Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future

Summary

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Decoder, Nilay Patel interviews Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State." Their conversation explores Lepore’s thesis that big tech, data-driven quantification, and AI are reshaping—and in many ways, undermining—the traditional liberal nation state. They examine how power is shifting from democratic institutions to private corporations, particularly through the privatization of public discourse, the rise of algorithmic politics, and the precarious future of democracy in an AI-dominated world. The episode also addresses recent public backlash against AI, notably led by younger generations, and whether this could catalyze meaningful change.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the “Artificial State”

• Lepore introduces the concept of the “artificial state” as the successor to the liberal nation state:
  • [05:23] Dr. Jill Lepore: "What I mean by the artificial state is a kind of successor to the liberal nation state, the constitutional democracy... more and more of the functions of the nation state have been taken over by private multinational corporations."
  • Social media platforms now control the "public square" once maintained by democratic structures.
  • Prioritization of monetization and outrage, rather than free discourse, marks a fundamental shift; bots dominate these spaces, serving varied, often non-democratic interests.

2. From National Democracy to Privatized, Quantified Systems

• Quantification and efficiency, once tools for democratic functioning (like census and polling), increasingly flatten individual experiences into data points.
  • [07:31] Nilay Patel: "We've automated away and numerically quantified away a bunch of that... and we are now run maybe by bots on Twitter, or at least politicians are overwhelmed by bots on Twitter and they've outsourced their thinking."
• Lepore traces this evolution from 1930s polling (Gallup) to today's microtargeting and AI-driven campaign messaging.
  • [09:09] Dr. Jill Lepore: "Extracting data, which is where we are now... it's a much more artificial politics than we have had before."
• The result: a political arena where authentic civic participation has been replaced by data extraction and manipulation, sometimes even pitting “AI versus AI” in elections.

3. Silicon Valley’s Ahistorical Techno-Futurism

• Nilay and Lepore discuss the tech elite's fixation on “first principles” thinking and disregard for historical or humanistic perspective, referencing major figures like Musk and Thiel.
  • [11:59] Dr. Jill Lepore: "Why would we bother to do something that a machine can do for us without the realization that... there's some things we want to do, including, like, meaningful work..."
  • Disavowal of collective pasts ("We'll do it better no matter what anybody did before") leaves tech culture lacking in humility and wisdom gained from history.
• Science fiction’s dystopian scenarios are not warnings but blueprints for some tech leaders, contributing further to the rise of the artificial state.

4. The Reality—and Limitations—of Digital Democratization

• Patel and Lepore debate whether the Internet’s opening has truly democratized opportunity or merely transferred gatekeeping to new hands.
  • [28:39] Nilay Patel: "[...] a lot of new people were allowed to gain a much larger platform with which to affect the culture, if not society at large."
  • Lepore acknowledges each new communication technology brings initial democratization, but power always reconsolidates with elites:
    • [30:50] Dr. Jill Lepore: "In each of those [media revolutions]... The elites regain the power, right?"
  • The current moment is distinct: opportunity for bottom-up influence (YouTubers, creators) exists, but the overall system trends toward consolidation and precarity for ordinary participants.

5. Microtargeting, Identity Politics, and the Political Economy

• Lepore describes contemporary identity politics as being amplified, if not defined, by algorithmic platform sorting and targeting.
  • [36:05] Dr. Jill Lepore: "I just think that our notion of a representative government where we agree to elect people to represent not my individual interests, but the interests of my community—we won't be able to do that... you'll only have the sense of your own interests."
• This trend toward "personal newspapers" and individualized messaging undermines collective civic life and makes traditional politics nearly impossible.
• Campaign consultants feel compelled to use these tools, even as they lament the change: "I don't want to use these tools, but I have to..."

6. Targeted Advertising: From Consumer to Citizen

• The blurring of consumer and citizen online is a core concern; platform economics are built upon sorting and targeting people not as civic actors but as buyers.
  • [42:46] Nilay Patel: "We'll do capitalism at scale and now we're going to subsume our politics into it."
  • [43:42] Dr. Jill Lepore: "The system that you're describing of, of the targeted advertising, which is really effectively what the, what the Internet currently is... we're not acting online primarily as citizens... I'm chiefly acting online as a consumer."
• This “privatization of the public square” erases distinctions between civic and commercial life.

7. Automation, Agency, and the (Potential) Death of the Human Internet

• As AI agents proliferate, Lepore and Patel ask: What happens when the web is mainly bots talking to bots?
  • [45:02] Dr. Jill Lepore: "It's now just the one place... it's all corporatized and privatized."
  • Some CEOs (in physical businesses) welcome the bot wave, while those with software-only offerings feel existential pressure.
  • Raises questions about agency: If bots represent us online, do they deserve rights or responsibilities? What becomes of human interaction, labor, and identity?
  • Patel notes a nascent "techlash," with younger generations pushing back (e.g., college students booing AI speakers).

8. Loss of Agency and Democratic Frictions

• Lepore underscores the disconnect between public participation and meaningful decision-making ("You can't even keep the data center from showing up in your backyard").
  • [55:39] Dr. Jill Lepore: "[...] the decay of people's sense of... we live in a representative government—if the majority of us don't want this thing... then we're not going to have it. Then you repeatedly find out that you are going to have it in spite of what you want, your ability to believe in how the system works has really deteriorated."
  • The unamendable Constitution serves as a metaphor for broader civic stagnation: without avenues for meaningful input, trust and democracy erode.

9. Is Democratic Renewal Possible?

• Tech leaders increasingly claim "the democratic process should put guardrails on us," but Lepore is skeptical of their sincerity and their understanding of real democratic processes.
  • [60:23] Dr. Jill Lepore: "When they talk about democracy will save us, what they mean by democracy is something that I think for most political scientists is unrecognizable as a democratic process. It's a word, it's a buzzword for them."
• However, Lepore maintains some hope in grassroots collective action—actual humans gathering and deliberating in person—as the antidote to technocratic disenfranchisement.
  • Moments of student protest and local activism are, in her view, sparks for potential renewal.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "[Our] public discourse is owned by corporations... priority is not the free expression of ideas... It is the monetization of attention and of outrage." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 05:23)
• "It's like AI versus AI in these upcoming elections." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 10:11)
• "The capacity for humanistic inquiry and humanistic reasoning is not something you see in great evidence in that culture." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 12:59)
• "You still don't have health insurance. You still can't buy a house. Like, I just don't think, like, we're in a moment of emancipation." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 32:11)
• "I don't think this is like a magnificent time to be out there being an influencer or... Well, like, you still don't have health insurance." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 34:16)
• "It's now all corporatized and privatized." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 45:02)
• "If you can't even keep the data center from showing up in your backyard, what else is there to believe in?" (Nilay Patel, 55:39)
• "When they talk about democracy will save us, what they mean by democracy is something that I think for most political scientists is unrecognizable as a democratic process." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 60:23)
• "That restlessness... that's what kind of gives me hope." (Dr. Jill Lepore, 53:39)

