Tech: Is Technology Setting Us Free?

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0:24You're now under automatic control. Hands off steering. People have been fascinated by automation, technological progress, and how we can change our lives throughout history. In 1956, General Motors made a film about the distant future of 1976 when cars would drive themselves with the help of traffic control towers.

0:52Ah, this is the light. Safe, cool, comfortable. Mind if I smoke a cigar? In 1993, AT &T envisioned what sounds a lot like today's smart home and smartwatch technology. Have you ever kept an eye on your home when you're not at home? Or gotten a phone call on your wrist? You will. And the company that'll bring it to you, AT &T. Even the calculator was once revolutionary. Here's 1971. Small, fast, silent. Ends paperwork pollution. LC8, world's smallest electronic calculator by Sharp. visions of the steady march of technological progress. Much of what the companies behind these advertisements promised has come true, but convenience isn't all they promised.

1:45Here's a Facebook ad from 2018.

1:50We came here for the friends. And we got to know the friends of our friends. Then our old friends from middle school, our mom, our ex, and our boss joined forces to wish us happy birthday. and we discovered our uncle used to play in a band and realized he was young once too. And we found others just like us. And just like that, we felt a little less alone. The idea running through all of it was that technology will set you free. It will connect you. It will give you power over your own life. It will make things better. And the people building those machines also say our journey to a future driven and controlled by technology is inevitable.

2:36But one author doesn't agree. In her new book, she writes, the artificial state is a fantasy half-built, dreaded, adored, awaited. I also believe it to be doomed. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We talk with that author after this short break. Stay with us.

2:57This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab with its original podcast, Schwab Market Update. Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash marketupdatepodcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Planet Money Summer School, we have drilled for oil in Norway, we've smuggled products into North Korea, and now we make it to our seventh continent, Antarctica.

3:37That's right, speak for me. Mr. Penguin, speak for me. That's another sound of Antarctica. That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's meet our guest. Jill Lepore is a Harvard historian and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her new book is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. It provides a dark picture of where we're headed, but she says it isn't too late to change course. Jill Lepore, welcome to 1A. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Jill, let's just start with a couple of definitions.

4:11What do you mean by artificial state? Well, we live in the United States today in a liberal constitutional democracy, in a nation state. This is a fairly new form, of course, of human history. We're celebrating the 250th anniversary this year of the founding of the United States, the world's first modern democracy. So it's not necessarily going to last. And I think much of the apparatus of a kind of successor state has now been put in place. And I call that the artificial state in which in place of government by consent, we have government by machines. It's not foreordained. It's not a fait accompli.

4:50I don't think it was even intentional. But I think we've surrendered a lot of the elements of democratic citizenship. We've outsourced it to machines. And for all that many of these tools and machines bring us, and I'm by no means an anti-technologist, I think a lot of recent innovations have had terribly malign consequences for democratic politics. Well, we are still electing our leaders, making choices as a society, right? So why do you see the artificial state as a threat to liberal democracy? We absolutely are still living in democracies, although democracies have been collapsing all over the world for the last 20 years or so.

5:34And there's also the ongoing process that political scientists call democratic backsliding, where we just have less and less faith in elections and in elected officials. Actually, a lot of new opinion research suggests that people have more faith in their chatbots than they do in their elected representatives, more trust in them. I think you see ways in which what was once called the public sphere, reasonably enough, no longer really exists in that same way. You know, you and I are having conversation on public media today, an open, free conversation that people are participating in. and this is kind of the best of what a public sphere is, it's still very much alive.

6:15But the emergence of social media really dismantled much local news reporting, local news organizations around the country. You know, everyone knows about the fate of newspapers, but more broadly, kind of local reporting has been essentially in remission for 20 years or so. That's a kind of glue to civil society that we really no longer have. people are very well aware of how social media has acted as a kind of radicalizing or polarizing machine not that polarization didn't exist or wasn't worsening before say facebook in in 2004 but i think uh people are quite familiar with the degree to which alienation the loneliness epidemic the social effects of social media the malign social effects of social media think about the new, like just announced Facebook, the meta settlement.

7:11But I think we're maybe less aware of the political consequences of these tools and the ways in which they involve the kind of slow dismantling of government by consent. You alluded to this earlier, you describe the rise of the artificial state as largely accidental for most of history. It was part of this well-intentioned effort to improve speed, to build more efficiency. So what changed? Well, states, of course, have to accumulate knowledge and they have to organize that knowledge in order to do things like just provide resources, distribute goods and benefits, and collect revenues in the form of taxes and tariffs.

