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
I mean, I, and I all, this causes a lot of self-reflection on my part.
Like a lot of these people are my former students, right?
Like I teach at Harvard.
We send so many students off to work in Silicon Valley and then they talk this way.
And you're like, what happened?
What did we do wrong?
Like what was there?
Do you not have a sense of obligation to the human condition?
That first begins 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 from the Super Bowl in January of 1984, it's like an outtake from...
It looks like you're watching George Orwell's 1984 with these kind of like people dressed in gray and their skin's 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 your audience really understands that the celebration of the personal computer as emancipating came out of the counterculture.
There's this great book 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 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.
Showing 121–140 of 433 · page 7 of 22
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