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Selected Timestamps for Major Topics

• [05:23] — Explaining the “artificial state”
• [09:09] — From campaign door-knocking to algorithmic politics
• [11:59] — Tech billionaires and the dystopian blueprint
• [20:31] — First principles thinking and the erasure of the past
• [28:39] — Digital democratization: myth versus reality
• [36:05] — Identity politics, atomization, and the future of representation
• [42:46] — Targeted advertising, consumerism, and citizenship
• [45:02] — AI agents, bots, and the 'death' of human internet activity
• [53:39] — Student protest as hope for renewal
• [60:23] — Tech leaders’ “trust the democratic process” narrative

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Tone and Style

The discussion is dense with historical perspective, cultural critique, and a blend of skepticism and cautious optimism rooted in Lepore's humanistic worldview. Nilay balances journalistic curiosity with frank personal reflection, and both engage in spirited, occasionally dry-witted exchanges (e.g., "Well, he would just ask ChatGPT." — Patel, 15:55). The conversational approach grounds deep theory in relatable contemporary examples.

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Conclusion

Lepore’s "Rise and Fall of the Artificial State" offers a sobering examination of how surveillance capitalism, quantification, and AI undermine democratic citizenship and human agency. While the forces behind privatized technocracy are powerful, Lepore locates a sliver of hope in direct, collective human action—be it student protest or local civic engagement. The episode leaves listeners with a challenge: reclaim the messiness of democracy, restore meaningful public discourse, and resist the flattening pressures of algorithmic governance.

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Transcript

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

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[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief of

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25th.

[Nilay Patel]

Jill is one of the best writers

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our strike zone, you build systems by measuring things, gathering information, quantifying it as data data and taking action on it. And Jill's thesis in the artificial state is that this kind of systemic measurement really dehumanizes people. It flattens us and human concerns into something, well, artificial. These artificial structures have grown to touch more and more parts of our lives, not just in obvious places like apps or AI, but all the way up to our politics and governance itself. And Jill's insight Here is a telling portrait of the way big tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the nation state. You'll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write kind of a grumpy, but

[Nilay Patel]

in my reading it's a pretty dead

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

ahead look at the last century and a half of technological and social developments

[Nilay Patel]

and how we got to a place

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

where bots are maybe running everything.

[Nilay Patel]

Jill's idea of the artificial state starts

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

with the very idea of quantification, from the first stabs at taking a census thousands of years ago to the invention of modern political polling in the 1930s.

[Nilay Patel]

But where she really sees a big

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

pivot in the era she and I talked about the most is in the 1980s, when we saw the emergence of the Silicon Valley culture we have today, when computers got personal and when computer aided targeting and micro targeting really and truly became possible and commonplace, not only for ads but for political campaigns.

[Nilay Patel]

What Jill and I did disagree about

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

is some of her pessimism about the

[Nilay Patel]

Internet, because the Internet is what made

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

jobs and careers like mine and businesses like the Verge and shows like Decoder even possible at all. There was a really great democratizing of access that happened in the late 20th century and into the 21st as people got online, and not all of it was illusory, as maybe there great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be. But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, so her response about the way systems of power keep adapting to how people use new technology was as illuminating as ever. Of course, we also talked about the future and where she sees hope for that future. And yes, that includes college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies. Okay, Dr. Jill Lepore on the Artificial State. Here we go.

[Nilay Patel]

Doctor Jill Lepore, you're a staff writer at the New Yorker, you're a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and most importantly, you're the author of a new book, the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Welcome to Decoder.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Nilay Patel]

I am really excited to talk to you. I'm a big fan of your work over the years, and I have to say this book is one of the most decoder y Virgy Neelai Patel Strike Zone books of all time.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Wow. I'm not sure how to take that, but I guess that's good.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, the producers and I just had a thrill ride reading this book. It is essentially about how computers and measurement flatten us, and then systems can take advantage of that flattening. And that is like I said it's in the strike zone. So let's just start at the very beginning for folks. The book is called the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Tell us what the artificial state is, define it so we can start from that foundation.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

What I mean by the artificial state is a kind of successor to the liberal nation state, the constitutional democracy under which, you know, our freedom of speech and free discourse and our constitutional rights are central to our experience as citizens within a nation state. We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding and you know, there's a whole public discussion of what's happening with democracy, but I don't think we talk about the nation state as much as we might, that is the, to say the state itself. So what I mean by the artificial state is a state in which more and more of the functions of the nation state have been taken over by private multinational corporations. And the easiest example of that to think about is, you know, what is sort of euphemistically called the public square, which is where people get information about how to vote and what's going on in the world and how to make decisions and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens. Our public discourse is really almost entirely privatized and owned by corporations who, you know, as many, many people have demonstrated, it's not news to your listeners or to anyone that public discourse, the priority is not the free expression of ideas and democratic deliberation. It is the monetization of attention and of outrage. And more than that, a fairly recent vintage, is the fact that public platforms in which we exchange ideas as citizens and democracies are dominated by bots. Right? They were. All of them have been inverted for several years now or different numbers of years. You know, from X to Facebook to TikTok, there are far more bots than humans on those platforms. And those bots are, many of them are owned by corporations and have particular act their own kind of financial interests, but they're owned by state actors and non state actors and criminals and terrorists. And so I think what we're at risk of is losing the liberal constitutional democracy and having it become supplanted by what I describe as the artificial state.

[Nilay Patel]

So one of the things that really struck me about this is at least America's conception of itself, the United States conception of itself is this messy multi part democracy. The Senate loves to call itself the most deliberative body in the history of the world. And it's supposed to be a whole bunch of people that are ruled by the consent of the government. And we're all arguing. And, and your thesis is, yeah, that's what we say about ourselves. But actually we've automated away and numerically quantified away a bunch of that. And we are now run maybe by bots on Twitter, or at least politicians are overwhelmed by bots on Twitter and they've outsourced their thinking. Or there's consultants that are turning us all into polling data. Is that the trajectory around that ends the nation state? Is that the core of the idea?

