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

24:07Like 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 talk this way. And they're like, what happened? What did we do wrong? Like, what was there? Do you not have a sense of obligation to the human condition?

24:23Nilay Patel:You have a number of these markers. Walk us through some of them from the Internet and social platforms will cause an outbreak of democracy to where we are now in 2026. 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 it looks like you're watching George Orwell's 1984 with these kind of like people dressed in gray and they're all skins all gray and they march into a room and, you know, whatever the Olympian woman comes through and smashes big brother on the screen.

25:00and the tagline of the ad is 1984 will not be like 1984. The promise that that was attempting to illustrate was that the personal computer would be revolutionary. As I'm sure you've talked about in your show and your audience really understands that the celebration of the personal computer as emancipating came out of the counterculture. There's this great book from counterculture to 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.

25:51businesses, 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. It's a 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.

26:29And there are people who are like, well, exactly how does the personal computer? Like, it's great. I would like one. It's fun to have. Like, I also like a nice toaster. But, like, my toaster isn't going to emancipate me. Like, what is it about? But so you begin to see new tech computing projects, products as very carefully packaged with an ideal about personal liberation. And then so by the time you get to the 90s and the 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 are going to have personal computers are going to be linked to one another.

27:13And so society is going to become emancipated and democratized, right? 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? Like, 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.

27:46And 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 will be able to be close to one another. And then that also doesn't happen. And then what we need is democratic AI.

28:21And that doesn't mean we have a say in democracy. We as a polity have a say. It just means that democratic countries should lift all restrictions and regulations so that democracies can have AI before authority. It's an old story.

28:39Nilay Patel:Can I push back on this a little bit? Because I personally struggle with that ad campaign, but the reality of it. There's not a world previous to the internet where a guy like me who grew up in Wisconsin with no connections to the media ends up interviewing you, a Harvard professor. like the internet needed to arrive publishing needed to be democratized for whatever reason AOL needed to pay a bunch of bloggers$12 a blog post and then somehow decide that I should be one of those people like a lot of things had to happen where gatekeepers did fall away and people like me were allowed to go find their audience and I see it every single day now with young people who style themselves as creators or youtubers that they they know that they can go start a business of single reach people on these platforms in some way.

29:27Nilay Patel: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 racist 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.

30:10Nilay Patel:Maybe that worked and maybe it didn't. My friend Casey Newton's 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?

30:41Nilay Patel: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. It's not purely an ad campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that's fair. I think we tend to forget that, for instance, up until fairly recent history, maybe the 1980s, very few newspaper reporters in the United States had college degrees. They were people, you know, mostly men, but there are a lot of women beat reporters and women editorial writers who started out like delivering newspapers, you know, working at the press, the printing, working the printing presses at newspapers, climbed their way up.

31:21I mean, you know, there's a reason Jimmy Olsen is in the newsroom with Clark Kent 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 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.

32:06And 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. It's like by definition, right, if you can make a technology of communication cheaper and faster, you're going to reach more people and more people are going to be involved in producing it. That happens with the, you know, with the first weekly newspapers, with the penny press in the 1830s, with the telegraph in the 1840s. It happens, you know, with how the telephone changes news reporting, the wire service in the Mexican-American War.

32:43It happens with the radio in the 1920s. It happens with TV in the 1950s. But in each of those, in fact, what's kind of interesting about that, each of those transformations reshapes the party system. There have been seven party systems in American history, and they all turn on a new emerging communications technology, which unsettles the relationship between the elites and the people, right? Like the people get more power, the parties just have to get realigned. But what always happens is the elites regain the power, right? Like they don't like it, right? They don't like the newsboys becoming beat reporters, becoming editors.

33:19They're like, who are these like 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 keeping 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.

33:57You 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 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 these billionaires have all this power over our culture. I don't. But like we're continuing to rotate in their direction.

34:33I 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.

35:02Nilay Patel:I said I was going to ask about targeted advertising. And one of the reasons I think the pendulum has swung back so sharply is a reaction to what you might call identity politics. In the book, you say that identity politics, as we know it, is made possible by computer-run sorting and targeting. Right? That the algorithms on these platforms will put us all together and then we will say, here's an identity. We're a 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.

