Today, I\u2019m talking with Harvard professor and New Yorker<\/em> staff writer Dr. Jill Lepore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State<\/em>, which comes out on August 25.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jill is one of the best writers there is at identifying institutional patterns in history, and Decoder <\/em>is a show about systems, so this book could not possibly be more in our zone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You build systems by measuring things \u2014 gathering information, quantifying it as data, and taking action on it. And Jill\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n These artificial structures touch everything \u2014 not just in the more obvious places like in apps or AI, but all the way up to politics and governance itself, and Jill\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Verge<\/em> subscribers, don\u2019t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder<\/em> wherever you get your podcasts. Head here<\/a>. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019ll hear Jill tell me she wanted to write a \u201ckind of grumpy book,\u201d but in my reading, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jill\u2019s 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 \u2014 and the era she and I talked about most \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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 \u2014 and businesses like The Verge<\/em>, and shows like Decoder<\/em> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of course, we also talked about the future \u2014 including where she thinks she still sees hope for the future. And yes, that does include college kids booing the AI CEOs<\/a> at graduation ceremonies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay: Dr Jill Lepore, on the Artificial State. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Dr. Jill Lepore, you\u2019re a staff writer at <\/strong>The New Yorker<\/em><\/strong>, you\u2019re a professor of history and law at Harvard University, and most importantly, you\u2019re the author of a new book, <\/strong>The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State<\/em><\/strong>. Welcome to <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Hey, thanks for having me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I am really excited to talk to you. I\u2019m a big fan of your work over the years. And I have to say, this book is one of the most <\/strong>Decoder<\/em><\/strong>-y, <\/strong>Verge<\/em><\/strong>-y, Nilay-Patel-strike-zone books of all time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n [Laughs] <\/em>Wow. I\u2019m not sure how to take that, but I guess that\u2019s good.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s in the strike zone.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n So let\u2019s just start at the very beginning for folks. The book is called<\/strong> The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State<\/em><\/strong>. Tell us what the \u201cartificial state\u201d is. Define it so we can start from that foundation.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding, and there\u2019s a whole public discussion of what\u2019s happening with democracy, but I don\u2019t think we talk about the nation-state as much as we might. And that is to say the state itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And so what I mean by the \u2018artificial state\u2019 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\u2019s going on in the world, how to make decisions, and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Our public discourse is almost entirely privatized and owned by corporations. As many, many people have demonstrated \u2014 it\u2019s not news to your listeners or to anyone \u2014 the priority of public discourse is not the free expression of ideas and democratic deliberation, it is the monetization of attention and of outrage.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Many of those bots are owned by corporations and have particular acts, their own kind of financial interests, but they\u2019re owned by state actors, non-state actors, criminals, and terrorists. What we\u2019re at risk of is losing the liberal constitutional democracy and having it become supplanted by what I describe as the artificial state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of the things that really struck me about this is at least America\u2019s conception of itself, the United States\u2019 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\u2019s supposed to be a whole bunch of people that are ruled by the consent of the governed and we\u2019re all arguing.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Your thesis is that that\u2019s what we say about ourselves, but actually we\u2019ve 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\u2019ve outsourced their thinking, or there are consultants that are turning us all into polling data. Is that the trajectory we\u2019re on that ends the nation-state? Is that the core of the idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. It has a long history, but the acceleration of these developments in the age of artificial intelligence is really considerable. I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019m running for election in some neighborhood, I have to go talk to people. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We might say, \u201cThat 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.\u201d But if you think about each one of those conversations that people used to have \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m a campaign volunteer and I\u2019m going to go and I\u2019m going to sit in on some PTA meeting,\u201d or, \u201cI\u2019m going to go to a basketball game in some neighborhood and talk to the parents who are there\u201d \u2014 all those conversations are the civic glue that holds a civil society together.