The Story
Nilay Patel brings Jill Lepore on because her new book fits Decoder almost too well: it is about what happens when institutions start treating people as measurable inputs. Lepore calls the result "the artificial state," a condition where functions that once belonged to the nation-state drift into the hands of private corporations. The public square is the clearest example. People get political information, argue, organize, and form opinions on platforms built to sell attention, not support democratic life.
She traces that shift across a long stretch of history, from census-taking and polling to the point where political life can be sliced into data and sold back as targeting. One of her strongest examples is polling in the 1930s. Campaigns once depended on face-to-face contact, all the messy, inefficient conversations that built civic connection. Polling made that less necessary. More efficient politics, maybe. Less human politics, certainly. That trade-off keeps repeating.
From there the conversation moves into Silicon Valley's self-image. Lepore sees a culture that worships the future and treats the past as dead weight. She argues that many tech leaders read warnings from science fiction as if they were product roadmaps. When someone like Sam Altman jokes, or half-jokes, about AI choosing a president, she hears the old fantasy of replacing democratic labor with machine efficiency. Her complaint is not that these people are dumb. It is that they are uninterested in the kinds of history, literature, and moral reasoning that might slow them down.
Nilay pushes back on one big point: the internet did open doors. It helped people outside old gatekept systems build careers, audiences, and communities. Lepore doesn't deny that. Her answer is that every communications revolution briefly loosens elite control before power regroups, and this time the regrouping has been especially sharp. She points to collapsing creative industries, precarious work, and platforms whose owners can change the rules overnight.
That leads naturally to targeted advertising and identity politics. Lepore argues that computer sorting changed how people are grouped and addressed, in commerce and in politics. Campaigns now feel forced to use microtargeting because their opponents will. Public life starts to look like a race to manipulate individuals at scale.
By the end, both of them are circling the same question: what happens if democratic institutions are too weak to check any of this? Lepore finds some hope in the physical world, in students booing AI executives at graduations, in local fights over data centers, in people showing up together and arguing in person. For her, that is where democratic life still lives.
Main Themes
The main thread is that quantification changes citizenship. Once people become polls, profiles, audience segments, and engagement metrics, institutions begin responding to abstractions instead of persons. Lepore's argument is that this does not just distort politics at the edges. It changes the state itself by moving public functions into private systems built around profit.
Another theme is the bait-and-switch of tech utopianism. Personal computers, the internet, social media, and now AI were all sold with promises of liberation. Nilay keeps hold of the fact that some of that liberation was real. Lepore keeps bringing the discussion back to who ends up controlling the medium. Their disagreement gives the episode its shape. He sees genuine openings that mattered. She sees those openings repeatedly narrowed by concentrated power.
The episode also ties consumer logic to political logic. Targeted advertising is not just a way to sell shoes or mattresses. It trains institutions to find the right message for the right person at the right moment, whether the goal is a purchase or a vote. That connection helps explain why online life feels less like citizenship and more like constant behavioral nudging.
Hope, when it appears, is small-scale and physical. Lepore does not put much faith in elite institutions or in tech executives who suddenly say democracy should regulate them. She trusts scenes where actual people are in a room together, making noise, disagreeing, and insisting on having a say.
