Ep005 - Random Rekkids

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Instead of second guessing or searching for hours, you get clarity. And can hire the right pro with confidence. For your next home project, try thumbtack. They know homes. Hire the right pro today. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI assisted in agente coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. Its ships at the speed of AI is acid compliant and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually, five words. It's a great frickin database. Start building at mongoDB.com/ai. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil iPadell, Editor and Chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Jill LaPore about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which comes out on August 25th. Jill is one of the best writers there is that identifying institutional patterns in history and Decoder is a show about systems. So this book could not possibly be more in our strikes in. You build systems by measuring things, gathering information, quantifying it as data and taking action on it. And Jill's thesis in the artificial state is that this kind of systemic measurement really dehumanizes people. It flattens us in human concerns into something, well, artificial. These artificial structures have grown to touch more and more parts of our lives. Not just in obvious places like apps or AI, but all the way up to our politics and governance itself. And Jill's insight here is a telling portrait of the way big tech and its billionaire figureheads have managed to break the very idea of the nation state. You'll hear Jill Tommy she wanted to write kind of a 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 a 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 the 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 and truly became possible in commonplace, not only for ads but 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 was a really 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 illusory as maybe the great hopes for Twitter after the Arab Spring turned out to be. But as I said Jill thinks in systems, so her response, but 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 and where she sees hope for that future. And yes, that includes college kids booing the AI CEOs at graduation ceremonies. Okay, Dr. Jill Lapor on the Artificial State. Here we go. Dr. Jill Lapor, your staff writer at the New Yorker, your 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. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm 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, virgy, Neil I Patel strike zone books of all time. Wow, I'm not sure how to take that, but I guess that's good. Yeah, 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. And that is, 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 kind of successor to the liberal nation state, the constitutional democracy under which our freedom of speech and free discourse and our constitutional rights are central to our experience as citizens within a nation state. We talk a lot about democratic decay and democratic backsliding. And then 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. That is to say the state itself. 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. And the easiest example of that to think about is what it's sort of euphemistically called the public square, which is where people get information about how to vote and what's going on in the world and how to make decisions and how to exercise their rights and duties as citizens. Our public discourse is really almost entirely privatized and known by corporations who, you know, as many, many people have demonstrated it's not news to your listeners or to anyone, that public discourse, the priority is not the free expression of ideas and democratic deliberation. It is the monetization of attention and of outrage. And 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, right? They were, all of them have been inverted for several years now or different numbers of years, you know, from X to Facebook to TikTok. There are far more bots than humans on those platforms. And those bots are, many of them are owned by corporations and have particular acts, their own kind of financial interests, but they're owned by state actors and non-state actors and criminals and terrorists. And so I think 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. So one of the things that really struck me about this is at least America's conception of itself. 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 government and we're all arguing. And your thesis is, yeah, that's what we say about ourselves. But actually, we've automated a way and numerically quantified a way, 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's consultants that are turning us all into polling data. Is that the trajectory around the end of the nation state? Is that the core of the idea? Yeah, and I think it has a long history. But the acceleration of these developments in the age of artificial intelligence is really considerable. So here I'll give you two examples that maybe stretch out across a century. So 1930s, the 1930s, 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 replaces the kind of door-to-door precinct walking that campaigns would need to do. If I want to, I'm running for election in some neighborhood, I got to go talk to people, go to baseball games, you're going to go to basketball games, go to the public library. But increasingly, it became less necessary for political campaigns to do that because they could subcontract out political polling. But you can find out what political opinion is in a neighborhood if you want to run a campaign by just drawing down, just by doing data mining and data analysis. So it might talk, "Well, 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 were there. All those conversations are the civic glue that holds a civil society together. So replacing those chatting by this site under a street lamp about, "What do you think about this guy?" With just extracting data, which is where we are now. It's just a much more eye-catching thing. artificial politics than