Dr. Jill Lepore
speaker
433 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
Dr. Jill Lepore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hey, thanks for having me.
Wow.
I'm not sure how to take that, but I guess that's good.
What I mean by the artificial state is a kind of successor to the liberal nation state, the constitutional democracy under which, you know, 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, you know, 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 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, you know, what is 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 elections.
their rights and duties as citizens, our public discourse is really almost entirely privatized and owned 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?
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.
Yeah.
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