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Replacing that chatting under a street lamp about, \u201cWhat do you think about this guy?\u201d with just extracting data, which is where we are now, is a much more artificial politics than we have had before.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019ll ask ChatGPT, \u201cHow should I vote in the primary?\u201d Meanwhile, many of the campaign messages that you\u2019re 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\u2019s AI versus AI in these upcoming elections, or even in elections that are already transpiring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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, \u201cLet\u2019s pause for a minute. What\u2019s at the bottom of that hill? Is that an icy pond and we\u2019re going to just go through the ice and we\u2019re all going to drown in there? Or is that a beautiful new political world?\u201d And I think it looks pretty perilous.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The book traces this evolution step by step as you\u2019re describing; this is a slow build to maybe where we\u2019ve gotten today.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n As you point out several times in the book, there are a bunch of science fiction authors in the \u201850s and \u201860s 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 <\/strong>Torment Nexus<\/strong><\/a> meme. It\u2019s 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\u2019re attempting to build.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m curious why you think they\u2019ve 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s a big thing, starting in the \u201830s, to imagine a future in which the president of the United States is chosen by a machine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are a bunch of examples of this from the \u201830s, where people are really worried about totalitarianism and the dehumanization of people as a consequence of the machine age. But there\u2019s also a lot of this in the 1950s. For instance, a classic story by Isaac Asimov<\/a> that I think is from 1955, called \u201cFranchise,\u201d and it\u2019s set on the days before November 4th, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In that imagined future, there\u2019s 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\u2019s the only person who votes. And then that guy has to go into hiding because if people don\u2019t like who was elected or the presidency goes badly, his life is destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot of this stuff in science fiction, but Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan<\/a> 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. \u201cWouldn\u2019t that be great? Because it\u2019s so efficient and we don\u2019t have to bother and it spares us the labor.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And that general premise, that \u201cWhy would we bother to do something that a machine can do for us?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I know these are very smart people, but they\u2019re not humanists. Thiel would say that he\u2019s a political philosopher. I\u2019m not so convinced of that. The capacity for humanistic inquiry, reading, and reasoning is not something you see in great evidence in that culture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s been bred out, in a way, of the culture of Silicon Valley. Even if you look back to the \u201890s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It doesn\u2019t matter what came before. You want to start a ride service, you don\u2019t study taxis or figure out where delivery service came from. You don\u2019t look at traffic patterns. You don\u2019t study anything in the past, you just start new. You just imagine it all new and you destroy what came before. There\u2019s such a rejection of the knowledge and wisdom of earlier human beings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The posture of the humanist is one of humility. Isn\u2019t it magisterial and majestic how Homer wrote The Odyssey<\/em> so long ago and it\u2019s still so powerful? The timelessness of literature and the arts, the infinite beauty of humanity\u2019s capacity for making things, it\u2019s just not the ethos. It\u2019s, \u201cNo, we\u2019ll do it better. It doesn\u2019t matter what anybody did before.\u201d It\u2019s, \u201cWe\u2019re innovating, we\u2019re disrupting.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The culture so fetishizes the future that it doesn\u2019t have that, \u201cLet\u2019s listen to what other people who came before might have known, that\u2019s still wisdom.\u201d That makes for a very poor reading of literature. We could have a great argument about what Isaac Asimov meant by that story. It\u2019s not a determinant, I\u2019m not the authority on Isaac Asimov, but I\u2019m not going to ask Sam Altman what a short story means.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, he would just ask ChatGPT.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019re making. And whether or not they\u2019re misreading Catholicism is irrelevant to them. They\u2019re often in fights with the Pope<\/a>, which is just not something a straight reading of Catholicism would allow you to do.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s an entire culture of thinking \u2014 I won\u2019t call it a philosophy, because I don\u2019t think it\u2019s quite that developed \u2014 around first principles. \u201cWe\u2019re going to do first principles thinking and that will lead us to some disruptive outcome.\u201d It often, to me at least, feels like where that first principle begins is a choice about what to ignore from the past.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s an assumption that is often not questioned as we go step by step towards a more quantified society, a more automated society.