we have had before. And then if you kind of project ahead to, I mean, there's been kind of great coverage lately of emerging trends for the 2026 selection in the US and around the world where a lot of people report that even in these primaries, you know, they've been going on over the spring and summer, they'll ask Chachee BT, like, how should I vote in the primary? Meanwhile, the campaign messages that you're getting have many of them been crafted by artificial intelligence, right? And the fact that you are getting them is a decision made by artificial intelligence. So in a way, it's like AI versus AI in these upcoming elections, or even in elections that are already transpiring. You can see how you could fall into that, like, step, just sort of, just going downhill on skis. But I kind of wanted to write a kind of grumpy book to say, well, let's pause for a minute. Like, when does, what, what's at the bottom of that hill? Like, is that an icy pond? We're going to just go through the ice and like, we're all going to drown in there. Or is that like a beautiful new political world? And I think it looks pretty perilous. Yeah. The book traces this evolution step-by-step as you're describing, right? This is a slow build to maybe where we've gotten today. And you point out several times in the book, you know, there's a bunch of science fiction authors in the 50s and 60s who are looking at computers and they're drawing a picture of the future. And some of them pick Utopia and their entire movements about technocratic Utopia that emerge. And a lot of them pick dystopia. They draw a picture of computer aided dystopia. And you point this out, I mean, everyone has heard the torment Nexus meme. It's in the book. You use it in the book that our modern industrials have read dystopian science fiction and decided that is the model of the future that they're attempting to build. I'm curious a why you think they've all gotten it wrong. For me, I must have Peter T. O'on down. And if that is a moment, an inflection point for us to actually pick a different future. - Like it's kind of 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, you know, where people are really worried about totalitarianism and the dehumanizing of people in that kind of the, it is a consequence of the machine age. But there's also a lot of it in the 1950s. So this for instance, like a classic story by Isaac Asimov, I think is 1955 called franchise. It's set on the days before Election Day 2008, November 4th, 2008, the day Obama won the presidency. And in that imagined future, that Asimovian 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, like the sampling method that pollsters use has been perfected mathematically by this computer or get picked the average person. And that's the only person who votes. And then then that guy has to go into hiding 'cause if he will only like who was elected or the presidency goes badly, like his life is destroyed. And so there's a lot of this stuff in science fiction. But who may be last year, Sam Altman was I think on Joe Rogan and he started talking about how great it would be if AI chose the president of the United States. Like and he wasn't, I mean, yes, he was like fucking around, but he was also serious, right? Like wouldn't that be great? Because it's so efficient and we don't have to bother and it spares us though it's labor. And that general premise that like why would we bother to do something that a machine can do for us without the realization that I think the rest of us would have like, but there's some things we wanna do, including like meaningful work, right? Including right and make art and do things for ourselves. I know, you know, these are very smart people. But they're not humanists. And they seem to have, I mean, Tiel would say he is, right? That he's a philosopher, a political philosopher. I'm not so convinced of that. Like I think that they're the capacity for humanistic inquiry and humanistic reading and humanistic reasoning is not something you see in great evidence. In that culture and I think it's been really kind of bred out in a way of the culture of Silicon Valley that 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, right? It doesn't matter what came before. You wanna start a ride service. You don't study taxis or figure out where the, you know, 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. Such a rejection of the knowledge and wisdom of earlier human beings. Like the posture of the humanist is one of kind of humility. Like isn't it magisterial and majestic? How, you know, Homer wrote the Odyssey so long ago and it's still so powerful and the kind of timelessness of literature and the arts, the infinite beauty of humanity's capacity for making things. That's just not the ethos, right? Like it's like, no, we'll do it better. It doesn't matter what anybody did before. It's we're innovating, we're disrupting. It's like the culture is just so fetishized on the future that it doesn't have that, like, let's listen to what other people who came before might have known, that's still wisdom. And that makes for a very poor reading of literature, right? We could have a great argument about what Azimov meant by that story, like it's not like a determinant, you know, I'm not the authority on Azimov, but like I'm not gonna ask Sam Altman what a short story he is, right? - Well, he would just ask chat GPT. - Yeah, it's right. - We have to take a short break here. We'll be right back. - Support for the show comes from Framer. 