Overview of Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future
In this Decoder interview, historian and Harvard professor Jill Lepore discusses her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, arguing that modern technology, data systems, and AI are steadily replacing the functions of the liberal nation-state with privatized, corporate-controlled systems. The conversation centers on how quantification, polling, targeted advertising, social platforms, and AI have reshaped politics, public discourse, and civic life — often flattening human judgment in the process. Lepore’s core point: the current backlash against AI, data centers, and tech power is not just reactionary; it may be one of the last meaningful defenses of democratic agency.
What Lepore Means by the “Artificial State”
Lepore defines the “artificial state” as a successor to the liberal nation-state, where core civic functions are increasingly absorbed by private multinational corporations.
Key characteristics
- Public discourse is privatized
- The “public square” is largely owned by platforms whose incentives are monetization, attention, and outrage.
- Bots and algorithms shape civic reality
- Social platforms are increasingly dominated by bots, state actors, criminals, and automated systems rather than human deliberation.
- Citizens become data points
- Measurement and quantification reduce people into usable inputs for systems, campaigns, and companies.
How We Got Here: A Long Technological Shift
Lepore traces the rise of the artificial state through a long historical arc, not just through recent AI developments.
Major milestones
- Polling in the 1930s
- Scientific polling replaced some of the face-to-face civic work of campaigning.
- Campaigns increasingly relied on data extraction instead of community contact.
- The personal computer era in the 1980s
- Computing was sold as emancipatory and anti-authoritarian.
- Lepore argues this was largely an ad campaign wrapped in a liberation narrative.
- The internet in the 1990s
- The web did expand access and created real opportunities for publishing, entrepreneurship, and communication.
- But it also intensified the shift toward privatized platforms and centralized power.
- Social media in the 2000s
- Platforms promised connection and democratization, but often produced fragmentation, manipulation, and outrage-driven attention economies.
- AI and microtargeting today
- Politics and advertising increasingly use machine-driven sorting to influence behavior at scale.
Her Argument About Democracy, Identity, and Targeting
A major theme in the interview is that technology has changed not just communication, but the structure of democratic participation.
Lepore’s view on targeted systems
- Identity politics and microtargeting are linked
- Computer-driven sorting allows people to be grouped, measured, and mobilized as blocs.
- Consumers have replaced citizens
- In postwar America, consumption became the dominant civic identity.
- Public and private life are collapsing together
- What used to be separate spaces for government, commerce, and civic life are now fused into platform-driven systems.
Her warning
- The system encourages people to act primarily as consumers, not as citizens.
- Democratic participation becomes less about deliberation and more about behavioral manipulation.
Why the AI Backlash Matters
Lepore is skeptical of the tech industry’s promise that AI will solve democratic or social problems. But she sees the current pushback as important.
Signs of resistance
- College students booing AI executives
- She sees this as a meaningful expression of human agency and institutional frustration.
- Community opposition to data centers
- Local resistance to AI infrastructure shows people are beginning to push back against corporate decisions imposed from above.
- Skepticism toward “AI at all costs”
- Lepore argues that institutions should pause and ask what kind of future they are building.
Her broader point
- Backlash is not necessarily anti-progress.
- It may be a necessary correction to systems that have gone too far in stripping away human judgment, deliberation, and control.
Main Takeaways
- Technology has real democratizing potential, and Lepore doesn’t deny that the internet opened important doors.
- But the dominant trend has been consolidation, not liberation.
- AI is accelerating an older process: the replacement of civic institutions with corporate systems of measurement and influence.
- Democracy still depends on human deliberation
- Lepore repeatedly emphasizes that real democratic decision-making requires people in a room, talking, debating, and voting — not just data collection or automated inputs.
- The backlash may be constructive
- Resistance to AI and platform power could help restore a more human, participatory public sphere.
Closing Insight
Lepore’s central message is that the fight over AI is really a fight over whether humans will still meaningfully govern themselves. Her answer is cautious but hopeful: democracy can survive, but only if people insist on collective, embodied, deliberative politics instead of surrendering public life to artificial systems.