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Yeah, and I, and I, I think it has, it has a long history, but the acceleration of these developments in the age of artificial intelligence is really considerable. So you could say here, I'll give you two examples that kind of maybe stretch out across a century. So 1930s, the 1930s, the invention of so called scientific polling. George Gallup starts the American Institute of Public opinion research in 1935. What polling does gradually over the middle decades of the 20th century is replaces the kind of door to door precinct walking that, you know, campaigns would need to do, right? If I want to, I'm running for election in some neighborhood, I got to go talk to people. Going to go to baseball games, you're going to, you know, go to basketball games, got to go to the public library. But increasingly it became less necessary for political campaigns to do that because they could subcontract out political polling.

[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

Right?

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

But you can find out what political opinion is in a neighborhood if you want to run a campaign by just drawing down, just by doing data mining and data analysis. So we might say, okay, well that makes politics so much more efficient, right? Like those campaigns can more efficiently use their money and they can get their message out to the right people. But if you think about each one of those conversations that people used to have, right? I'm a campaign volunteer and I'm gonna go and I'm gonna sit in on some PTA meeting or I'm gonna go to a basketball game in some neighborhood and like talk to the parents who are there. All those conversations are kind of the civic glue that kind of holds a civil society together. And so replacing those just kind of like chatting by the side, you know, under a street lamp about what do you think about this guy with just ext. Extracting data, which is where we are now. It's just a, it's a much more artificial politics than we have had before. And then if you kind of project ahead to, I mean, there's been kind of great coverage lately of emerging Trends for the 2026 election in the US and around the world, where a lot of people report that even in these primaries, you know, that have been going on over the spring and summer, they'll ask ChatGPT, like, who how should I vote in the primary? Meanwhile, the campaign messages that you're getting have many of them been crafted by artificial intelligence. Right. And the fact that you getting them is a decision made by artificial intelligence. So in a way, it's like. It's like AI versus AI in these upcoming elections, or even in elections that are already transpiring, you can see how you could fall into that, like, step, just sort of just going downhill on skis. But. But I kind of wanted to write a kind of grumpy book to say, well, let's pause for a minute. Like, when does what. What's at the bottom of that hill? Like, is that an icy pond and we're gonna just go through the ice and like, we're all gonna drown in there? Or is that like a. A beautiful new political world? And I. I think it looks pretty perilous.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. The book traces this evolution step by step, as you're describing. Right. This is a slow build to maybe where we've gotten today. And you point out several times in the book, you know, there's a bunch

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

of science fiction authors in the 50s

[Nilay Patel]

and 60s who are looking at computers and they're drawing a picture of the future. And some of them pick utopia, and there are entire movements about technocratic utopia that emerge. And a lot of them pick dystopia. They draw a picture of computer aided dystopia, and you point this out. I mean, everyone has heard the torment nexus meme. It's in the book, you use it in the book, that our modern industrialists have read dystopian science fiction and decided that is the model of the future that they're attempting to build. I'm curious a why you think they've all gotten it wrong, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel on down. And if that is a moment, an inflection point for us to actually pick a different future, like, it's kind of

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

a big thing, starting in the 30s to imagine a future in which the President of the United States is chosen by a machine, there are a bunch of examples of this from the 30s, you know, where people are really worried about totalitarianism and the dehumanizing of people in that kind of. Is a consequence of the machine age. But there's also a lot of it in the 1950s. So this, for instance, like a classic story by Isaac Asimov that I think is 1955, called franchise. It's set on the days before election day, 2008, November 4, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency. And in that imagined future, that Asimovian future, there's this machine called the Multivac that determines using polling data who in the United States is the average man, the most representative man. Like, the sampling method that pollsters use has been perfected mathematically by this computer. Get picked the average person, and that's the only person who votes. And then, then that guy has to go into hiding because if people don't like who was elected or the presidency goes badly, like, he's. His life is destroyed. So there's a lot of this stuff in science fiction, but who. Maybe last year, Sam Altman was, I think, on Joe Rogan, and he started talking about how great it would be if AI chose the President of the United States. Like, and he wasn't. I. I mean, yes, he was like, fucking around, but he was also serious, right? Like, wouldn't that be great? Because it's so efficient and we don't have to bother and it spares us labor. And that general premise that, like, why would we bother to do something that a machine can do for us without the realization that I think the rest of us would have, like. But there's some things we want to do, including, like, meaningful work, right? Including write and make art and do things for ourselves. I know, you know, these are very smart people, but they're not humanists. And they seem to have. I mean, Thiel would say he is right, that he's a philosopher, a political philosopher. I'm not so convinced of that. I think that the capacity for humanistic inquiry and humanistic reading and humanistic reasoning is not something you see in great evidence in that culture. And I think it's been really kind of bred out in a way of the culture of Silicon Valley, that even if you look back to the 90s and the culture of the celebration of the serial entrepreneur as the new man of progress, that particular kind of cultural formulation was all about the disavowal of the past, right? It doesn't matter what came before. You want to start a ride service. You don't study taxis or figure out where the livery service came from. You don't look at traffic patterns. You don't study anything in the past. You just start new. You just imagine it all new, and you destroy what came before. Such a rejection of the knowledge and wisdom of earlier human beings, like the posture of the humanist, is one of kind of humility. Like, isn't it magisterial and majestic how, you know, Homer wrote the Odyssey so long ago and it's still so powerful. And the kind of timelessness of literature and the arts, the infinite beauty of humanity's capacity for making things, that's just kind. It's just not the ethos. Right? Like, it's like, no, we'll do it better matter what anybody did before. It's, we're innovating, we're disrupting. It's like the culture is just so fetishized on the future that it, it doesn't have that. Like, let's listen to what other people who came before might have known. That's still wisdom. And, and I, that makes for a very poor reading of literature.

[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

Right.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Like we could have a great argument about what Isaac Asimov meant by that story. Like, it's not like a determinant. Mean, I'm like, I'm not the authorit authority on Isaac Asimov, but like I'm not going to ask Sam Altman what a short story means. Right?

[Nilay Patel]

Well, he would just ask ChatGPT.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

That's right.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

We have to take a short break here.

[Nilay Patel]

We'll be right back.

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[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

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[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Hi everyone. This segment of decoder sessions features Helen Havlik, the publisher of the Verse, and Kristy Argelon, Uber's global head of advertising. And you're going to enjoy this conversation.