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Come on. You're not serious, right? It's real. - Oh my gosh, I'm freaking out. - We'll still be getting into all the huge questions that can take over your life. Are there different ways that humans might be dead? - Do we live inside of an enormous black hole? - Why do we cry? - What if I eat it? - But now we're gonna be able to show you all sorts of things we never could before. You really have no choice but to just let your mind go wild. Unexplainable is gonna have new video episodes every Monday on Netflix with new audio episodes still dropping every Monday and Wednesday. (upbeat music) Unexplainable. A podcast from Vox. Now on Netflix. (upbeat music) - Hi, Ron, this segment of Decoder Sessions features how and how to act to publish for the verge in Christy Argelon, Uber's Global Head of Advertising. And you're gonna enjoy this conversation. - Christy, just to start, when did Uber launch advertising and how is it going? - It's been a really interesting journey for Uber. Most people came to know Uber as we alternative to a ride hailing service, but the other side of the platform is Uber Eats. And the Uber Eats side was where we first got into advertising with simple sponsored listings so that any restaurant on our platform could actually run ads, we started to realize we have this platform that is full of people going places and getting things. And there's no better way to show brand relevancy than to insert your brand into decision-making in the moment that it's happening and to help facilitate and provide offers information services at the moment. People are making decisions. - What makes Uber advertising unique as a product? - One of the things that we keep seeing in our research with consumers is that there is this enormous trend to use digital as quickly as possible to make decisions so that they can get back into the physical world. And we see that over and over again on the Uber platform. People are looking to quickly find a ride to get to a bar where they can meet friends and watch their favorite football team together. And so this pivot from the digital world, world, enhancing what people really want to do in the physical world is a role that Uber plays that's incredibly powerful. [MUSIC] Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Jill Lapor about the cast of billionaires who run the artificial state. There's something very interesting about this cast of characters, particularly Peter Teal who comes up in your book, Elon Musk who comes up in your book as more over a hundred 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 a fetishization of, you know, there's an entire culture of thinking. I won't call it a philosophy because I don't think it's quite that developed, but a culture of thinking around first principles. We're going to do first principles thinking and that will lead us to some disruptive outcome. And often, to me, it at least feels like where that first principle begins is a choice about what to ignore from the past. And I see that kind of over again in your book in the culture that we live in at large that's 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. Step by step towards a more automated society. That there's something messy about democracy that is very, very important in 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 kind of setting aside is happening by accident or on purpose. I mean, I think of these guys as really instrumental. They're not pursuing knowledge for its own sake. They are deeply interested in exploration and I think in wonder and I think like one of the things I really love about this moment is the fascination with space and space exploration and things tremendously exciting. You know, harness to militarization in certain commercial projects is like, wow, we went from Star Trek to Star Wars really fast. 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. But I just don't think that's part of that culture. It's just not that position, right? A kind of humanist commitment to knowledge for the sake of the accumulation of wisdom and leading a better life and understanding the world with greater clarity and greater compassion. I think it's largely mocked in that world as woke or feminine or lived art, whatever. Like I think especially with the kind of the conservative turn of the tech world, it takes on weird, weird balances. Yeah, I think it is really purposeful. Like this kind of knowledge is not worth having. We can't make money off of it. You know, 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. And you know, like the lack of curiousness about the bigger world in the place of these really thrilling inventions within it. I don't know, I find it bizarre. I mean, I and I all just cause a lot of self reflection on my part. Like a lot of these people are my former students, right? Like I teach it Harvard. We send so many students off to work in Silicon Valley and then they just talk this way. And like, what happened? What did we do wrong? Like, what was there? 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 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 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. And 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, you know, in your audience really understands that the celebration of the personal computer as a mans painting came out of the counterculture. And this is great book from 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. Businesses, 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 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 a mans patient. And you know, it's an ad campaign. Yeah. It's like at the end of the day, it's just an ad campaign. And there are people who are like, well, exactly how does the personal computer like, like, it's great. And it's fun to have like, it's like I also, I also like a nice toaster, but like my toaster isn't going to emancipate me like what, what is it about? But, but so you begin to see new tech product computing projects, products as very carefully packaged with an ideal about personal liberation. And then so by the time you get to the 90s in the, you know, 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. And so society is going to become emancipated and democratized, right? They'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 it, they're whenever remembers even what they forecast and it's like, I don't 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. And another there aren't like plenty of people that sincerely believe that or certainly is tremendous democratizing potential for the internet, right? Like, there was a lot of promise there. But 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, all emerging social media is like, oh, Facebook, like we're going to democratize this. I'm 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 we need is democratic AI. And that doesn't mean we have a say in democracy in, in, we as, you like a polity have a say. It just means that like democratic countries should lift all restrictions and regulations on, so that democracies can have AI before authority. Like, it's just a, 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, previously, internet, where a guy like me who grew up in Wisconsin, with no connections to the media ends up interviewing you, 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 creators. That they know that they can go just start a business and go reach people on these platforms in some way. The flip side of that is I do think a bunch of gatekeepers, the men who own these platforms, largely men, realize 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? 