35:35Nilay Patel: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 the identity politics of today is defined by the fact that we all exist on platforms? Or do you think it's just shaped by it? What's the relationship there? I remember being quite struck reading an article from 1968 in a magazine that I think was called Science and Technology.

36:15Like a popular magazine. Like, you know, the Wired of the 1960s. By this guy, Ithiel de Solopoul, who was an MIT political scientist. In 1968, he was asked with J.C.R. Licklider, the inventor of the internet, to speculate on what the computer revolution would mean by the year 2000. And they were both really smart guys and they had really, really fascinating things to say. And Ithiel de Sola pulled his 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 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?

37:23Or Corn Farmers Association is an interest group. He's like, I don't think we'll even have that. We really only be able to have kind of personal politics. 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 interest of my community you'll only have the sense of your own interest 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.

38:16And 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.

38:50Like, 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.

39:08Nilay Patel:We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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41:20Welcome back.

41:21Nilay Patel: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'm just thinking 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.

41:53Nilay Patel:We might know so much about you that we can target that message even more tightly to you in an automated way. and we will deliver it to you. And, you know, the big tech companies have all gotten in trouble for over sorting people. Meta got sued for creating ad categories that were protected classes by race and gender, by other platforms have gotten in trouble for not delivering housing advertisements to certain groups that were supposed to receive them or otherwise be discriminated against. You see this play out over and over again, that there's all kinds of sorting we're not supposed to do, that we've actually made illegal.

42:25Nilay Patel:And the algorithms don't know this. The platforms may you 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. That's the business we're in. I'm wondering how you see that connecting to the artificial state, right? 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.

42:59It'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 entity of consequence in the United States, you know, in the 1950s, in the post-war era, with the, you know, peacetime conversion of wartime factories. So, like, Really consumption was what was going to save the country and advance the country's interests. And American growth and American strength was associated with consumerism.

43:34And that we've, like my lifetime, that's been the way that we live. That's not where 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. 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.

44:15Like, 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.

44:26Nilay Patel:Everyone's phones are listening to them. 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 Consumer's 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, this is going to make me sound like I'm 112, there's like the JCPenney and the Walgreens.

45:06Like, 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 you're uh you're gonna your house has been reappraised and you want to you know want to question that or you've got a a parking ticket and you want to appeal it those were in one place and then like if you're gonna go buy ibuprofen um 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.

45:46I 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 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, I just, if this continues, I just, I kind of don't see how democracy endures the corporatization of all political, all public discourse.

46:42Nilay Patel:Yeah, we have had many, many, many tech CEOs on the show and we have asked them very directly what happens when no one uses your app anymore, 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 Camry's. We literally have asked the CEOs over this question. 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 CEO of ZocDoc, the CEO of Uber, the CEO of TaskRabbit, they're all like, yeah, go ahead and try.

47:20Nilay Patel: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'm still trying to puzzle that out. Do I believe that the agentic AI is equivalent to my labor?

47:55Nilay Patel: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, really don't.

48:27Yeah, 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.

48:55Nilay Patel:Yeah. The other piece of it that is just, it strikes me is all of that, the internet will go away. It is, it's wishful thinking on a part of the companies. They want this internet to go away. The economists 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 however 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 big and meaningful ways.

49:37Nilay Patel:But I think people like Instagram and I don't think they're going to give up their phones, right? And that keeps you in a world where there's at least something happening where you're looking for other people in some way. And that to me is maybe the heart of the solution. I'll connect it to the fact that you're a college producer. You're in the height of the tech lash, 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.

50:17Nilay Patel:And that still came from the internet itself. No, it came from those people in a quad in their sweating and their stupid caps and gowns making a lot of noise together. It came from an actual group of humans 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.

51:02You see it maybe in the publishing industry. It's very self-interested, but I think you see it in some state governments and some local governments. But I don't think you see it in, you know, big law firms, big universities. I gave these lectures at Yale last year that are the basis for this book on the artificial state. And I 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 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.

51:46And 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? Yeah. Like what's there like what's the branding strategy here? And the faculty are like, what are you actually talking about? Like you brought us here to have a branding conversation. So at this lecture, I'm in a lecture hall with this wonderful group of students. And so I said, like, what about I like let's just do like let's just have a good discussion now.