[Framer Representative]

Christy, just to start, when did Uber

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

launch advertising and how is it going?

[Kristy Argelon]

It's been a really interesting journey for Uber. Most people came to know Uber as we alternative to a ride hailing service. But the other side of the platform is Uber Eats. And the Uber Eats side was where we first got into advertising with simple sponsored listings so that any restaurant on our platform could actually run ads. We started to realize we have this platform that is full of people going places and getting things. And there's no better way to show brand relevancy than to insert your brand into decision making in the moment that it's happening and to help facilitate and provide offers information services. At the moment people are making decisions.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

What makes Uber advertising unique as a product?

[Kristy Argelon]

Well, one of the things that we keep seeing in our research with consumers is that there is this enormous trend to use digital as quickly as possible to make decisions so that they can get back into the physical world. And we see that over and over again on the Uber platform. People are looking to quickly find a ride to get to a bar where they can meet friends and watch their favorite football team together. And so this pivot from the digital world, enhancing what people really want to do in the physical world, is a role that Uber plays that's incredibly powerful.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Jill Lepore about the cast of billionaires who run the artificial state.

[Nilay Patel]

There's something very interesting about this cast of characters, particularly Peter Thiel who comes up in your book, Elon Musk, who comes up in your book somewhere over a hundred times. I think they are, they are falling back to literally Catholicism as some kind of moral foundation for whatever decisions they're making. And whether or not they're misreading Catholicism is irrelevant to them. Like they're often in fights with the Pope.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Which is just not something a straight reading of Catholicism would allow you to do. There's a fetishization of. There's an entire culture of thinking.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

I won't call it a philosophy because

[Nilay Patel]

I don't think it's quite that developed, But a culture of thinking around first principles. We're going to do first principles thinking, and that will lead us to some disruptive outcome. And it often, to me at least, feels like where that first principle begins is a choice about what to ignore from the past. And I see that kind of over again in your book. In the culture that we live in at large, that deciding what to set aside is the big decision.

[Kristy Argelon]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

And that's an assumption that is often not questioned as we go step by step towards a more quantified society, step by step towards a more automated society. That there's something messy about democracy that is very, very important. And the decision we're making now is to actually set that mess aside in the name of, I don't know, efficiency, potentially happiness. I'm curious if you see that that kind of setting aside is happening by

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

accident or on purpose.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

I mean, I think of these guys as really instrumental. They're not pursuing knowledge for its own sake. They are deeply interested in exploration. And I think. And wonder. And I think, like, one of the things I really love this moment is the fascination with space. And, you know, space exploration, I think is tremendously exciting. You know, harnessed to militarization in certain commercial projects is like, wow, we went from Star Trek to Star wars really fast. You know, like the sense that what you might want to know about the world can be just because it's worth knowing rather than that you can use it to extract money from other people. That's. I just don't think that's part of that tech culture. It's just not that position. Right. A kind of humanist commitment to knowledge for the sake of the accumulation of wisdom and leading a better life and understanding the world with greater clarity and greater compassion. I think it's largely mocked in, in that world as woke or feminine or libtard, whatever. Like, I think especially with the kind of the. The. The conservative turn of the tech world, it takes on weird, weird valences.

[Sponsor/Advertiser Voice]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

I think it is really purposeful. Like this kind of knowledge is not worth having. We can't make money off of it. We can't. You know, if we had that kind of knowledge, it might slow down what we're trying to do. And what we're trying to do is win the AI race and determine the future of humanity. And you know, like the, the lack of curiousness about the bigger world in the place of these really thrilling inventions within it. I don't know, I find it bizarre. I mean, and I all this causes a lot of self reflection on my part. Like a lot of these people are my former students, right? Like I teach at Harvard. We send so many students off to work in Silicon Valley and then they just talk this way and like what happened? What did we do wrong? Like what was there? Do you not have a sense of obligation to the human condition?

[Nilay Patel]

You have a number of these markers. Walk us through some of them. From the Internet and social platforms will cause an outbreak of democracy to where we are now in 2026.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

That first begins to emerge in the 1980s. Like if you go back to 1984 and the launch of the Apple Macintosh and that, that, you know, famous iconic Apple TV ad from the Super bowl in January of 1984 with it's like an outtake from. Looks like you're watching George Orwell's 1984 with these kind of like people dressed in gray and they're all, skin's all gray and they march into a room and you know, whatever. The Olympian woman comes through and smashes Big Brother on the screen. And the tagline of the ad is 1984 will not be like 1984. The promise that that was attempting to illustrate was that the personal computer would be revolutionary, as I'm sure you've talked about in your show. And your audience really understands that the celebration of the personal computer as emancipating came out of the counterculture. There's this great book from counterculture to cyber Culture that's about the so called California ideology that marries kind of counterculture libertarianism to computer utopianism. And you see that realized in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh, like oh well, we're going to defeat totalitarianism in the form of the giant mainstream IBM that's run by, that's associated with two things at the time, businesses, big businesses which are the only places they can afford these giant IBM mainframes that are running payroll systems and stuff for big corporations. And the Republican party which actually has a ton of IBM mainframes and the Democrats have basically no computers. It's a huge problem for the Democrats in 1970s and 1980s. So there's this whole like, like the personal computer is going to advance liberty, personal freedom and therefore democracy it's not. It's like a kind of libertarian version, but it's about emancipation. And, you know, it's an ad campaign. It's like, at the end of the day, it's just an ad campaign. And there are people who are like, well, exactly. How does the personal computer. Like, like, it's great. I would like one. It's fun to have. Like, it's like, I also, I also like a nice toaster. But, like, my toaster isn't gonna emancipate me. Like, what. What is it about? But, but so you begin to see new tech, product, computing, projects, products as very carefully packaged with an ideal about personal liberation. And then so by the time you get to the 90s and the, you know, the opening of the Internet to commercial traffic, that you see the scaling of that promise, right? Like, well, what's gonna happen is now we all are gonna have. Personal computers are gonna be linked to one another. And so society is going to become emancipated and democratized, right? We're gonna have a digital democracy. Even though, like, it's a little bit like when political pundits make election forecasts and they're wrong half the time, but no one ever remembers even what they forecast. And it's like, how do you even have a job? Like the people in the 80s that said the personal computer was gonna liberate people. Well, it didn't, right? But then in the 90s, it was like, no, but the Internet is going to democratize societies. Well, well, they didn't. That was just an ad campaign. And not that there aren't like, plenty of people that sincerely believe that or that certainly is tremendous democratizing potential for the Internet.