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But there\u2019s something messy about democracy that is very, very important. The decision we\u2019re making now is to actually set that mess aside in the name of, I don\u2019t know, efficiency, potentially happiness. I\u2019m curious if you see that setting-aside is happening by accident or on purpose?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think of these guys as really instrumental. They\u2019re 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, \u201cWow, we went from Star Trek<\/em> to Star Wars<\/em> really fast.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the sense that what you might want to know about the world can be just because it\u2019s worth knowing rather than that you can use it to extract money from other people, I just don\u2019t think that\u2019s part of that tech culture. It\u2019s 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 \u201cwoke\u201d or \u201cfeminine\u201d or \u201clibtard,\u201d whatever. Especially with the conservative turn of the tech world, it takes on weird valances.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It is really purposeful. \u201cThis kind of knowledge is not worth having [because] we can\u2019t make money off of it. If we had that kind of knowledge, it might slow down what we\u2019re trying to do. And what we\u2019re trying to do is win the AI race and determine the future of humanity.\u201d The lack of curiosity about the bigger world and the place of these really thrilling inventions within it, I don\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You have a number of these markers. Walk us through some of them, from \u201cthe internet and social platforms will cause an outbreak of democracy\u201d to where we are now in 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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<\/a> from the Super Bowl in January of 1984, the promise was that the personal computer would be revolutionary. As I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve talked about in your show and your audience really understands, the celebration of the personal computer as emancipation came out of the counterculture. There\u2019s this great book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture<\/em>, that\u2019s about the so-called \u201cCalifornia ideology\u201d that marries counterculture libertarianism to computer utopianism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And you see that realized in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh: \u201cWe\u2019re going to defeat totalitarianism in the form of the giant mainframe IBM\u201d that\u2019s associated with two things at the time \u2014 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\u2019s a huge problem for the Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s. So there\u2019s this whole feeling that the personal computer is going to advance liberty, personal freedom, and therefore democracy. It\u2019s a libertarian vision, but it\u2019s about emancipation. And it\u2019s an ad. At the end of the day, it\u2019s just an ad campaign.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There were people who said, \u201cWell, exactly how does the personal computer emancipate? It\u2019s great. I would like one. It\u2019s fun to have. I also like a nice toaster, but my toaster isn\u2019t going to emancipate me. What is it about?\u201d 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 \u201890s, and the opening of the internet to commercial traffic, you see the scaling of that promise. \u201cNow 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\u2019re going to have a digital democracy.\u201d Even though it\u2019s a little bit like when political pundits make election forecasts and they\u2019re wrong half the time, but no one ever remembers even what they forecasted. How do you even have a job?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The people in the \u201880s said the personal computer was going to liberate people. Well, it didn\u2019t. But then in the \u201890s, the internet was going to democratize societies. Well, it didn\u2019t. That was just an ad campaign. And not that there aren\u2019t 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\u2019s not realized for all kinds of reasons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s already two strikes, but then you get to 2004 and all the emerging social media says, \u201cOh, Facebook, we\u2019re going to democratize this. We\u2019re going to connect everybody. Everyone will be able to be close to one another.\u201d That also doesn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then the ad campaign now, the packaging of somehow AI is going to do this. \u201cWhat we need is democratic AI.\u201d And that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s an old story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Can I push back on this a little bit? Because I personally struggle with that ad campaign, but the reality of it. There\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The flip side of that is that I do think a bunch of gatekeepers, the men who own these platforms \u2014 it\u2019s largely men \u2014 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\u2019s my experience of that platform whenever I participate.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019t. My friend Casey Newton\u2019s going to have something to write about in <\/strong>Platformer <\/em><\/strong>for the rest of his life as that experiment continues. But Zuckerberg said, \u201cThis is kind of dumb. I\u2019m turning it off. We\u2019re doing community notes here. No more moderation.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s that dynamic that I struggle with, it\u2019s not purely an ad campaign.