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

Dr. Jill Lepore is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems and organization — so her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, is a perfect fit for the show. You build systems by measuring things — gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. The book's big thesis is that this kind of systemic measurement is really a dehumanizing act, one that flattens humanity and human concerns into something, well, artificial. These artificial structures touch everything — not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics, governance, and the very future of the nation-state itself. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: The Artificial State | The New Yorker ‘Terminator’ to tech titans: Jill Lepore on the ‘artificial state’ | Yale Univ. The failed ideas that drive Elon Musk | New York Times Sam Altman | The Joe Rogan Experience Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder’s producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:42Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of 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 25. Jill is one of the best writers 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, 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,

• 2:25Speaker 02

  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 book, but in my reading, it's a pretty dead ahead look at the last century and a half of technological and social developments and how we got to a place where bots are maybe running everything. Jill's idea of the artificial state starts 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. But where she really sees a big pivot in the era she and I talked about the most is in the 1980s,

• 3:08Speaker 02

  when we saw the emergence of the Silicon Valley culture we have today, when computers got personal, and when computer aided targeting and microtargeting really and truly became possible and commonplace, not only for ads, but for political campaigns. What Jill and I did disagree about is some of her pessimism about the internet because the internet is what made 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 the 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

• 3:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Dr. 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. Welcome to Decoder.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  I'm 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, Verge-y, Neelai Patel strike zone books of all time.

• 4:39Speaker 03

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

• 4:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  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 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,

• 5:51Speaker 03

  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

• 6:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  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 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 we're on that ends the nation state?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Is that the core of the idea?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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 wanna, I'm running for election in some neighborhood, I gotta go talk to people, gonna go to baseball games, you're gonna, you know, go to basketball games, gonna go to the public library.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  But increasingly, it became less necessary for political campaigns to do that because they could subcontract out political polling, right? 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.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  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 extracting data, which is where we are now. It's just, 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 are getting them is a decision made by artificial intelligence.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  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 I kind of wanted to write a kind of grumpy book to say, well, let's pause for a minute. Like, when does, what was 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 beautiful new political world? And I think it looks pretty perilous.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  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 of science fiction authors in the 50s 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.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  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?

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Like, it's kind of 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, it is a consequence of the machine age. But there's also a lot of it in the 1950s. So there's, for instance, like a classic story by Isaac Asimov, I think it's 1955, called Franchise. It's set on the days before Election Day, 2008, November 4th, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency. And in that imagined future, that Asimovian future, there's this machine called the multivac

• 12:22Speaker 03

  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 pick 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, his life is destroyed. And 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 mean, yes, he was like, fucking around, but he was also serious, right? Like, wouldn't that be great?

• 13:05Speaker 03

  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, they're not, they're not humanists. And they, 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. Like, I think that they're, the capacity for humanistic inquiry and humanistic reading

• 13:49Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  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, of literature and the arts? The infinite beauty of humanity's capacity for making things? That's just, it's just not the ethos, right? Like, it's like, no, we'll do it better. Doesn't 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 doesn't have that,

• 15:16Speaker 03

  like, let's listen to what other people who came before might have known? That's still wisdom. And, and that makes for a very poor reading of literature, right? Like, we could have a great argument about what Isaac Asimov meant by that story. Like, it's not like a determinate, you know, like, I'm not the authority on Isaac Asimov, but like, I'm not going to ask Sam Altman what a short story means, right?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Well, he would just ask ChatGPT.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Yes, right.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  We have to take a short break here. We'll be right back.

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• 17:35Speaker 02

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Jill Lepore about the cast of billionaires who run the artificial state. 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 100 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.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Which is just not something a straight reading of Catholicism would allow you to do.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  There's a fetishization of, you know, there's an entire culture of thinking. I won't call it a philosophy, because I don't think it's quite that developed, but a culture of thinking around first principles, right? 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, right? 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

• 18:56Speaker 02

  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 accident or on purpose?

• 19:14Speaker 03

  I mean, I think of these guys as really instrumental. They're not...