[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

Right?

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Like, there was a lot of promise there, but it's. It's not realized for all kinds of reasons. And then. And so it's like, already two strikes. But then you get to like 2004. And the social. All the social media, emerging social media is like, oh, Facebook. Like, we're gonna democratize this. We're gonna connect everybody. We're gonna have a fully, you know, everyone will be able to be close to one another. And then that also doesn't happen. And then what we need is democratic AI. And that doesn't mean we have a say in democracy. We as like a polity, have a say. It just means that, like, democratic countries should lift all restrictions and regulations so that democracies can have AI before authority. Like, it's just a. It's a. It's an old story.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I push back on this a little bit, because I personally struggle with that ad campaign. But the reality of it, there's not a world previous to the Internet where a guy like me who grew up in Wisconsin with no connections to the media ends up interviewing you, a Harvard professor. Like, the Internet needed to arrive, Publishing needed to be democratized for whatever reason. AOL needed to pay a Bunch of Bloggers $12 a blog post and then somehow decide that I should be one of those people. Like, a lot of things had to happen where gatekeepers did fall away and people like me were allowed to go find their audience. And I see it every single day now with young people who style themselves as creators or YouTubers that they know that they can go start. Start a business and go reach people on these platforms in some way. The flip side of that is I. I do think a bunch of gatekeepers, the men who own these platforms, largely men, realize they could turn the knobs, right? That Elon Musk could buy X and he could take X from a platform where, when it was known as Twitter, lots and lots of activists could find each other and shape public opinion. And now X is whatever X is, and mostly, like, racist.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Find me, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Like, that's my experience of that platform whenever I participate. Mark Zuckerberg, you know, he started a Supreme Court for Facebook moderation because he wanted to recapitulate the machinations of democracy for people who had been banned for being crazy in their local Facebook groups. Maybe that worked and maybe it didn't. My friend Casey Newton's gonna have something to write about in Platformer for the rest of his life as that experiment continues. But Zuckerberg was like, this is kind of dumb. I'm turning it off. We're doing community notes here. No more moderation. There's some kind of pendulum swing. I agree with you. This is largely an ad campaign. But a lot of people were able to find each other. A lot of new people were allowed to gain a much larger platform with which to affect the culture, if not society at large. How do you put that in the context of the artificial state? I'm going to. I'll just preview. My next question is going to be about targeted advertising, which I think is an enormously influential piece of the puzzle. But it's that dynamic that I struggle with. Right.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

It's not purely an ad campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I. And I think that's fair. I think we tend to forget that, for instance, up until fairly recent history, maybe the 1980s, very few newspaper reporters in the United States had College degrees. They were people, you know, mostly men, but there are a lot of women beat reporters and women editorial writers who started out, like, delivering newspapers, you know, working at the press, the printing. Working the printing presses at newspapers climbed their way up. I mean, you know, there's a reason Jimmy Olsen is in the newsroom with Clark Kent in 19. The 1930s. Comic books like these are just. They're like street kids and they know the streets and they start reporting. I don't think they're that different from, you know, coming up with a $12 blog post payment, right? That what happens in every industry, unsurprisingly, right? Like, there's a new medium emerges, the daily paper or the twice daily paper, right? It creates all kinds of opportunities for new. The interview is invented, you know, eyewitness reporting is invented. The byline is invented. Like, the history of the newspaper is kind of all about, like, an explosion of new kinds of doors that different people can walk through to report on the world to other people. And then more people can learn about the world because these newspapers are different. Like, there's an explosion in the democratization of any new technology of communication. When it starts, like, by definition, right? If you can make a technology of communication cheaper and faster, you're going to reach more people and more people are going to be involved in producing it. That happens with the, you know, with the first weekly newspapers, with the penny press in the 1830s, with the telegraph in the 1840s. That happens, you know, with how the telephone changes news reporting, the wire service in the Mexican American war. It happens with the radio in the 1920s. It happens with TV in the 1950s. But in each of those, in fact, what's kind of interesting about that, each of those transformations reshapes the party system. There have been seven party systems in American history, and they all turn on a new emerging communications technology which unsettles the relationship between the elites and the people, right? Like, the people get more power. The parties just have to get realigned. But what always happens is the elites regain the power, right? Like, they don't like it, right? They don't like the newsboys becoming beat reporters, becoming editors. They're like. Are these like, nouveau people that are like, they re they. You. To use your metaphor, they, you know, they turn the dial, they regain control, they consolidate their power over the medium, and then it kind of has to wait. The next communications technology revolution. I think the tricky thing about the moment that we're in now is the emerging technologies are not restoring power to the people. They're not like, check. They're not turning the wheel this way. They're just. We're keeping to go this way. I teach undergraduates. Like, I see them go out in the world. There are no jobs for them. You want to be a writer, you want to be an artist, you want to be a movie maker, you want to be a screenwriter. Where are you going to get a job? Who's going to the hall? The whole culture industry is imploding. So I don't think this is like a magnificent time to be out there being an influencer or. Well, like, you still don't have health insurance. I mean, we still can't buy a house. Like, I just don't think, like, we're in a moment of emancipation that's responding to that consolidation. Some people like, it's great. I like these billionaires have all this power over our culture. I don't. But like, we are continuing to rotate in their direction. I don't think it's kind of turning back. So I guess that's how I would grant for you that there is. There's always something thrilling, emancipatory, illuminating, increasingly inclusive about a new communications technology. So I wouldn't deny that. And so you're right to that degree. It's not just an ad campaign. But I do think we're in a kind of exceptional moment right now.

[Nilay Patel]

I said I was going to ask about targeted advertising and one of the reasons I think the pendulum has swung back so sharply is a reaction to what you might call identity politics. In the book, you say that identity politics as we know it is made possible by computer run, sorting and targeting. Right. That the algorithms on these platforms will put us all together and then we will say, here's an identity. We're a bloc, we have some political power as a block. Deal with us. That seems true. I think we've all had that experience. We've seen that play out both in the culture, in our politics more broadly. But you can push back on that, right? You can say, no, we don't like that. Identity politics bad, right? That's too woke. And you can see that the culture react to that. You can see, certainly politicians and billionaires react to that. But I don't think identity politics is only a product of quantifiability, right. Of computer aided targeting and sorting. It certainly existed before. Do you think the identity politics of today is defined by the fact that we all exist on platforms, or do you think it's just shaped by it? What's the relationship there?

