preacher from Chicago, then a few hours later order for the table at Le Cirque. He had degrees from Columbia and Harvard, dropped the correct cultural signifiers to indicate good taste, and showed that he had mastered the two-tiered operation of elite power in America by winning over both the young staffers at philanthropic foundations and the billionaires who financed the world of political nonprofits. 

Shortly after announcing his run for president, Obama returned to Google’s headquarters to announce his “innovation agenda” and was joined onstage by the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt. Toward the end of the event Obama spoke of “the need to use technology and information to break through people’s ill-founded opinions.” Platforms like Google that controlled the world’s data flows would serve, in Obama’s vision, as public fact-checking and opinion-shaping departments. Most voters weren’t bad people, Obama explained, just ignorant. “Mainly people — they’re just misinformed, or they are too busy, they’re trying to get their kids to school, they’re working, they just don’t have enough information, or they’re not professionals at sorting out all the information that’s out there, and so our political process gets skewed. But if you give them good information, their instincts are good and they will make good decisions. And the president has the bully pulpit to give them good information.”

It was not a new idea. American Progressives had been championing the government’s role as public schoolmaster since the late 19th century. In the abstract, perhaps it seemed like a benign program for a liberal society. Why shouldn’t the government inculcate a better-informed citizenry by providing them with true facts about the world? But Obama was not talking about promoting greater access to neutral resources in the interests of a common civic good. He would use the bully pulpit to push Americans toward accepting views on contentious subjects — like the healthcare system, climate change, or the root causes of Islamic terrorism — that aligned with the interests of his political party.

Informing the public meant to him roughly the same thing it had meant to his spiritual predecessor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson who founded America’s first official propaganda organ in 1917, the Committee on Public Information, in order to silence critics of his decision to enter the US into the first world war. For Obama, like Wilson before him, the government would use its control over the news to indoctrinate citizens into holding the correct beliefs while protecting them from allegedly harmful misinformation. The aim was not to empower individuals by improving their access to knowledge so that they could become better able to govern themselves. Rather, in the progressive imagination, proper information conditioned the public to accept decisions made on its behalf by unelected administrators in the party of expertise.

“And that’s what we have to return to,” Obama told the crowd of Google engineers and executives. “A government where the American people trust the information they’re getting. And I’m really looking forward to doing that, because I am a big believer in reason and facts and evidence and science and feedback — everything that allows you to do what you do, that’s what we should be doing in our government.” The Palo Alto audience applauded. “I want people in technology, I want innovators and engineers and scientists like yourselves, I want you helping us make policy — based on facts! Based on reason!” More applause.

Facts! Reason! More applause.

While few Americans had heard of Obama when he made his first pilgrimages to Google headquarters, he was already a celebrity in Silicon Valley. A 2008 article in The Atlantic called his campaign “this year’s hottest startup.” It described how his appeal to tech CEOs had been crucial in pushing him past the far better-known Hillary Clinton to clinch the Democratic nomination. “More than any policy, the idea of Obama and the world he speaks for seemed to excite something deep within the limbic system of the Valley brain that manifested itself through the early and continuing financial support that was crucial to launching Obama’s campaign.”

The relationship between the new White House and big tech rested on more than mere political convenience. Obama and Google shared what could be described as an informational ideology. Marrying the Democratic party’s political class to the tech giants in the Valley, Obama inaugurated the most significant political alliance of the 21st century. That put the final nail in the coffin of the New Deal coalition built by F.D.R. The party’s new members were wealthier than the people they replaced, better educated, more concentrated in hub cities and in industries tied to the federal government. Topping the list of professions that donated to Obama’s campaign were bankers, tech workers, and university employees — the trifecta of the new knowledge economy.

To exercise power without being hampered by legal obstacles, the new party structure relied on institutions outside of the formal government. The tech companies would, when necessary, cooperate directly with federal offices, but they too often relied on pseudo-private third-party cutouts to manage the increasingly complex relationship between the public, the digital platforms, and the state. Bridging the gaps between these centers of power became the business of the nonprofit sector. A trillion-dollar industry by the early 2000s, the nonprofits functioned as an undeclared fourth branch of government, allowing federal officials to skirt oversight by outsourcing policies that might run afoul of the Constitution. The savvier nonprofits didn’t require official orders to carry out the ruling party’s agenda. Even the most idealistic nonprofit workers knew where their bread was buttered and naturally looked to support the state’s sprawling regulatory apparatus. 

But something had begun to change by the middle of Obama’s second term. As the president pushed through his most ambitious and controversial policies, from Obamacare to his Iran deal, it produced a populist backlash that seemed to feed on the antiestablishment tendencies of Internet culture. Control over the information environment was slipping away. As that happened, Obama took an increasingly dark view of the Internet freedom that his administration had once championed. As if to answer those worries, a new crop of nonprofits proliferated over this same period focused on fact-checking political narratives and monitoring the spread of extremism online — a category that the regulators often conflated with populist views. One of those new organizations was called the Data & Society Research Institute.