Full Transcript
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With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place: what it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great frickin' database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash AI. Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay 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 25th. 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. 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, and 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. 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 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. 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. Hi, thanks for having me. 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 decodery, vergy, Nilay Patel strike zone books of all time. Wow, I'm not sure how to take that, but I guess that's good. 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. 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 then, 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, 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 acts, 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. 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? Is that the core of the idea? Yeah. And I think 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 got to go talk to people. I'm gonna go to baseball games. You're going to, you know, go to basketball games. You're going 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, right? But you can find out what political opinion is in a neighborhood if you wanna run a campaign by just drawing down, just by doing data mining and data analysis. So you might say, 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 going to go and I'm going to sit in on some PTA meeting or I'm going to 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 And we're going to just go through the ice, and like, we're all going to drown in there. Or is that like a beautiful new political world? And I think it looks pretty perilous. 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 tormented 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 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 that I think is 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 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 to pick the average person. And that's the only person who votes. And 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 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 because it's so efficient and we don't have to bother and it spares us the 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. Like, 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, 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. 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 not the ethos, right? Like, it's like, no, we'll do it better. It 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 like, let's listen to what other people who came before might have known. That's still wisdom. 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 determinant. I mean, I don't 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? Well, he would just ask ChatGPT. That's right. We have to take a short break here. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. Thousands of businesses, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500s, are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days. Agents solve the gap between AI-generated ideas and production-ready website work. Agents in Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything all in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash decoder for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash decoder for 30% off. Framer.com slash decoder. Rules and restrictions may apply. This is advertiser content from IBM. Cold take. My laptop works fine at room temperature, and most things on Earth do. If quantum computers can only function and behave quantumly at insanely cold temperatures, how will they ever become useful to most people? My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the global lead for content and education at IBM Quantum. I want to emphasize that actually cooling down a quantum computer is not really as hard as I think people think it is. It really is just the push of a button that can take your entire infrastructure down to 10 millikelvin. That is not the challenge, scientifically speaking. I also want to emphasize that in the future, we don't envision everyone having their own quantum laptop. Quantum computers are going to live in a data center. Data centers already have their own cooling infrastructure. It's not going to be something that you have to learn how to install and work on a personal level. But that doesn't mean that discoveries made with the technology won't affect every person. Quantum computing has the potential to touch almost every industry that you can probably think of. If you would like to learn more, you can do so at ibm.com slash quantum. Hi everyone, this segment of Decoder Sessions features Helen Havlak, the publisher of The Verge, and Christy Argelon, Uber's global head of advertising. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Christy, just to start, when did Uber launch advertising and how is it going? It's been a really interesting journey for Uber. Most people came to know Uber as the 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. What makes Uber advertising unique as a product? 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. 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 a hundred times, I think. 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 are often in fights with the Pope, which is just not something a straight reading of Catholicism would allow you to do. 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 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. 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 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 it's tremendously exciting. You know, harnessed to militarization and certain commercial projects is like, well, we went from Star Trek to Star Wars really fast, you know, like the, the, 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, 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, greater compassion. I think it's largely mocked in that world as woke or feminine or libtard, whatever. Like, I think especially with the kind of 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. 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 always cause 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 I'm like, what happened? What did we do wrong? Like what, was there, do you not have a sense of obligation to the human condition? 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. 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 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, you know, and your audience really understands that the celebration of the personal computer as emancipating came out of the counterculture. And there's this great book 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 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 Party, which actually has a ton of IBM mainframes and the Democrats have basically no computers. Huge problem for the Democrats in the 1970s and 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. Yeah. 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? But, but, so you begin to see new tech products, computing 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 going to happen is now we're all going to have personal computers that are going to be linked to one another. And so society is going to become emancipated and democratized, right? That we're going to have a digital democracy. Even though, like, it's a little bit like, you know, when political pundits like 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? But the people in the 80s that said the personal computer was going to liberate people, well, it didn't, right? But then in the 90s, 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 that there certainly is tremendous democratizing potential for the internet, right? Like there was a lot of promise there, but 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 going to democratize this. We're going to connect everybody. We're going to 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, we as like a polity have a say. It just means that, like, democratic countries should lift all restrictions and regulations on AI so that democracies can have AI before authorities. Like, it's just a, it's an old story. 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 just start a business and go reach people on these platforms in some way. The flip side of that is, 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, racists find me, right? 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 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 it. 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? It's not purely an ad campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, 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 were 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 the 193 Radio in the 1920s. It happens with TV in the 1950s. But in each of those instances— 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, who are these like nouveau people that are like, they really—they, 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, they're not turning the wheel this way. They're just, we're keeping it to go this way. I teach undergraduates, like I see them go out in the world. There are no fucking jobs for them. You want to be a writer. You want to be an artist. You want to be a moviemaker. You want to be a screenwriter. Where are you going to get a job? Who's going to— 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 just 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 it'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're 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. 