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

I Remember being quite struck reading an article from 1968 in a magazine that I think was called like Science and Technology, like a popular magazine, like a, you know, the wired of the 1960s by this guy, Ithiel de Solapoul, who was an MIT political scientist. In 1968, he was asked with J.C.R. licklider, the inventor of the Internet, to speculate on what the computer revolution would mean by the year 2000. And they were both really smart guys and they had really, really fascinating things to say. And Ithiel de Sola Pool, this political scientist said, certainly by then there will be personal newspapers like you will, you will log onto your computer in the morning and it will be networked because the computer was moving in 1968 from being a storage and data processing device to being a communications device. Nice being both of those things. And Poole said, you know, there really won't be able to be party politics if you have your own newspaper, because a party, a political party is the organization of political dissent, of, you know, of shared political priorities. And you know, I don't think we'll even have interest group politics. You know, like the, like the Black Congressional Caucus is an interest group, right? Or Corn Growers Farmers, Corn Farmers association is an interest group. He's like, I don't think we'll even have that. We'd really only be able to have, have kind of personal. I just think that our notion of a representative government where we agree to elect people to represent not my individual interests, but the interests of my community, we won't be able to do that because no one will have a sense of what is in the interests of my community. You'll only have the sense of your own interests. And that's kind of not how a representative democracy works. Our system of government will be incompatible with our technology of communication. Smart people saw this, you know, 50, 60 years ago, and I think smart people see it now happening all the time. And it's something that is complicated for political campaigns to work with. And of course, the way they can work with, the only way they can work with it, is to use the best tools that are available to them to win elections. Like you read interviews now with campaign consultants who are like, I really do not want to use these tools tools. I really do not want to do micro targeted messaging, voter by voter, with deep fake AI ads to convince people to vote for my candidate. I really believe in my candidate, but I don't want to use these tools. But I have to use these tools because there's no moratorium on using these tools. And therefore I have to use the tools that I think my enemy will also be like. It's just kind of a sad, a sad moment. I don't think there's anybody. I don't know, there's probably like some wretched human beings out there really excited to do deep fakes and win elections that way. But I think most people in politics are not loving this moment.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

We have to pause here for another quick break.

[Nilay Patel]

We'll be back in just a minute.

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[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Jill Lepore about how micro targeting and identity politics define our political economy.

[Nilay Patel]

So I said I was going to ask about targeted advertising. I started with identity politics for a reason. If I look at how money on the Internet is made broadly today, it is targeted advertising. And I just think about your line about identity politics, how it's made possible by computer run Sorting and targeting Computer run. Sorting and targeting is advertising. That is the modern advertising industry at scale. We'll find you the person who is most susceptible to whatever advertising message we have. We might know so much about you that we can target that message even more tightly to you in an automated way and we will deliver it to you. And you know, the big tech companies have all gotten in trouble for over sorting people meta got sued for creating ad categories that were protected classes by race and gender by other platforms have gotten in trouble for not delivering housing advertisements to certain groups that were supposed to receive them or otherwise be discriminated against. You see this play out over and over again that there's all kinds of sorting we're not supposed to do that we've actually made illegal. And the algorithms don't know this. The platforms maybe want to ignore it and their entire model is delivering the right message to you at the right time so that you might buy something, whether that is in a foam mattress that you'll pay for as a direct to consumer or whether it's a political candidate. Like that's the business we're in. I'm wondering how you see that connecting to the artificial state.

[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to measure everybody, quantify everybody. We'll do capitalism at scale and now we're going to subsume our politics into it. Because you're saying that the politicians themselves understand maybe they shouldn't do that.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

It's helpful to remember that that's not an invention of, you know, the Internet or the personal computer era or certainly not of the artificial intelligence. This is a great book by my colleague Liz Cohen, Consumers Republic, that argues that the kind of consumer replaced the citizen as the individual entity of consequence. In the United States, you know, in the 1950s, in the post war era with the, you know, peacetime conversion of wartime factories. So like really consumption was what was going to save the country and advance the country's interests and American growth and American strength was associated with consumerism. And that we like my lifetime, that's been the way that we live. That's not what that country was founded and that's also not inevitable.

[Stitch Fix Representative]

Right.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

But the, the system that you're describing of, of the targeted advertising, which is really effectively what the, what the Internet currently is. I don't, I actually don't think that's going to last. But what it currently is, we're not acting online primarily as citizens. Certainly I don't feel that I am, I'm chiefly acting online as a consumer. Like, and I remember the Day that I noticed that I was like, 2000, I had a baby and Google started sending me ads for breast pumps. And I was like, fuck this. Like, like, remember when you were outraged by that and you're like, I hate that they know that I had a baby. How do they. That makes me mad. I didn't tell them that. Like, like. But now we just accept, you know, that's just.

[Nilay Patel]

Everyone's phones are listening to them.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Everyone's phones are listening to them. You know you're getting on a flight, you know that you guess someone's gonna offer you Dramamine online. But that I think that seemed to a lot of people, like, inevitable and almost natural because the Consumers Republic is how we've lived for such a long time. But, you know, I'm not trying to offer up like a Luddite or like nostalgic reading here, but there, you know, when you walk down a city street, there's City hall and there's the post office and there's.

[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

It.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

This is going to make me sound like I'm 112. There's like the JCPenney and the Walgreens, like they're different places. It's now just the one place where the information that City hall might have about you or the information you might wish to share at City hall, you know, you're going to. Your house has been reappraised and you want to, you know, want to question that or you've got a parking ticket and you want to appeal it. Those were in one place. And then like, if you're gonna go buy ibuprofen or socks, new socks, like, that was a different place. It's now all corporatized and privatized. But, you know, again, the privatization of the public square is a, is a, is a transformation that is a long time coming. I think that I, I'd be very curious to hear what you think about this. But the people that I read increasingly say the Internet is really just gonna be for bots in fairly short order and the humans aren't really going to be on it. She's going to be agentic AI doing your stuff. Like people, it's really just going to be machines talking to machines, which is in a way what people thought it was going to be to begin with. I think that actually offers some prospect for restoring in the real world a distinctive place for how we engage with one another as families and communities and governments. But where we are now, if this continues, I kind of don't see how democracy endures. The corporatization of all public discourse.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. We have had many, many, many tech CEOs on the show, and we have asked them very directly, what happens when no one uses your app anymore? Anymore, when it's just the bots and the agents doing my bidding and all of your business model has to fall away and you are just a provider of Toyota Camrys? We like, literally vast.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

What do they say? What do they say? What do they say?

