Jill Lepore on the Dangers of the 'Artifical State'

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So two of the questions that Harvard and New Yorker magazine historian Jill Lepore asks in her new book are these. Why and when did the unthinkable become thinkable? That's a big question. And how did a nightmare become a dream? The nightmare she's talking about is a world governed by machines, algorithms, and the handful of people, really men, if you look at the history of this, who owned them. Lepore calls this the artificial state. In her telling, it's been decades in the making, built out of Cold War computing, science fiction, and a philosophy that treats the whole universe as a machine you can calculate your way through.
Jill Lepore, as many of you may know, is a professor of American history at Harvard, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of a number of books, including the bestseller These Truths. Her new one is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Would you believe with a title like that, that this is a hopeful book? Jill Lepore, welcome back to WNYC. Always great to have you.

**Jill Lepore** (1:20)
Thanks so much, Brian.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:22)
And listeners will open up the phones right away on this theme or anything. You always wanted to ask Jill Lepore but didn't have her over for dinner. 212-433-WNYC, call or text, 212-433-9692.
So what is the artificial state as you define it in this book?

**Jill Lepore** (1:43)
The artificial state is both something that is being built and also a fantasy. So it's something that is not yet built, but I wanted to give a name to the state we're increasingly finding ourselves in, which in some ways is the successor to the liberal democratic nation state, right? Which is itself a new thing under the sun, really only emerged at the end of the 18th century. But increasingly the elements of what constitutes a nation state have been taken over by corporations and have become increasingly automated. I think the easiest place to see that is in the so-called public sphere, right? Where citizens are supposed to be deliberating democratically, getting information, arguing with one another, communicating with their representatives, representatives are supposed to be communicating with their constituents. That public sphere, of course, is now privately owned and mostly consists of social media platforms. There are rare exceptions like public media, which we have the privilege to be on today.
But it's important to note that in addition to being ruled by algorithms and run on machines owned by corporations who have their own private interests, the public sphere is now populated more by bots than by humans. There are more robots online in any platform than there are humans.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:11)
Does that make or that group of things you just described, make society or democracy lean in particular directions?

**Jill Lepore** (3:22)
I don't think it has to necessarily lean in a particular direction. There are, we could think of, I think cases immediately where there was a point in time when Twitter, when it was Twitter was significantly left-leaning and X its replacement is significantly right-leaning. It's not endemic to the technology, right? Technologies themselves don't have the politics.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:46)
Right. But that raises the question as to whether it's good or bad or neutral in terms of its effect on people.

**Jill Lepore** (3:56)
I think the point is that people don't have much control over these technologies, especially technologies of communication that have built themselves as democratizing and in fact, have largely been the reverse. I mean, a good way to think about, say, Twitter is like in its short history, Twitter was founded I think 2006, 2007, and really just mainly just as a lark. Like it would be a goofy thing to do to say, I had a tuna fish sandwich today for lunch. What did you have? Just like fun status updates kinds of things. But by 2012, Twitter had decided to bill itself as a replacement for the public sphere, a town hall. It turned out that politicians really liked using Twitter. They liked communicating that way. They liked using Twitter as a way to get a pulse, the feeling of the nation or the feeling of their constituents. So Twitter decided to market itself that way.
At the time though, fewer than I think one in five Americans even had a Twitter account, almost all of the tweeting about politics, more than 90% of all political tweeting was done by less than 10% of political tweeters. Most people who are on Twitter weren't tweeting about politics.
A minority of Americans are using this platform. A minority of that minority are using it to talk about politics. A minority of that minority are doing 90% of all the tweeting about politics. Meanwhile, Twitter is boasting that you could use Twitter to get a sense of what the electorate is, as a proxy for the electorate.