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 there. 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. Is that experiment continues? But Zuckerberg was like, this is kind of dumb. I'm turning it off. We're doing community notes here at No More Oversation. There's some kind of pendulum on the 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'm going to, 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. 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, mostly men, but there are a lot of women beat reporters and women editorial writers who started out like delivering newspapers, working at the press, the printing, working the printer presses at newspapers, climbed 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 like street kids and they know the streets and they start reporting. I don't think they're that different from you 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 creates all kinds of opportunities for new, like the interview is invented. You know, eyewitness reporting is invented. The by line 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. And 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. 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 that happens, you know, with how the telephone changes news reporting, the wire service in the Mexican American war had 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're, 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 re-aligned. But what always happens is deletes regain the power, right? Like they don't like it, right? They don't like the news boys becoming beat reporters, becoming editors. They're like, who are these like new vote people that are like they, they, they, you're going to use your metaphor. They, you know, 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 it going 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, 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? Who's going to the hall, 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 like, you're still on a 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. Something 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. I 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. I said I was going to ask about targeted advertising. And one of the reasons I think that 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, but you can push back on that right? You can say, no, we don't like that identity politics bad, right? It's too woke. And you can see that 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 that 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 like Science and Technology, like a popular magazine, like the Wired of the 1960s. By the sky, Ethel DeSolapoul, who was an MIT political scientist. In 1968, he was asked with JCR liquider, 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 I had really, really fascinating things to say. Ethel DeSolapoul, this political scientist, said, certainly by then, there will be personal newspapers. You will log onto 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 Paul said, there really won't be able to be party politics if you have your own newspaper. Because a political party is the organization of political dissent, I've shared political priorities. And I don't think we'll even have interest group politics, like the Black Congressional caucus as an interest group, or corn growers, farmers as the corn farmers association, as 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 my individual interest, but the interest 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. Our system of government will be incompatible with our technology of communication. Smart people saw this 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. And 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. 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 more auditorium on using these tools. And therefore, I have to use the tools that I think my enemy will also be like, it's just kind of 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 win elections that way. But I think like most people in politics are not loving this moment. We have to pause here for another quick break. We'll be back in just a minute. I'm stand-up comedian John Marcos Sarrazi and I'm actor penis model Russell Daniels. The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are, because let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guest lives, the world, but in a fun way. Bottom line is you're going to walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests Caleb here on. Busy Philips. Stavros Halkias. Laverne Cox. Hassan Piker. Alana Glazer. I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is the downside. AI assisted and agente coding can help you you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is a bottleneck, what's the point? MongoDB actually gets out of your way. MongoDB is a unified AI-ready data platform that empowers you to build scalable, generative AI applications. It eliminates the need for separate, specialized vector databases by combining a flexible document model natively with semantic vector search, full text search, and real-time operational data. Plus, MongoDB gives you the flexibility to ship at the speed of AI. The acid compliance lets you sleep soundly at night and scales to handle massive fortune 500 workloads. It's a great freaking database. Welcome back. I'm