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ll come at that in a couple of different ways while granting that you absolutely have a point. I\u2019ll 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\u2019s a reason Jimmy Olson is in the newsroom with Clark Kent in the 1930s comic books. They\u2019re street kids and they know the streets and they start reporting. I don\u2019t think they\u2019re that different from coming up with a $12 blog post payment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In fact, what\u2019s interesting about that is 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. The people get more power. The parties just have to get realigned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But what always happens is the elites regain power. They don\u2019t like it. They don\u2019t like the news boys becoming beat reporters, becoming editors. They say, \u201cWho are these nouveau people?\u201d To use your metaphor, they turn the dial, they regain control, they consolidate their power over the medium, and then it has to wait for the next communications technology revolution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The tricky thing about the moment that we\u2019re in now is the emerging technologies are not restoring power to the people. They\u2019re not turning the wheel this way, they just keep going that way. I teach undergraduates. 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 movie maker, you want to be a screenwriter, where are you going to get a job? The whole culture industry is imploding. I don\u2019t think this is a magnificent time to be out there being an influencer. You still don\u2019t have health insurance. You still can\u2019t buy a house. I just don\u2019t think we\u2019re in a moment of emancipation that\u2019s responding to that consolidation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Some people are like, \u201cIt\u2019s great. I like that these billionaires have all this power over our culture.\u201d I don\u2019t, but we\u2019re continuing to rotate in their direction. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s turning back. That\u2019s how I would grant for you that there\u2019s always something thrilling, emancipatory, illuminating, increasingly inclusive about a new communications technology. I wouldn\u2019t deny that, and so you\u2019re right to that degree, it\u2019s not just an ad campaign, but I do think we\u2019re in an exceptional moment right now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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. The algorithms on these platforms will put us all together, and then we will say, \u201cHere\u2019s an identity. We\u2019re a bloc. We have some political power as a bloc. Deal with us.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That seems true. I think we\u2019ve all had that experience. We\u2019ve seen that play out both in the culture, in our politics more broadly, but you can push back on that. You can say, \u201cNo, we don\u2019t like that. Identity politics bad. That\u2019s too woke,\u201d and you can see the culture react to that. You can certainly see politicians and billionaires react to that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But I don\u2019t think identity politics is only a product of quantifiability, 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\u2019s just shaped by it? What\u2019s the relationship there?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I remember being quite struck reading an article from 1968 in a magazine that I think was called Science and Technology<\/em>, a popular magazine, like the Wired<\/em> of the 1960s, by this guy, Ithiel de Sola Pool, who was an MIT political scientist..<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1968, he was asked [alongside] JCR Licklider, the inventor of the internet, to speculate on what the computer revolution would mean by the year 2000. They were both really smart guys and they had really, really fascinating things to say. Ithiel de Sola Pool, this political scientist, said, \u201cCertainly by then there will be personal newspapers. You will log onto your computer in the morning, and it will be networked,\u201d 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. So he said, \u201cYou will be able to log onto your computer in the morning and be a personal computer.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And Pool said, \u201cThere really won\u2019t be able to be party politics if you have your own newspaper because a political party is the organization of political dissent, of shared political priorities. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll even have interest group politics,\u201d like the Black Congressional Caucus or the Corn Farmers Association. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll even have that. We\u2019ll really only be able to have personal politics. I just think that our notion of a representative government where we agree to elect people to represent not my individual interests, but the interests of my community, we won\u2019t be able to do that because no one will have a sense of what is in the interest of their community. You\u2019ll only have the sense of your own interests, and that\u2019s not how a representative democracy works. Our system of government will be incompatible with our technology of communication.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Smart people saw this 50-60 years ago, and I think smart people see it now happening all the time. It\u2019s something that is complicated for political campaigns to work with. You read interviews now with campaign consultants who say, \u201cI 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\u2019t want to use these tools. But I have to use these tools because there\u2019s no moratorium on using these tools, and therefore, I have to use the tools that I think my enemy will also use.\u201d It\u2019s a sad moment. