Reviews of my book are being censored.
Last week, I published a book called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. It describes how, as technology has advanced, American politics and government have been transformed by the shift in societal power from visible laws and institutions to opaque forms of digital and informational control.
As I explain in the book, one of the consequences of this shift has been the ability of the government-tech alliance—what I call “the information state”—to carry out mass censorship online over the past decade. This point was noted in a generally positive review of the book that ran on March 24 in a left-wing magazine called The Baffler. The information state, noted academic Richard Greenwald in his review, rests on “twin pillars—censorship and propaganda.”
So I could only savor the irony when, less than a day later, the magazine purged the review from its website.
What happened? Did The Baffler censor me? Did they censor the reviewer who, while criticizing parts of the book, also called it “at once a sweeping history of technocratic governance, a detailed exposé of the counter-disinformation apparatus, and an urgent meditation on what it means to live in a society organized around information as its ruling principle”?
I had written for The Baffler myself once before, in 2018. Perhaps, in the intervening years, someone at the magazine detected evidence that I hold unacceptable opinions. But if that were the case, why publish the review of my book in the first place?
If you’re looking for an answer, you won’t find it on The Baffler’s website. All it has, in place of the purged piece, is an editor’s note informing visitors that the magazine removed the review “after determining that it does not meet The Baffler’s fact-checking standards.” That is the kind of cryptic statement that raises more questions than it answers. Is the magazine accusing me of having made factual errors in my book, or is it leveling that claim at Greenwald? (Greenwald declined to comment for this article.) It’s impossible to say, because the note never specifies the facts that it purports to dispute.
To say that this is unusual by the standards of magazine publishing undersells it by a wide margin. Removing an already-published book review without so much as specifying the offense is not something done by any publication interested in maintaining a reputation as intellectually open and honest. Deleting articles after publication reeks of censorship. It erodes the trust of readers who are left to wonder what other machinations influence the publication’s editorial decisions. It tends to turn off independent-minded writers, who will reasonably suspect that their own work could be next on the chopping block.
Instead, when errors are found, editors generally add updates or corrections to an article so that readers can see both what it got wrong and what the publication now asserts is factually correct. If a magazine publishes something that generates significant controversy among readers or within its own staff—as happens frequently these days—the liberal thing to do is to publish a counterargument. To cite a “fact-checking” error without elaborating what it is leaves the public even less informed than before; it is an incoherent pretext and self-refuting by its own standards.
So, I set out to find what really happened.