[Nilay Patel]

It breaks down in two ways. Anybody who offers a physical service is like, yeah, it was really hard to build this business. Go ahead and try to disrupt me with your bots. You won't. The CEO of ZocDoc, the CEO of Uber, the CEO of TaskRabbit, they're all like, yeah, go ahead and try. Like, try to find an army of people to come hang up your TV on demand. That's our database. That's our labor supply, and we will not be disrupted because you can't replace us. Anybody who runs a virtual business or something, that's more software freaking out. Amazon basically freaking out. Like, they're a front end to a bunch of drop shippers.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Right?

[Nilay Patel]

They can be replaced. They're the ones suing Perplexity. And Perplexity is saying our software is the new labor and you're. They're discriminating against our labor, which I don't. I, I'm still trying to puzzle that out. Like, do I believe that the agentic AI is equivalent to my labor? Should it have the same rights as me? That is an open question that I think the Internet is not quite ready for. But it seems like the bleeding edge of what does it actually mean to even have an Internet? Right. If I can deploy bots out onto the Internet on my behalf, should they have the same rights as I do? Or do you actually need me and all the friction that I come with in order to build a business model? And do you have a right to that business model? I'm wondering if you know the answer, because that'd be great for me. I could just skip to the end.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Yeah, I totally don't know the answer. I really, I really, really don't. Yeah, no. And I am just really fascinated by, you know, every time I look at the height of the tidal wave of the coming tech lash, like, it's just, just, it's, it's higher and higher. Like, I just think that kind of. I don't see that manifesting itself in an effective way, but I, I just think we're in for really bumpy times.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. The Other piece of it that is just, it strikes me is all of that the Internet will go away. It is, it's wishful thinking on a part of the companies. The, they, they want this Internet to go away. The economics of this Internet are really well known to them. There are a bunch of gatekeepers that just extract fees at every turn of this Internet. Most famously there's Apple. I think Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and a whole bunch of other people would like to have business models that are not restricted by the iOS app store and Apple's 30% fees and how are they feel about privacy and saying we can build a new Internet. That's all bots, gets you away from the iPhone, gets you away from this device. Where Apple gets to decide what the Internet is for people in like big and meaningful ways. But I think people like Instagram and I don't think they're going to give up their phones right, like, and that keeps you in a world where there's at least something happening where you're looking for other people in some way. And that to me is maybe the heart of the solution. I'll connect it to the fact that you're a college producer, you're in the

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

height of the tech lashes you just said.

[Nilay Patel]

And I'm watching college students boo AI at graduation ceremony after graduation ceremony and talk about it on the social platforms in big and meaningful ways. That seems like if there's any kind of market pushback that leads to a political pushback, that leads to actual change. That's where it comes from. And that still came from the Internet itself.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

No, it came from those people in a quad in their sweating, in their stupid caps and gowns, making a lot of noise together. It came from a cr. Like an actual group of humans in a, in this, in physical space together. I don't know. But I would say I wouldn't look to college administrations to be of any help because they're all just like, oh, we made a deal with OpenAI. Here's your free, not so free. You have to use this tool now or public schools. Like I just, I. Institutions, not just individuals, have to have positions of moral integrity in this moment. And I don't see a ton of evidence of that. You see it maybe in the publishing industry, it's very self interested. But I think you see it in some state governments and some local governments, but I don't think you see it in, you know, big law firms, big universities. I gave these lectures at Yale last year that are the basis for this book on the artificial state and had a lot of, like, group meetings with Yale students. And I had been told by a colleague that at the very first meeting of the AI task force, which the faculty thought was going to be about, like, what should our pedagogical position be about? Like, we're going to use this task force to deliberate on what's the proper time and place for using these incredibly powerful tools. And then what are places that are maybe not. Not good places? And he was like, well, the first meeting of the task force was how can we brand AI at Yale so that it's really sexy and people are excited about it. Like, are we going to call it yay? Like, was there, like, what's the branding strategy here? And the faculty are like, what are you actually talking about? Like, you brought us here to have a branding conversation. So at this lecture. So I'm in a lecture hall with this wonderful group of students. And so I said, like, what about. Let's just do like a. Let's just have a discussion now. Like, what about just having there be like a two week moratorium starting tomorrow. The president of the university could announce it tonight that for two weeks, like, every class on campus is gonna be a discussion section involving staff and faculty and students of like, what's our. What should our community policy be about using this tool this year? And the students were, they're like, they were like stamping. They were like, let's do that. Why can't we do that? Why can't we have a discussion about. And the staff and the faculty were like, why are we not doing that? And you're like, why are we not doing that? That's sort of my. That's why the students are mad. They're not doing. They're paying all this money, taking on all this debt, working their asses off to be replaced by machines and have no capacity not be granted no fulfillment of the role of student, scholar, citizen, member of a community in what that means and should mean. It's such a mismatch of like, the Silicon Valley rhetoric of the future of humanity. This is bigger than the wheel or the invention of fire. With like, but you don't. We don't give a shit what you think or want. Like,

[Interjecting Commentator/Interviewer]

that's.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

That's what people are. That, that's, that's what kind of gives me hope, that restlessness around that. But, you know, there was like a resounding applause around this idea. And you will notice this is not what Yale did. Yale instead branded its, its relationship with OpenAI and now it's like a corporate agreement.

[Nilay Patel]

Let me connect that sense, that lack of agency that you're describing to what we see in our politics writ large. I think a lot of people are going to, to their local town community planning meetings, and the data center is being proposed and they're saying no, and then it's happening anyway. Right. Like, I. We see this playing out like, yeah, Democratic politics. Little D. Democratic politics is failing people in just obvious ways. Here's this data center that you don't want, and you've literally come to the meeting to register your opposition and, well, we're doing it anyway because something. Because the town needs the job. So whatever, whatever excuse is being put forward. We see this maybe most notably in Utah. Kevin o' Leary is going to build the data center, no matter how much those people in Utah wanted or not. And maybe the elected officials get thrown out because they said yes, and that will be the, the mechanism of, of change there. But actually the representatives are not doing what the people want. The people feel this lack of agency. Your entire book is about the decaying of the liberal nation state. I could point to that very tiny thing. People don't feel agency about data centers and say, well, that's the tip of the spear. That's what's going to break it wide open. If you don't believe in your local government and you haven't believed in your national or state government for a long time, what. What's left is there? Is that recoverable? Like, the thing that I'm worried about the most is like, maybe that's not recoverable. If you can't even keep the data center from showing up in your backyard, what else is there to believe in? If you can't even get Yale to take, like, take a beat and talk to you, what else is there?