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anybody \u2014 well, I don\u2019t know, there are probably some wretched human beings out there really excited to do deep-fakes and win elections that way, but most people in politics are not loving this moment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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. I\u2019m just thinking about your line about identity politics and how it\u2019s made possible by computer-run sorting and targeting. Computer-run sorting and targeting is advertising. That is the modern advertising industry at scale. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The big tech companies have all gotten in trouble for over-sorting people. Meta <\/strong>got sued<\/strong><\/a> 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 were discriminated against. You see this play out over and over again that there\u2019s all kinds of sorting we\u2019re not supposed to do, that we\u2019ve actually made illegal. The algorithms don\u2019t 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\u2019ll pay for as a direct-to-consumer or whether it\u2019s a political candidate, that\u2019s the business we\u2019re in.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m wondering how you see that connecting to the artificial state. We\u2019re going to measure everybody, quantify everybody, we\u2019ll do capitalism at scale, and now we\u2019re going to subsume our politics into it. Because you\u2019re saying that the politicians themselves understand that maybe they shouldn\u2019t do that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s helpful to remember that that\u2019s not an invention of the internet or the personal computer era, or certainly not of the artificial intelligence era. There is a great book by my colleague, Liz Cohen, Consumers\u2019 Republic<\/em>, that argues that the consumer replaced the citizen as the individual entity of consequence in the United States in the 1950s, in the postwar era with the peacetime conversion of wartime factories. Consumption was what was going to save the country and advance the country\u2019s interests, and American growth and American strength was associated with consumerism. In my lifetime, that\u2019s been the way that we live. That\u2019s not where the country was founded, and that\u2019s also not inevitable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the system that you\u2019re describing with targeted advertising, which is effectively what the internet currently is, I actually don\u2019t think that\u2019s going to last. We\u2019re not acting online primarily as citizens. Certainly I don\u2019t feel that I am. I\u2019m chiefly acting online as a consumer. I remember the day that I noticed that. In like 2000 I had a baby, and Google started sending me ads for breast pumps. I said, \u201cFuck this.\u201d Remember when you were outraged by that and you say, \u201cI hate that they know that I had a baby. That makes me mad. I didn\u2019t tell them that\u201d? But now we just accept it..<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Everyone\u2019s phones are listening to them and it\u2019s whatever.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Everyone\u2019s phones are listening to them. You\u2019re getting on a flight, you know that someone\u2019s going to offer you Dramamine online. But that seemed, to a lot of people, inevitable and almost natural because the consumers\u2019 republic is how we\u2019ve lived for such a long time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m not trying to offer up a Luddite or nostalgic reading here, but when you walk down a city street, there\u2019s City Hall and there\u2019s the post office, and \u2014 this is going to make me sound like I\u2019m 112 years old \u2014 there\u2019s the JCPenney and the Walgreens. There are different places. It\u2019s 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, your house has been reappraised and you want to question that, or you\u2019ve got a parking ticket and you want to appeal it, those were in one place. And then if you\u2019re going to go buy ibuprofen or new socks, that was a different place. It\u2019s now all corporatized and privatized. But the privatization of the public square is a transformation that is a long time coming.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019d be very curious to hear what you think about this, but the people that I read increasingly say the internet is just going to be for bots in fairly short order and the humans aren\u2019t really going to be on it. It\u2019s just going to be agentic AI doing your stuff. It\u2019s 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 the real world as a distinctive place for how we engage with one another as families, communities, and governments. But where we are now, if this continues, I don\u2019t see how democracy endures the corporatization of all public discourse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We have had many, many, many tech CEOs on the show and <\/strong>we have asked them very directly<\/strong><\/a>, \u201cWhat happens when no one uses your app anymore, when it\u2019s 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?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, yeah! What do they say? What do they say?!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It breaks down in two ways. Anybody who offers a physical service says, \u201cYeah, it was really hard to build this business. Go ahead and try to disrupt me with your bots. You won\u2019t.\u201cThe <\/strong>CEO of Zocdoc<\/strong><\/a>, the <\/strong>CEO of Uber<\/strong><\/a>, and the <\/strong>CEO of TaskRabbit<\/strong><\/a> all say, \u201cYeah, go ahead and try. Try to find an army of people to come hang up your TV on demand. That\u2019s our database, that\u2019s our labor supply, and we will not be disrupted, because you can\u2019t replace us.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/chorus\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/24792604\/The_Verge_Decoder_Tileart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
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