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Pursuing knowledge for its own sake. They are deeply interested in exploration and I think in wonder. And I think like one of the things I really love about 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.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  That's, I just don't think that's part of that, that tech culture. It's, 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 conservative turn of the tech world, it takes on weird, weird valences. Yeah, I think it is really purposeful. Like this kind of knowledge is not worth having. We can't make money off of it.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  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 and 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? 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?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  You have a number of these markers. Walk, 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.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  That first begins to emerge in the 1980s. Like if you go back to 1984 and the launch of the Apple Macintosh and that, you know, famous iconic Apple TV ad from the Superbowl in January of 1984 with, it's like an outtake from, it 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 prom, the promise that that was attempting to illustrate was that the personal computer would be revolutionary.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  As I'm sure you've talked about in your show and you know, and your audience really understands that the, the celebration of the personal computer as emancipating came out of the counterculture. There's this great book from, from counterculture to cyberculture 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, of the Macintosh. Like, oh, well, we're going to defeat totalitarianism in the form of like the giant mainframe IBM that's run by, you know, that's associated with two things at the time. Businesses, big businesses, which are the only places that can afford these giant IBM mainframes that are running payroll systems and stuff for big corporations and the Republican

• 23:09Speaker 03

  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, 1980s. So there's this whole 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 going to emancipate me. Like what, what is it about?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  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 nineties 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 going to happen is now we all going to have personal computers that can be linked to one another. And so society is going to become emancipated and, and, and democratized, right? We're going to have a digital democracy, even though like it's, it's a little bit like, you know, when political pundits like make election forecasts and they're wrong half

• 24:38Speaker 03

  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 eighties that said the personal computer was going to liberate people, well, it didn't, right? But then in the nineties, it's 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 there certainly is tremendous democratizing potential for the internet, right? 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, emerging social media is like, oh, Facebook, like we're going to democratize this, we're going to connect everybody, we're going to have a fully, you know, everyone

• 25:23Speaker 03

  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, in, in we as like a polity have a say. It just means that like democratic countries should lift all restrictions and regulations up, be so that democracies can have AI before authority. Like it's just a, it's a, it's an old story.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Can I push back on this a little bit? Cause I personally struggle with that ad campaign, but the reality of it. There's not a world previous to 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

• 26:31Speaker 02

  YouTubers, that they, they know that they can go 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, realized 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 find me, right? 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

• 27:16Speaker 02

  for being crazy in their local Facebook groups. Maybe that worked and maybe it didn't. My friend Casey Newton is going to 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?

• 28:00Speaker 02

  It's not purely an ad campaign.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  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, uh, climbed their way up. I mean, you know, there's a reason Jimmy Olsen is in the newsroom with Clark Kent in 19, in 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

• 28:46Speaker 03

  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, like 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?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  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. It 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're, they all turn on a new emerging communications technology, which unsettles the relationship between the elites and the people, right?

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Like the people get more power, the parties just have to get realigned. But what always happens is

• 30:20Speaker 03

  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, who are these nouveau people that are like, they, to use your metaphor, 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 fucking jobs for them.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  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 whole, 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, we 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 are like, it's great, I like that these billionaires have all this power over our culture. I don't, but, like, we're continuing to rotate in their direction. I don't think it's kind of turning back.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  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 block, 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.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  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 that 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?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  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, you know, The Wired of the 1960s, by this guy, Ethiel de Solapool, who was an MIT political scientist. In 1968, he was asked with JCR Lichtleiter, the inventor of the internet, to speculate on what the computer revolution would mean by the year 2000. And they're both really smart guys, and they had really, really fascinating things to say.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  And Ethiel de Solapool, this political scientist, said, certainly by then, there will be personal newspapers. Like, you will, you will log on to 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, 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 Black Congressional Caucus is an interest group, right? Or Corn Growers, Farmers, Corn Farmers Association is an interest group.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  He's like, I don't think we'll even have that. We'd really only be able to have kind of personal polit, like, we will, I just think that our notion of a representative government, where we agree to elect people to represent not, you know, my individual interests, but like, 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. Like, 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

• 35:19Speaker 03

  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. 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.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  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, you know, win elections that way. But I think, like, most people in politics are not loving this moment.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

• 36:20Speaker 04

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• 37:34Speaker 02

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Jill Lepore about how micro-targeting and identity politics define our political economy. So, I said I was going to ask about targeted advertising, and 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 will 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.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  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 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, right?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  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 era. 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 of 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 that, 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've, like, my lifetime, that's been the way that we live. That's not when that country was founded, and that's also not inevitable, right?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  But the, the system that you're describing of the targeted advertising, which is really, effectively, what the, what the internet currently is, 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 actually chiefly acting online as a consumer, right? 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, you remember when you were outraged by that? You're like, I hate that they know that I had a baby. That makes me mad. I didn't tell them that. Like, like, but now we just accept, you know, that's just...