52:18Like what about just having there be like a two week moratorium starting tomorrow? wow, the president of the university could announce it tonight, that for two weeks, like every class on campus is going to be a discussion section involving staff and faculty and students of like, what should our community policy be about using this tool this year? And the students were 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 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 not they're paying all this money taking on on all this debt working their asses off to be replaced by machines and have no capacity not be granted no fulfillment of the role of student scholar citizen member of a community in what that means and should mean um 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 that's that's what people are that that's that's what kind of gives me hope, that restlessness around that.

53:44But, you know, there was like a resounding applause around this idea. And you will notice this is not what Yale did. Yale instead branded its relationship with OpenAI. And now it's like a corporate agreement.

53:56Nilay Patel:Let me connect that sense, that lack of agency that you're describing to what we see in our politics writ large. I think a lot of people are going to 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 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 while we're doing it anyway, because something because the town needs the job.

54:37Nilay Patel:So 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 wanted 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.

55:12Nilay Patel: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 - No, no, you're supposed to depress me. I mean, look, people are showing up and having those arguments.

55:51And, 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 arguments against it. Let's have an open forum and let's see what the people think. And let's also educate ourselves and the community. Because there is a lot of dumbass stuff out there about data centers, I'm sure. Certainly on both sides. I don't know. I think the fact that that's happening and is likely to really influence these elections is meaningful. I think there are political consequences for just kind of going along to get along.

56:29But, you know, it's part of a much bigger problem with money in American politics and the relationship between corporations and government. So it's there's 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 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 meaningful and amended since 1971, and so instead the Supreme Court amends the Constitution and how it acts, right?

57:13So the more, Or the longer that goes on, the more resentful people are of the Supreme Court. When people ask, well, would we ever get that back? The example I often give is jury service. One thing that people really believe in is jury duty. Even if they don't like to do it, they believe in it. They think it's a good thing to have, that it involves fairness in our criminal justice system. Even if objectively, 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 what's true and what's not true. But imagine that for some reason jury service was abolished in 1971.

57:52And now in 2026, someone was like, you know, what would actually be good would be bringing back jury duty and having like just 12 random people decide like whether or not your kid, you know, is guilty of aggravated assault. there's no way we would bring it back because kind of trust in one another in in civil society is so um 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.

58:39I 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.

58:50Nilay Patel:I want to end by asking about a phenomenon that I see more and more, especially after AI got booed at all the college graduations. It's amazing. Between that and the data center pushback. It seems like the industry has decided they need a new tech, right? They need to communicate more. OpenAI, you know, they're just running around and their executive's like, we have a marketing problem. We just need to market it better. Google's 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.

59:21Nilay Patel:Well, there's a range of opinions here. The thing that all of them have started saying over and over and over again is Because the democratic process should be trusted to put the guardrails on us. The CEO of Skydio was on. He was 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.

59:57Nilay Patel: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 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, 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.

1:00:35And 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 knew nothing about representative democracy, nor did they care to learn, right? Like the way collective constitutionalism worked, the Democratic Inputs Project work was basically just turning people into data points.

1:01:09Well, 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 – 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 needs to be rules. There needs to be a parliamentarian. There need to be votes. There need to be, you know, rules about vetoing votes. There needs to be rules about speech and process. So when they talk about democracy will save us, what they mean by democracy is something that I think for most political scientists is unrecognizable as a democratic process.

1:01:46it'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 town council, the neighborhood council, and like work it out. This is the chief argument of my book. That can still happen.

1:02:21That should still happen. And I think it has to still happen.

1:02:26Nilay Patel:That seems like the next step. It seems like getting the college kids together to boo is maybe the thing that will solve democracy. As a college student who booed the Iraq war, I still want to believe this, whether or not that went my way. Dr. Lepore, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. A lot of fun. 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 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.

1:02:57Nilay Patel:You can email us at dakotaratthevirge.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 Dakotarpod. We have a TikTok and an Instagram, same handle, at Dakotarpod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Dakotar, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Shows 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.

1:03:22Nilay Patel:We'll see you next time.

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