Dr. Jill Lepore on why AI backlash is vital for the future
The Verge·July 20, 2026
AI Summary
Dr. Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor and New Yorker writer, argues that public skepticism and backlash against AI are essential for shaping its responsible development and future impact. Her upcoming book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," explores institutional patterns related to artificial intelligence and releases on August 25.
The Artificial State author explains how counting everything breaks society — and how college grads booing AI might save us all.
Today, I’m talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25.
Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our zone.
You build systems by measuring things — gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill’s big thesis in the book is that this kind of systemic measurement is really a dehumanizing act, one that flattens human concerns into something, well, artificial.
These artificial structures touch everything — not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics and governance itself, and Jill’s insights here are a telling portrait of the way Big Tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the state itself.
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You’ll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write a “kind of 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 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 microtargeting really truly became both possible and commonplace, both for ads and 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 really was a 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 as illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be.
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But as I said, Jill thinks in systems, and 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 — including where she thinks she still sees hope for the future. And yes, that does include college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies.
Okay: Dr Jill Lepore, on the Artificial State. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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.
I am really excited to talk to you. I’m a big fan of your work over the years. And I have to say, this book is one of the most Decoder-y, Verge-y, Nilay-Patel-strike-zone books of all time.
[Laughs] Wow. I’m not sure how to take that, but I guess that’s good.
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. 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 successor to the liberal nation-state, the constitutional democracy under which our freedom of speech, free discourse, and constitutional rights are central to our experience as citizens within a nation-state.
We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding, and 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. And that is to say the state itself.
And 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. The easiest example of that to think about is what is euphemistically called the public square, which is where people get information about how to vote, what’s going on in the world, how to make decisions, and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens.
Our public discourse is almost entirely privatized and owned by corporations. As many, many people have demonstrated — it’s not news to your listeners or to anyone — the priority of public discourse is not the free expression of ideas and democratic deliberation, it is the monetization of attention and of outrage.
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. All of them have been inverted for several years now, or different numbers of years, from X to Facebook to TikTok. There are far more bots than humans on those platforms.
Many of those bots are owned by corporations and have particular acts, their own kind of financial interests, but they’re owned by state actors, non-state actors, criminals, and terrorists. 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.
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 governed and we’re all arguing.
Your thesis is that 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 are 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. It has a long history, but the acceleration of these developments in the age of artificial intelligence is really considerable. I’ll give you two examples that stretch out across a century. In the 1930s, we see 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 replace the kind of door-to-door precinct walking that campaigns would need to do, right? If I’m running for election in some neighborhood, I have to go talk to people. I’m going to go to baseball games, basketball games, and the public library. But increasingly, it became less necessary for political campaigns to do that because they could subcontract out political polling.
You can find out what political opinion is in a neighborhood if you want to run a campaign just by doing data mining and data analysis.
We might say, “That makes politics so much more efficient. 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 — “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 talk to the parents who are there” — all those conversations are the civic glue that holds a civil society together.
Replacing that chatting under a street lamp about, “What do you think about this guy?” with just extracting data, which is where we are now, is a much more artificial politics than we have had before.
There’s been great coverage lately of emerging trends for the 2026 election in the US,and around the world, where a lot of people report that even in these primaries that have been going on over the spring and summer, they’ll ask ChatGPT, “How should I vote in the primary?” Meanwhile, many of the campaign messages that you’re getting have been crafted by artificial intelligence. The fact that you are getting them is a decision made by artificial intelligence. In a way, it’s AI versus AI in these upcoming elections, or even in elections that are already transpiring.
You can see how you could fall into that step, just going downhill on skis. But I wanted to write a grumpy book to say, “Let’s pause for a minute. What’s at the bottom of that hill? Is that an icy pond and we’re going to just go through the ice and we’re all going to drown in there? Or is that a beautiful new political world?” And I think it looks pretty perilous.
The book traces this evolution step by step as you’re describing; this is a slow build to maybe where we’ve gotten today.