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Yeah, I don't know, man. That is really grim. I mean, I think the fact that

[Nilay Patel]

you're supposed to depress me.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

People are showing up and having those arguments. And, you know, if you were a smart community development board, you'd. You'd get ahead of that and be like, all right, let's think about. There are some good arguments for this data center that are honest arguments, and then there are some real, you know, arguments against it. Let's, let's have an open forum and let's see what the people think. And let's also educate ourselves and the community because there's a lot of, like, dumbass stuff out there about data centers. I'm sure on both, certainly on Both sides. I don't know. I think the fact that that's, that's happening and is likely to really influence these elections is, is meaningful. I think there are political consequences for just kind of going along to get along. But, you know, it's part of a much bigger problem with money in American politics and the relationship between corporations and government. So it's, there's, there's no, there's no really easy fix for that question, though, sort of structurally, like, like, is there any going back? A hypothetical I often pose is because my last book was about the history of the U.S. constitution. And one of the things, one of the claims I make in this book is it's a problem for American politics and government when the Constitution becomes unamendable. The U.S. constitution has been meaningfully amended since 1971. And so instead the Supreme Court amends the Constitution and how it acts, right? So the more, the longer that goes on, the more resentful people are of the Supreme Court. When people ask, like, well, would we ever get that back? I. The example I often give is jury service, right? Like, people, one thing that people really believe in is jury duty. Like, even if they don't like to do it, they believe in it. Like, they think it's a good thing to have, that it's involves fairness in our criminal justice system. Even if, like, objectively, like, juries often make the wrong decisions. But people believe, like, it's good that we are asked to go to a room with strangers and have, and deliberate over whether what's true and what's not true. But imagine that for some reason jury service was abolished in 1971, and now in 2026, someone was like, you know, what would actually be good would be bringing back jury duty and having like, just 12 random people decide, like, whether or not your kid, you know, is guilty of aggravated assault. There's no way we would bring it back because kind of trust in one another, in civil society is so evaporated. And that's what's worrying about the decay of people's sense of, well, we live in a representative government. If all of us, if the majority of us don't want this thing and we tell our elected officials we don't want this thing, then we're not going to have it. Then you repeatedly find out that you are going to have it in spite of what you want, your ability to believe in how the system works has really deteriorated. I think a lot of that sapping away of our civic strength and our capacity as citizens to deliberate with one Another hear one another out is because of the incursions of the artificial state.

[Nilay Patel]

I want to end by asking about a phenomenon that I see more and more, especially after AI got booed at all the college graduations. It's amazing. Between that and the data center pushback, it seems like the industry has decided they need a new tech. Right. They need to communicate more OpenAI. You know, they're just running around and their executives like we have a marketing problem, we just need to market it better. Google CEO is on the show and he's like I don't think it's a marketing problem. We actually have to like prove that the products are useful to people. That's what Microsoft CEO says. Well, there's a range of opinions here. The thing that all of them have started saying over and over and over again is the democratic process should be trusted to put the guardrails on us. The CEO of skydio was on, he is a drone maker. He supplies drones to the military and various governments and he will tell you it's as much power companies as the police. But don't worry about the police. The democratic process was going to stop the police from infringing on your rights with drones. Maybe I hear it with Anthropic just proposed a federal regulator for AI that will determine who runs the frontier models and do safety checks on them. And that's the democratic process. And I could probably make a list of every big tech executive at some point saying democracy will stop us. We trust democracy. Your entire book is about technology fraying democracy to its very core. Is this just self serving on their part that they now that they've broken it, they're like that's the thing that will stop us and they know that it won't. Or is this actually the moment for democracy to reassert itself because they're asking for for it?

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

Yes to both. I mean it is self serving on their part. And this goes pretty far back. I mean, you know, OpenAI some years ago had this whole like democratic inputs project where they were going to get democratic inputs on how AI should run. And this is where Claude's constitution comes from. We're going to have a democratically, we're going to have a collective constitution. We're going to like crowdsource constitutional drafting. And they did all these like Sure. I think the individuals involved in the democratic outputs inputs project for OpenAI and the collective constitutional project for, for Anthropic, they really cared about those things. They knew nothing about the political process, they know nothing about representative Democracy, nor did they care to learn. Right. Like the way collective constitutionalism worked, the democratic inputs project work was basically just turning people into data points. Well, we'll do like hyperscaling. Like, we'll do like a massive. Every American will be able to like click point and click and make a vote. And it's like that, that's not represent. Like, that's not deliberative democracy, actually. Like, people have to be in a room to get. They need to talk to one another. There needs to be a process. There need to be rules. There needs to be a parliamentarian. There need to be votes. There need to be, you know, rules about vetoing votes. There needs to be rules about speech and process. So when they talk about democracy will save us, what they mean by democracy is something that I think for most political scientists is unrecognizable as a democratic process. It's a word, it's a buzzword for them. It's been convenient for them at different moments in recent past, and it seems convenient now. That said, that doesn't mean this isn't a moment that people who care about think. You know, involving ordinary people in discussions around what do. What do we want would be, what would be Right. Like, I had to learn a little bit more about this and I want to talk to some people and I want to hear what my neighbors think and I want to sit down with, you know, the. The town council, the neighborhood council, and like, work it out. This is the chief argument in my book. That can still happen. That should still happen, and I think it has to still happen.

[Nilay Patel]

That seems like the next step. It seems like getting the college kids together to boo is like, maybe the thing that will solve democracy. As a college student who booed the Iraq war, I still want to believe this. Whether or not that went my way. Dr. Lapor, this has been amazing.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

Thank you so much for being here.

[Dr. Jill Lepore]

A lot of fun. Thanks so much for having me.

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

The book is the Rise and Fall of the Artificial state, out on August 25, wherever you like to get your books. I'd like to thank Dr. Jill Lepore for taking time to speak with me. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Just let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all. Drop us a line. You can email us@decoder the verge.com we really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or bluesky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod. We have a TikTok and an Instagram. Same handle@decoderpod. They're a lot of fun.

[Nilay Patel]

If you like Decoder, please share it

[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

with your friends and subscribe over your podcasts. Decoder is production of the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network show is produced by Kate Cox and Nickstadt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our Editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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[Nilay Patel (continued/alternate label)]

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[Dr. Jill Lepore]

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[Nilay Patel]

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