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 and in our politics more broadly. But you can push back on that, right? You can say, no, we don't like that. Identity politics is bad, right? That's too woke. And you can see 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 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? 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, Ithiel de Solapool, 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're both really smart guys, and they had really, really fascinating things to say. And Ithiel de Solapool, 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, being both of those things. And Pool said, you know, there really won't be able to be party politics if you have your own newspaper because the 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, a corn farmers association is an interest group. He's like, I don't think we'll even have that. We really will only be able to have kind of personal politics. 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 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 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 deepfake 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, you know, win elections that way. But I think like most people in politics are not loving this moment. We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate. Instead, it just describes them, suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. That's not help. That's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved, requests get processed, loops get closed, and most importantly, no extra work for you. Because when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do. The work that requires a person with ideas and judgment. And you know, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding can help you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is a bottleneck, what's the point? MongoDB actually gets out of your way. MongoDB is a unified, AI-ready data platform that empowers you to build scalable, generative AI applications. It eliminates the need for separate, specialized vector databases by combining a flexible document model natively with semantic vector search, full-text search, and real-time operational data. Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. Plus, MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI. The asset compliance lets you sleep soundly at night and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash AI. 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 and 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. Meta got sued for creating ad categories that were protected classes by race and gender. 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 That's not what that country was founded, and that's also not inevitable, right? But the system that you're describing of the targeted advertising, which is really effectively 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 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, remember when you were outraged by that? And you're like, I hate that they know that I had a baby. That makes me mad. I didn't tell them that. Like, but now we just accept, you know, that's just... Everyone's phones are listening to them and it's whatever. Everyone's phones are listening to them. You know, you're getting on a flight. You know that you get someone's gonna offer you Dramamine online. But that, I think that seems to a lot of people, like inevitable and almost natural because the consumer's republic is just 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 JC Penney and the Walgreens. Like there are 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, 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 are 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 transformation that is a long time coming. I think that 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 going to be for bots here in fairly short order. And the humans aren't really going to be on it. It's just 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, it just continues. I just, I kind of don't see how democracy endures the corporatization of all political, all public discourse. 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. Like literally I've asked the CEO of Uber this question. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do they say? What do they say? What do they say? 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 CEOs 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. 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 drop shippers, 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 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. 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 techlash, 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. 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 the 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 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 professor. You're, you're in the high, the height of the techlash, 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. 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 group, like an actual group of humans in a, 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, 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, you see it maybe in the publishing industry. Please, it's very self-interested, but I think you, 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 I 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 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 Yale AI? Like what's the, 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. It's this wonderful group of students. And so I said like, what about, I like, let's just do like a, 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 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 like, they were like, they were like, let's do that. Like, why can't we do that? Why can't we have a discussion about, you know, 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, like, that's why the students are mad. They're not doing, they're And, well, we're doing it anyway because something. Because the town needs the jobs or whatever excuse is being put forward. We see this maybe most notably in Utah. Kevin O'Leary is going to build a data center no matter how much those people in Utah want it or not. And maybe the elected officials will get thrown out because they said yes, and that will be the mechanism 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's left? Is that recoverable? The thing that I'm worried about the most is 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 a beat and talk to you, what else is there? Yeah. I don't know, man. That is really grim. I mean, I think the fact that people are showing up. No, no, you're supposed to depress me. I mean, look, people are showing up and having those arguments. And, you know, if you were a smart community development board, 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 this, there is a lot of like dumb ass 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, this is, there's no, there's no really easy fix for that. The 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 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? 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 decision, 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's would actually be good would be bringing back jury service, jury duty and having like 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 and 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 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 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. 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 that they need a new tech, right? 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 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 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 a moment for democracy to reassert itself because they're asking for it? Yes to both. I mean, it is self-serving on their part. And this goes pretty far back. I mean, OpenAI some years ago had this whole like democratic inputs project where they're 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 inputs project worked 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's not represent, 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 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. 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. That's the, that's the chief argument in my book that can still happen. That should still happen. And I think it has to still happen. 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 is a college student who booed the Iraq war. I, I still want to believe this whether or not that went my way, Tasha Pour, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Thanks so much for having me. 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. Jill Lepore for taking 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 decoder at the verge.com. 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. 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