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Everyone's phones are listening to them.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Everyone's phones are listening to them. You know, you're getting on a flight, you know that you guess someone's going to 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, this is gonna 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

• 41:26Speaker 03

  the information that City Hall might have about you, or the information you might wish to share at City Hall, you know, you're gonna, your house has been reappraised and you wanna, you know, wanna question that, or you've got a parking ticket and you wanna 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

• 42:11Speaker 03

  for bots, in fairly short order, and the humans aren't really gonna be on it. It's just gonna be agentic AI doing your stuff." Like, people, it's really just gonna be machines talking to machines, which is in a way what people thought it was gonna 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, I just, if this continues, I just, I kinda don't see how democracy endures the corporatization of all political, all public discourse.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  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? 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 have asked the CEO of Uber this question.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do they say? What do they say? What do they say?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  It breaks down in two ways. Anybody who offers a physical service is like, "Yeah, it was really hard to build this business." Like, "You go ahead and try to disrupt me with your bots." Like, you won't. The CEO of Zocdoc, the CEO of Uber, the CEO of Task Rabbit, 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. Like, "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 dropshippers, right? They can be replaced, they're the ones suing perplexity. And perplexity is saying, "Our software is the new labor, and you're discriminating against our labor," which, I don't, I'm still trying to puzzle

• 44:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I totally don't know the answer. I really, I really, really don't. Yeah, no. And I'm just really fascinated by, you know, every time I look at the height of the tidal wave of the coming tech clash, like, it's just, 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 just think we're in for really bumpy times.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. The other piece of it that is just, it strikes me, is all of that, the internet will go away, is it's wishful thinking on a part of the companies. 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

• 45:54Speaker 02

  gonna 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. All connected to the fact that you're a college professor, you, you're in the height of the tech clash, as you just said. 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.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  No, it came from those people in, in, in a quad, in their sweating and their stupid caps and gowns, making a lot of noise together. It came from a, 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, 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

• 47:17Speaker 03

  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 the very first meeting of the AI task force, which the faculty thought was gonna be about, like, what should our pedagogical position be about? Like, "We're gonna use this task force to deliberate on what's the proper time and place for using these incredibly powerful tools, and then

• 48:00Speaker 03

  what are places that are maybe 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 gonna call it YayAI? Like, what's the branding strategy here?" And the faculty were 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, like, let's just do, like, let's just have a good 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

• 48:43Speaker 03

  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're like, "Let's do that. Like, why can't we do that? Why can't we have a discussion about, you know?" And this 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, like, that's why the students are mad. They're not doing, they're not, they're paying all this money, taking on all this debt, working their asses off, to

• 49:21Speaker 03

  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...

• 49:52Speaker 03

  That's, 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. 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.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  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 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, we see this playing out, like 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 for, we see this maybe

• 50:54Speaker 02

  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

• 51:38Speaker 02

  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?

• 51:53Speaker 03

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

• 51:59Speaker 02

  No, you're supposed to depress me.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  I mean, look, people are showing up and, 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. Cause there's, 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, 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

• 52:46Speaker 03

  with money and 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, is there any going back? A hypothetical I often pose is, because my last book was about the history of the US 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 US 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

• 53:30Speaker 03

  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 service, jury duty and having like

• 54:13Speaker 03

  just 12 random people decide like whether or not your kid, you know, is, is guilty of aggravated assault. There's no way we would bring it back because kind of trust in one another, in, in, 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 like all of us, if, 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, right? And then you repeatedly find out that you are going to have it in spite of what you want. Like your ability to believe in how the system works has really deteriorated. I think a lot of that sapping

• 54:55Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  I want to end by asking you about a phenomenon that I see more and more, especially after AI got booed at all the, all the college graduations. It's, it's amazing. Between that and the data center pushback, it seems like the industry has decided they need a new tech, right? They, they need to communicate more. OpenAI, you know, they're just running around and their executives are 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

• 55:50Speaker 02

  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, 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,

• 56:31Speaker 02

  they know that it won't? Or is this actually a moment for democracy to reassert itself because they're asking for it?

• 56:37Speaker 03

  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 experiments. Like, sure, I think the individuals involved in the democratic outputs, inputs project for OpenAI and the collective constitutional project 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

• 57:19Speaker 03

  inputs project worked was basically just turning people into data points. Well, we'll do like hyper scaling, 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 representative, like that's not deliberative democracy. Actually, like people have to be in a room together. 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, the rules about vetoing votes. There needs to be rules about speech and process. So I, 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

• 58:00Speaker 03

  process. It's a word. It's a buzzword for them. It's been convenient for them at different moments in their 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. I don't 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 of my book. That can still happen. That should still happen. And I think it has to still happen.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  That seems like the next step. It, 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, I still want to believe this, whether or not that went my way. Dr. Jalaport, this has been amazing. Thank you so much.

• 58:55Speaker 03

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

• 59:00Speaker 02

  The book is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, out on August 25th, wherever you like to get your books. I'd like to thank Dr. Jalaport for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. To let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We have a TikTok and an Instagram, same handle at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. 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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