As you point out several times in the book, there are a bunch of science fiction authors in the ‘50s and ‘60s who were looking at computers and drawing a picture of the future. Some of them picked 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. You point this out. Everyone has heard the Torment Nexus meme. It’s in the book. You use it in the book. 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 why you think they’ve all gotten it wrong, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel on down, and if that is an inflection point for us to actually pick a different future.
It’s 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, where people are really worried about totalitarianism and the dehumanization of people as a consequence of the machine age. But there’s also a lot of this in the 1950s. For instance, a classic story by Isaac Asimov that I think is from 1955, called “Franchise,” and it’s set on the days before November 4th, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency.
In that imagined 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. 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, his life is destroyed.
There’s a lot of this stuff in science fiction, but Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan and he started talking about how great it would be if AI chose the president of the United States. Yes, he was fucking around, but he was also serious. “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 “Why would we bother to do something that a machine can do for us?” without the realization that the rest of us would have. There are some things we want to do, including meaningful work: writing, making art, and doing things for ourselves.
I know these are very smart people, but they’re not humanists. Thiel would say that he’s a political philosopher. I’m not so convinced of that. The capacity for humanistic inquiry, reading, and reasoning is not something you see in great evidence in that culture.
It’s been bred out, in a way, of the culture of Silicon Valley. Even if you look back to the ‘90s and the culture of the celebration of the serial entrepreneur as the new man of progress, that particular kind of cultural formulation was all about the disavowal of the past.
It doesn’t matter what came before. You want to start a ride service, you don’t study taxis or figure out where delivery 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. There’s such a rejection of the knowledge and wisdom of earlier human beings.
The posture of the humanist is one of humility. Isn’t it magisterial and majestic how Homer wrote The Odyssey so long ago and it’s still so powerful? The timelessness of literature and the arts, the infinite beauty of humanity’s capacity for making things, it’s just not the ethos. It’s, “No, we’ll do it better. It doesn’t matter what anybody did before.” It’s, “We’re innovating, we’re disrupting.”
The culture so fetishizes the future that it doesn’t have that, “Let’s listen to what other people who came before might have known, that’s still wisdom.” That makes for a very poor reading of literature. We could have a great argument about what Isaac Asimov meant by that story. It’s not a determinant, I’m not the authority on Isaac Asimov, but I’m not going to ask Sam Altman what a short story means.
There’s something very interesting about this cast of characters, particularly Peter Thiel who comes up in your book, Elon Musk who comes up in your book somewhere over 100 times I think. They are 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. They’re often in fights with the Pope, which is just not something a straight reading of Catholicism would allow you to do.
There’s an entire culture of thinking — I won’t call it a philosophy, because I don’t think it’s quite that developed — around first principles. “We’re going to do first principles thinking and that will lead us to some disruptive outcome.” It often, to me at least, feels like where that first principle begins is a choice about what to ignore from the past.
I see that over again in your book, in the culture we live in at large, that deciding what to set aside is the big decision. That’s an assumption that is often not questioned as we go step by step towards a more quantified society, a more automated society.
But there’s something messy about democracy that is very, very important. 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 setting-aside is happening by accident or on purpose?
I think of these guys as really instrumental. They’re not pursuing knowledge for its own sake. They are deeply interested in exploration and wonder, and one of the things I really love about this moment is the fascination with space and space exploration, which I think is tremendously exciting. Harnessed to militarization in certain commercial projects is like, “Wow, we went from Star Trek to Star Wars really fast.”
But 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, I just don’t think that’s part of that tech culture. It’s just not. A humanist commitment to knowledge for the sake of the accumulation of wisdom, leading a better life, and understanding the world with greater clarity and greater compassion is largely mocked in that world as “woke” or “feminine” or “libtard,” whatever. Especially with the conservative turn of the tech world, it takes on weird valances.
It is really purposeful. “This kind of knowledge is not worth having [because] we can’t make money off of it. 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.” The lack of curiosity about the bigger world and the place of these really thrilling inventions within it, I don’t know, I find it bizarre. This causes a lot of self-reflection on my part. A lot of these people are my former students. I teach at Harvard. We send so many students off to work in Silicon Valley, and then they talk this way and what happened? What did we do wrong? Do you not have a sense of obligation to the human condition?