talking with Dr. Jill Lapor about how micro-targeting and identity politics define our political economy. So I said I was going to ask about target 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 target advertising. And I just think about your line about identity politics and it's made possible like computer-run sorting targeting. Computer-run sorting and targeting is advertising that is the modern advertising industry at scale. We'll 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. And the big tech companies have all gotten in trouble for over-sorting people. Metagot 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 a legal, and the algorithms don't know this. The platforms may be 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, in a faux mattress, if you'll pay for as a direct 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 gonna measure everybody, quantify everybody, we'll do capitalism at scale, and now we're gonna subsume our politics into it. Because you're saying that the politicians themselves understand maybe they shouldn't do that. - It's helpful to remember that that's not an invention of the intraday or the personal computer era, or certainly not of the artificial intelligence era. This is a great book by my colleague, Liz Cohen, a consumers republic that argues that the kind of consumer replaced the citizen as the individual entity of consequence in the United States, in the 1950s, in the post-war era with a peacetime conversion of wartime factories, so that really consumption was what was gonna save the country and advance the country's interests. And American growth and American strength was associated with consumerism. And that we've, like my lifetime, that's been the way that we live. That's not what 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 gonna last, but what it currently is, we're not acting online, primarily as citizens, certainly I don't feel it I am, I'm actually chiefly acting online as a consumer, right? 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. Like, remember when you were outraged by that, and you're like, I hate that they know that I had a baby. That makes me mad, I didn't tell them that. Like, but now we just accept, you know, that's just, - Everyone's funds are listening to that. - Everyone's funds are listening to that, you know, you're getting on a flight, you know, that you guess someone's gonna offer you drama, mean online. But that, I think that seemed to a lot of people, like inevitable and almost natural, because the consumers' republic is how we've lived for such a long time. But I'm not trying to offer up like a lead-iter, 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 gonna make me sound like 112. There's like the JC Penny and the Walgreens. Like, 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, your house has been reapprased, and you wanna question that, or you've got a parking ticket and you wanna appeal it. Those were in one place, and then like, if you're gonna go by, I'd be profan, 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. I 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 gonna be for bots, fairly short order, and the humans aren't really gonna be on it. She's gonna be a gentick AI, doing your stuff, like people, it's really just gonna be machines talking to machines, which is in a way what people thought it was gonna 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, this continues. I just, I kinda don't see how democracy indoors the corporatization of all political, all public discourse. - Yeah, we have had many, many, many textos 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 were just a provider of Toyota Camrys. Like literally, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 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 try to disrupt me with your bots. Like, you won't. The CEO of Zockdock, the CEO of Uber, the CEO of TaskRabit, they're all like, yeah, go ahead and try. 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 drop shippers, 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. Like, do I believe that the Agentak AI is equivalent to my labor? 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-tip 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, I really, really don't. Yeah, no. And I am just really fascinated by, you know, every time I look at the height of the title wave of the coming tech lash, 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. Yeah, the other piece of it that it strikes me is all of that, the internet will go away. It's wishful thinking on a part of the companies. They want this internet to go away. The economics 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 how are 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 like big and meaningful ways. But I think people like Instagram, and I don't think they're gonna 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 professor. You're in the high to the tech class, as you just said. I'm watching college students boo AI, a 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 party. back that leads to actual change, that's where it comes from, 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 a, like 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. What is your free, not so free, you have to use this tool now, or public schools. 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. You 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 big law firms, big universities. I gave these lectures a Yale last year, that are the basis for this book on the artificial state, and had a lot of 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? We're going to use this task force to deliberate on what's the proper time and place for using these incredibly powerful tools. And 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, yay! Like, what's the branding strategy here? And the faculty are like, what are you actually talking about? You brought us here to have a branding conversation. So at this lecture, so I'm going to 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 discussion now. Like, what about just having there be like a two week moratorium, starting tomorrow? 