Danah Boyd embodied the new national elite born out of Obama’s alliance with Silicon Valley. She was punk-corporate; West-Coast-tech-meets-Beltway-insider-meets-New York-media. In the first decade of the 2000s, while she was making a name for herself working at Yahoo and Google, Boyd attended the South by Southwest festival sporting multicolored dreadlocks and a T-shirt that read, “I fuck like a girl.” She was smart, cool, and prolific. That made her a star in a tech industry clinging to its image as a refuge of garage-LAN hackers while it operated the backend control system for a global superpower.

In 2009, Boyd landed a job at Microsoft, where she would remain over the next two decades. The New York Times, in a 2012 profile, marveled at the then-thirty-four-year-old’s “coordinated zebra-striped scarf, tights and arm warmers (arm warmers?), spiky out-to-there hat and pierced tongue.” A child of divorce and a troubled teen, Boyd found a community online. “The Internet was my saving grace,” she told the Times. The paper portrayed her as a rock star with “fans trailing her” at speaking gigs. The year after the Times profile came out, Boyd founded Data & Society as a nonprofit with funding provided by a “generous unrestricted gift from Microsoft.”

On her personal blog, she described herself as “an activist and a progressive” who voted for Obama. Indeed, she helped shape the Obama administration’s approach to the concept of data governance. In early 2014, Boyd held a conference on “The Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of ‘Big Data.’” When Boyd was later invited to join a White House summit on the same topic, she “fed the conclusions from that event back to the White House for its report,” according to a write-up by the tech journalist Cory Doctorow. Only months after the Edward Snowden leaks revealed the government’s bulk data-collection programs, the report promoted a glass-half-full optimism about mass surveillance. “While big data unquestionably increases the potential of government power to accrue unchecked,” the paper acknowledged, “it also holds within it solutions that can enhance accountability, privacy, and the rights of citizens.” A few months later, two representatives from the White House attended a big Data & Society event held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

Other participants at the October 2014 Newseum conference on “Why ‘Big Data’ Is a Civil Rights Issue” came from Google, Microsoft, Harvard, and Princeton. From progressive racial-activist groups like the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Color of Change, and UnidosUS (formerly known as the National Council of La Raza). From the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, the Ford Foundation, the ACLU, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. A recap published on Data & Society’s website described attendees as united by their desire to use “data-driven technologies to improve socio-economic mobility for historically marginalized groups.”

One participant at an “industry innovation breakout” session suggested that “perhaps we should not distinguish between privacy and civil rights, but rather frame both conversations as aspects of data governance.” In data governance, two of the most powerful forces in modern America — data and civil rights — came together in a new mandate for administrative power. Digital networks would act as the granter of rights and services as determined by experts on subjects such as safety and equity. Representation and inclusion in these digital networks — that is, in the domains of mass surveillance and algorithmic manipulation — was thereby recast as a civil right. With everyone housed inside the networks, data monitoring and surveillance tools could enforce moment-to-moment compliance with the latest language protocols and standards of justice related to race or gender.

Mass surveillance was not only a matter of policy; its gravitational pull reshaped American culture. “It’s not as though traditional power structures have been sealed in stasis while digital networking has risen,” observed the tech pioneer turned industry critic Jaron Lanier. He pointed to the culture of modern intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA: “A visit to one of these organizations feels very much like a visit to the Googleplex or a major high-tech finance venture. The same sorts of cheery recent PhDs from top schools cavort in an airy and playful environment with lots of glass and excellent coffee.”

Three board members are listed on Data & Society’s tax filings from 2014, its first full year of operations: Boyd as president, Anil Dash as treasurer, and John Palfrey as secretary. Like Boyd, Dash was a tech insider known for his progressive social critique of the industry. A longtime blogger and consultant who also served as the CEO for several companies, Dash made a name in media circles through his strident Twitter presence. The tech industry was “morally vulnerable” to activist pressure, he told Vanity Fair in a 2014 profile.

Palfrey represented the quiet continuity of a familiar presence within the new power vertical: America’s old WASP elite. A Harvard Law graduate and expert on issues of Internet law, Palfrey was running the super-elite Andover prep school in Massachusetts, whose notable alumni include both presidents named George Bush, when he joined the Data & Society board. Palfrey, who is the great-great-grandson of the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, went on to head the MacArthur Foundation, where he controlled the nonprofit’s $7 billion endowment.

Its leadership and funding in place, Data & Society expanded rapidly. In 2015, the organization rented two floors of office space in the ultra-prime real estate of New York’s Flatiron district. It was enough to accommodate a large “fellows” program and host its own events. From its offices in Manhattan, the group proved especially effective at media outreach. The New York Times and the Washington Post frequently cited its experts, who promoted a new popular theory of the Internet that would become important in the Trump era as the different branches of the American elite united behind the demand for new administrative powers to monitor and censor speech online.

While the Wilson administration had sought to tighten its control over information by creating a highly visible government propaganda office, the Obama White House took a different approach. It empowered partners like Data & Society to carry out many of the same functions. A well-placed network of government-aligned nonprofits began constantly raising the alarms about growing extremism online, while defining extremism in highly partisan terms. As the media then uncritically repeated those claims, it created the appearance of an objective, expert consensus demanding more censorship online in the name of public safety. 

By mid-June of 2015, when Donald Trump announced his first bid to become president, the foundations of the counter-disinformation crusade that would dominate American politics for the next decade had already been put in place.

Adapted from The Information State by Jacob Siegel, available for preorder now and out from Holt on March 24, 2026.