7:55So there are all kinds of tools that States use. And, you know, some of them are mechanical and others are not. But it is perfectly rational for, for instance, you know, the United States, the first nation in the world to require national census every 10 years. You want to be able to get that census processed as quickly as possible because our representation is mathematically proportionate to the population. So say in the 1880s and 1890s, when the Census Bureau population had increased significantly, it was harder and harder to count, to tally the returns, all these kind of handwritten returns.

8:35They had kind of a contest to see who could invent a tabulating machine that could do that work, that could automate some of that work. Herman Hollerth won that contest and the census was increasingly, the tabulation was done by a machine, done more quickly, more efficiently, more cheaply. He went on to found what becomes IBM. That seems like perfectly natural. While that's really useful, you do want census to be counted quickly. There's nothing sinister or conspiratorial or malign about that. So tools that the government uses all the time are not, we might think of them as artificial in the sense that they're man-made, But they're not really replacing democratic citizenship or the capacities of citizens to make democratic decisions or to deliberate democratically.

9:29But if you compare, you know, using a mainframe, the first mainframe computer that was sold commercially was built in the 1950s for the U.S. Census Bureau, which, you know, greatly sped up census taking. But that same computer, so that was 1950, the 1950 census that that was used for. by 1958 an advertising company in New York had formed an offshoot called the Simulmatics Corporation that was going to use those same early mainframe computers to simulate the electorate. They wanted to build what they called a people machine, Simulmatics did, and by compiling census data and election returns and public opinion surveys to make a representative sample of the American electorate to which the computer could be asked all kinds of what-if questions.

10:19They sold their services to the Democratic National Committee and then to the John F. Kennedy campaign in 1960 and did things like, and again, this does not seem malign. So Kennedy's campaign could say, what if Kennedy were to talk more about his Catholicism? What would be the effect of that change of approach on Protestant and Jewish voters in the Midwest. I think it might surprise people to hear that the use of this kind of data goes back that far. As you were researching this book and uncovering the layers, were there surprises for you? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I wrote a book about the Simulmatics Corporation a few years ago because I was completely staggered by the existence of this stuff in the 1950s and 1960s and actually how sophisticated it was.

11:12Like they were pretty good at what they were doing. But what also really surprised me about, say, Simo Maddox was how morally concerned people were about it. Like when Kennedy won in 1960, Simo Maddox kind of did a little kind of press junket and claimed credit for his victory. And then the Kennedy campaign denied having ever hired them. Like they realized it was a bad thing to have used a computer to win an election. I think that's a good measure of the distance between now and then. Coming up, tech companies like Facebook and Twitter marketed themselves as the new public square, platforms that connect people and ideas.

11:50But how have those platforms affected the health of public discourse in the U.S.? We'll be right back.

12:00Fall is right around the corner. That means the midterms. Hey, it's Miles Parks from the NPR Politics Podcast. Now is the perfect time to calibrate your news diet for the fall. Follow our show for short daily episodes that will help you stay ahead of the most important midterm storylines that you need to follow. Find the NPR Politics Podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. How do products end up on big box shelves? Well, we at Planet Money pitch the Planet Money board game. I'm trying not to think how much of a big deal it is and how much work has gone into. It's really big. Is it helpful if I remind you how big it is?

12:38It's sort of the whole thing. We go inside the minds of the people who decide what goes on store shelves. Listen to Planet Money on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Tanya, I think you did the best interview that I've done. Seriously. Oh, that's a great question. I think I'm going to think about that question for the rest of my life. Oh, good question. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air, and the questions are only the half of it. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Back to our conversation with historian Jill Lepore about what happens to democracy when the functions of government are turned over to machines and automation.

13:23Jill, one of the really fascinating things you do in this book is go back to the 1920s and a movement I think most people have never heard of, technocracy, which argued democracy simply isn't up to the task of running a modern industrial economy and that scientists and engineers should govern instead. Explain more about what was behind that movement. yeah so after the first world war and the collapse of empires and the rise of these kind of new tentative democracies many very quickly began to fall by the late 1920s and into the early 1930s under the pressures sort of replaced by communism and fascism and the great depression put an enormous pressure on democracies around the world and in the u.s there was a real fear that democracy just was not going to survive, right?