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 began to emerge in the 1980s. If you go back to 1984 and the launch of the Apple Macintosh and that famous, iconic Apple TV ad from the Super Bowl in January of 1984, the promise was that the personal computer would be revolutionary. As I’m sure you’ve talked about in your show and your audience really understands, the celebration of the personal computer as emancipation came out of the counterculture. There’s this great book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, that’s about the so-called “California ideology” that marries counterculture libertarianism to computer utopianism.
And you see that realized in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh: “We’re going to defeat totalitarianism in the form of the giant mainframe IBM” that’s associated with two things at the time — 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. The Democrats have basically no computers. It’s a huge problem for the Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s. So there’s this whole feeling that the personal computer is going to advance liberty, personal freedom, and therefore democracy. It’s a libertarian vision, but it’s about emancipation. And it’s an ad. At the end of the day, it’s just an ad campaign.
There were people who said, “Well, exactly how does the personal computer emancipate? It’s great. I would like one. It’s fun to have. I also like a nice toaster, but my toaster isn’t going to emancipate me. What is it about?” You begin to see new tech computing products as very carefully packaged with an ideal about personal liberation. By the time you get to the ‘90s, and the opening of the internet to commercial traffic, you see the scaling of that promise. “Now we all are going to have personal communities that are going to be linked to one another, and so society is going to become emancipated and democratized. We’re going to have a digital democracy.” Even though it’s a little bit like when political pundits make election forecasts and they’re wrong half the time, but no one ever remembers even what they forecasted. How do you even have a job?
The people in the ‘80s said the personal computer was going to liberate people. Well, it didn’t. But then in the ‘90s, the internet was going to democratize societies. Well, it didn’t. That was just an ad campaign. And not that there aren’t plenty of people that sincerely believe that; there certainly is tremendous democratizing potential for the internet. There was a lot of promise there, but it’s not realized for all kinds of reasons.
That’s already two strikes, but then you get to 2004 and all the emerging social media says, “Oh, Facebook, we’re going to democratize this. We’re going to connect everybody. Everyone will be able to be close to one another.” That also doesn’t happen.
Then the ad campaign now, the packaging of somehow AI is going to do this. “What we need is democratic AI.” And that doesn’t mean 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 authoritarians. 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. 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. 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 start a business and reach people on these platforms in some way.
The flip side of that is that I do think a bunch of gatekeepers, the men who own these platforms — it’s largely men — realized they could turn the knobs. 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 racists find me. That’s my experience of that platform whenever I participate.
Mark Zuckerberg started a Supreme Court for Facebook moderation because he wanted to recapitulate the machinations of democracy for people who had been banned for being crazy in their local Facebook groups. Maybe that worked and maybe it didn’t. My friend Casey Newton’s going to have something to write about in Platformer for the rest of his life as that experiment continues. But Zuckerberg said, “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’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.
I’ll come at that in a couple of different ways while granting that you absolutely have a point. I’ll figure out where we could maybe see a line. 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, mostly men, but there were a lot of women beat reporters and women editorial writers who started out delivering newspapers, working at the press, working the printer presses at newspapers, climbing their way up. I mean, there’s a reason Jimmy Olson is in the newsroom with Clark Kent in the 1930s comic books. They’re street kids and they know the streets and they start reporting. I don’t think they’re that different from coming up with a $12 blog post payment.
That’s what happens in every industry, unsurprisingly. A new medium emerges, the daily paper or the twice-daily paper. The interview is invented. Eyewitness reporting is invented, the byline is invented. The history of the newspaper is all about an explosion of new kinds of doors that different people can walk through to report on the world to other people, and then more people can learn about the world because these newspapers are different.
There’s an explosion in the democratization of any new technology of communication when it starts. By definition, 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 first weekly newspapers, with the penny press in the 1830s, with the telegraph in the 1840s. It happens with how the telephone changes news reporting, the wire service in the Mexican-American War. It happens with the radio in the 1920s. It happens with TV in the 1950s.
