# Close Encounters of the Totalitarian Kind

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian-kind.md
Podcast: [Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone](https://stenobird.com/podcast/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501)
Published: 2026-04-08T23:16:10+00:00
Episode link: https://www.sashastone.com/p/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/193399072/da4060dec49bb491c097f076cb1cb744.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/free-thinking-through-the-fourth-turning-with-sasha-stone-5501501/episodes/close-encounters-of-the-totalitarian-kind
Duration seconds: 2015

## Resource

—Jacob Siegel, the Information State, excerpts from audiobook , which can be found here. Totalitarianism came to America slowly at first and then all at once. It began as a utopia, one I helped build. It seemed like a perfect new America and gave all of us godless creatures, who’d been chewed up and spit out by the Boomers’ counterculture revolution, a collective sense of purpose. It was all going so great until it wasn’t. A Virtual Utopia I got online 30 years ago. I never planned on living half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. I had motive, means, and opportunity to kill off my real-life self and be reborn in the virtual world. Why wouldn’t I escape a life that had become a full-spectrum failure at everything I tried to do? A relationship that blew up when the man I thought loved me went back to his wife, the Graduate Film Program at Columbia I’d targeted as my life’s dream ended in one semester as I chased that loser guy back to LA. There are things about that moment that are too painful to write about, at least for now, but I will someday. The result was me staring at the wall with nothing achieved and nowhere to go. I had just turned 30. The internet allowed me to remake myself as someone else. I could be strong. I could be confident. I could be beautiful because who knew what you looked like? I could just use words, and I was good at words. So I dove into a life online full of excitement and wonder, a dreamscape of endless possibilities. There was no Amazon, no eBay, no Google. There was barely a web browser. I fell in love with an Italian I met online and came back from Italy pregnant. He didn’t want to be a father, but I wanted to be a mother, so I had my baby, and then I built a website so I could stay home with her and support us. I wa…

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## Transcript

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