14:13That degree of suffering that you really needed a strongman to run an industrial economy. And so before FDR's election in 1932 was just an incredibly fragile moment in the history of American democracy. Everybody was worried about, and every magazine and newspaper radio story was about the future of American democracy. And there emerged at that moment a movement called Technocracy Incorporated, and it had headquarters in New York, but it was really a North American movement, really Canadian and American. The leader in the United States was a guy named Howard Scott and the leader in Canada was an amateur aviator and chiropractor, kind of an adventure, former rodeo cowboy named Joshua Haldeman.

14:58And technocracy was opposed to democracy. He said, as you said, that the popularly elected leaders, people weren't smart enough to elect people who could understand modern machinery and the modern industrial economy. And that democracy was just doomed to fail and therefore societies ought to be run instead by scientists and engineers who would make all the decisions. People would be, and everything would be done in the interest of the greatest possible sort of mechanical efficiency. So people would have numbers instead of names, easier to sort of run a society that way. There would be no politics, no elections.

15:36There would be no banks. It would be a kind of single unit of currency, which would be the erg. It would be a unit of energy. Goods would be distributed along something kind of not dissimilar from what today is known as universal basic income. And everyone would live in what was called a technate. Technocrats had a kind of fascist aesthetic. They wore identical gray suits. They drove identical gray cars. And although it seems really kooky, and a lot of people at the time thought it was really cukey. It had a huge following, like tens of thousands of people would show up for these technocracy rallies at places like the Hollywood Bowl.

16:15And it really seemed for a moment in time, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of news stories were published about technocracy until FDR was elected. And then FDR's great promise with the New Deal was that he would find a third way between an entirely unregulated laissez-faire economy and a kind of government-controlled, like state-controlled economy. And that was the New Deal. So where do we see the echoes of technocracy today? What is the legacy of that movement? You know, I think if you go back and read the pamphlets, like they mainly reached people through like a massive pamphleteering campaign.

16:52Like what is technocracy? Six steps to a technocrat, to a technate. They really have an uncanny similarity to the manifestos that are constantly coming out of Silicon Valley, right? The kind of, oh, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg manifestos that are published online or Sam Altman manifestos. Here's what the future is going to look like. And there's also a kind of weird, and I think to many people, certainly surprised me when I discovered in the archives, connection because Joshua Haldeman, who was the leader of the movement in Canada, even after the movement was completely collapsed in the US, Haldeman continued to be an avid leader of the technocrat movement in Canada.

17:36Canada outlawed technocracy as subversive to the government. Haldeman was briefly put in prison. He was barred entry to the US. He later decided after South Africa declared its policy of apartheid to take his family to South Africa. And he is in fact Elon Musk's grandfather. That's why Musk was born in South Africa. So there's even kind of a family story. If you look at photographs of these two guys, they look astoundingly alike, and they have a lot in common, the sort of amateur aviator adventurer piece of things. You know, Musk is not responsible for his grandfather. He barely knew him. He died when Musk was a toddler.

18:15But there is a way in which for all of the futurism, the technological marvels that are coming out of Silicon Valley and really that are wonders to be appreciated and admired, the political ideas that come out of Silicon Valley are the worst and most discredited failed ideas of the 20th century. Well, let's get to 1A's Town Square. We got this from Brian, who says, the problem here is capitalism. It is at the heart of everything to do with the rise of unmitigated tech control in our society. We also got this voicemail from Jim. Business and corporations operate by a different ethos. Their ethos is the bottom line.

18:57The government, in its original spirit, although less all the time, operates on a more human interest, the interest and well-being of its participants. And I think that it is a significant distinction because corporations will sacrifice much in relation to human interest and human benefit, whereas the government is obligated not to do so. Thanks for those messages. And Jill, what do you say to both Jim and our previous caller who say this is really about the difference between the role and responsibility of businesses and corporations and the role and responsibilities of government, that it's not even so much a tech issue as it is that they play different roles in our society.

19:49Sure. And I think you sometimes see, you know, some of, I think, the better intention tech executives are out there begging Congress to act. We actually, we need this industry to be regulated. Can you please do something? I mean, you would just think of like Bill Gates issued a 6 ,000 word manifesto online just this week, essentially arguing the same. The failure, and I think that the two commentators would agree here, like it's not surprising that corporations act this way, but where's government? Why are our elected representatives not protecting our best interests and our quality of life here?