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 were like, let's do that. Like why can't we do that? We have a discussion about, you know, and this 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 it. They're paying all this money, taking 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, and what that means and should mean. 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. That's what people are. That's what kind of gives me hope, that restlessness around that. But you know, there was like a resounding applause around this idea and you will notice this is not what Yale did. Yeah, instead branded it's, it's a relationship with open AI and now it's like a corporate agreement. 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 I, we see this playing out like, yeah. Democratic politics, little lead, 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. So whatever excuse is being put for, 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 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. 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's really grim. I think you're supposed to depress me. People are showing up and having those arguments. 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. Then there are some real arguments against it. Let's have an open forum and let's see what the people think. Let's also educate ourselves and the community because there's a lot of dumb ass stuff out there about data centers. I'm certainly on both sides. 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. But it's part of a much bigger problem with money in American politics and the relationship between corporations and government. So there's no really easy fix for that. Question those sort of structurally, like, is there any going back? Hypothetical, I often pose is because my last book was about the history of the US Constitution. 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 undamendable. The US Constitution has been meaningful a minute since 1971. And so instead the Supreme Court amends a Constitution in how it acts. So 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. People, one thing that people really believe in is jury duty. Like 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, like, 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 whether what's true and what's not true. But imagine that for some reason, jury service was abolished in 1971. And now in 2026, someone was like, you know what would actually be good would be bringing back jury service, 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 civil society is so 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. I think a lot of that sapping away of our civic strength and our capacity as citizens to deliberate with one another, here one another out is because of the incursions of the artificial state. I want to end by asking you about a phenomenon that I see more and more, especially after AI got booted all the college graduations. It's amazing between that and the data center push back. It seems like the industry has decided they need a new tech, right? They need to communicate more. Open AI, you know, they're just running around and they're exactly, it's like, we have a marketing problem. We just need to market it better. Google 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. Well, there's a range of opinions here. The thing that all of them have started saying over and over and over again is the democratic process should be trusted to put the Gorg rails on us. The CEO of Skydeo was on. He is 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 Anthropics just proposed a federal regulator for AI that will determine who runs the frontier models and do safety checks on them and that's the democratic process. 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 freeing 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 know that it won't. Or is this actually the 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, open AI some years ago had this all like democratic inputs project where they were going to get democratic inputs on how AI should run. And 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 experts. Like, for sure, I think the individuals involved in the democratic outputs inputs project for open AI and the collective constitutional project for Anthropic, they really cared about those things. They knew nothing about the political process, 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. Well, we'll do like hyper scaling, 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 represent like that's not deliberate of 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 need to be rules and 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 I 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. It'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 and discussions around what do we want? What would be what would be right? Like I have to learn a little bit more about this. I don't 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 a chief argument of my book. That can still happen. That should still happen. And I think it has to still happen. That seems like the next step. It seems like getting the college kids together to boo is what maybe the thing that will solve democracy is a college student who booed the Iraq war. I still want to believe this, whether or not that went my way. Dr. Pore, this has been amazing. Thank you 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. Julepore for taking 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. You can email us at decoderthabirds.com. We really do read all the emails or you can name me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at decoder pod. We made a TikTok and an Instagram same handle at decoder pod. There are a lot of fun. If you like decoder, please share it through friends and subscribe wherever you are. Your podcasts. The code is a production version. Part of the box means a podcast network. Just produced by K-Cox NextStat. This episode was edited by Zander Adams. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The decoder music is by break master cylinder. We'll see you next time.