20:24And I think that, too, is a historical story. And I think that begins in the 1980s. I remember, and you may well remember as well, 1984 when Apple released the Macintosh. It was with this incredibly great ad. We actually have that ad. Let's take a listen to it. So this is 1984. Apple launches the Macintosh computer with a Super Bowl commercial. It's directed by a sci-fi legend, Ridley Scott. And the advertisement references Orwell's 1984. So there are rows of identically dressed people watching this giant screen showing Big Brother. Today we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the information glorification of victims.

21:04And it ends with a lone, brightly dressed woman hurling a hammer at the screen. We shall prevail. On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. So the promise there seems to be that personal computing will be this moment of liberation for people, that it'll free us from central control, from conformity. What do you make of that advertisement today? Yeah, so it's a great ad. It's still powerful. And it does make that claim. The personal computer will enhance democratic politics. It will empower the people, right? Big IBM mainframes, oh, those are associated with totalitarianism somehow.

21:57The gray is like the IBM. But, oh, the personal computer, that's going to be emancipatory. I think it's a great idea. It's also funny. Like, it's kind of a joke, right? It's not really, it's not a serious political claim. But I think it became a serious political claim in Silicon Valley so that by the time you get to the 1990s, now the promise that the personal computer will be, and it will enhance democratic politics is kind of extended to the internet. Oh, the internet, it'll bring about a digital democracy. We'll have direct democracy on the internet. But there was also a libertarianism to the launching of the opening of the internet in the 1990s, right?

22:35The declaration of the independence of cyberspace, which claimed that the internet would be beyond all laws, that it would be a wholly unregulated place. And that would be the beauty of it. And that would be the promise of it. So there's a kind of marketing campaign around each of these new generations of technologies that is about enhancing democracy, but the political ideas behind them are really libertarian. So you get the same promise with social media, again, beginning with Facebook in 2004. This will enhance democracy, right? But don't regulate it because this lies outside the realm of government and law.

23:11And now we're in the kind of AI version of that and soon we'll be in the humanoid robots version of that, right? Like the libertarianism of Silicon Valley and the claim that underlies all of these marketing campaigns that regulation would stifle innovation. The government has no place here. That goes back to the very beginnings of Silicon Valley. One of the main threats you identify to liberal democracy is the current information landscape. and all its bots and algorithms. It's something on our listeners' minds as well. Michelle in Virginia emails, people now demand photos or it didn't happen.

23:49And yet when presented with a photo, people shout either that it is AI or fake news. It has made the subjective even more so without really improving anything. And Lynn writes, I think social media addiction is one of the biggest issues, maybe the biggest issue facing society. We are more lonely than ever. We are more divided than ever. And the number of people I know of, both personally and tangentially, who actually believe anything and everything they see, read, or hear on social media is extremely disturbing. I'm curious to hear your historical read on the way these social media systems are shaping our public discourse.

24:28I mean, they're designed to maximize engagement. Yeah, and I think your readers' very wise comments suggest that there is a growing awareness of, and certainly governments too are beginning to act, courts and legislatures, that there are real harms that are caused by social media. And we think of those largely as social harms. And Australia has banned social media for users under the age of 16 and other countries are thinking about similar bans. And yet there's a whole kind of the toothpaste has already been squeezed out, you can't put it back in feeling about that. And those social harms are real.

25:13And it's good that there's a reckoning with that. I don't think we're out ahead of the political harms. And those are the ones that I'm trying to call some attention to. Because they're largely invisible. I mean, I think what's visible, honestly, are the data centers, which are big, giant, many miles of buildings. and so weirdly, it's kind of the first time people could see like, oh, I see, this is a thing. This is a physical thing in the actual physical world that may be a problem for me, may be a problem for my community and it's different than I can't put my phone down even when I have my baby in my arms.

25:52You know, it's different than I haven't visited my mother-in-law in the nursing home in years because I just Zoom with her. Um, it's, it's the data center thing is, is more tangible, but I don't think it's a different issue. You know, tech companies argue that regulation will hurt American companies with other countries like China, that it'll threaten U.S. national security. What do you make of those arguments? I, you know, that the argument that regulation stifles innovation is presented by these companies as a kind of eternal, timeless truth. In fact, it's kind of equal parts marketing campaign and political slogan.