To combat the 'Artificial State,' Jill Lepore says to look to science fiction
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Today's interview paints a pretty bleak picture as to where we're at now, as a country, as a society, as a people. It's with the historian Jill Lapore, whose new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, examines who actually has the reins of power. She argues that our liberal democracy has already been replaced by something else, by corporate. operations and machines. And after she finishes painting that bleak picture, MPR's Michelle Martin asks Lapore, well what can we do about it? And I'll let her answer that after the break.
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Normally an historian like Jill Lapore writes about the past, in her case, best selling prize winning histories about politics and the law. But Lapora sees a real and compelling danger in an inescapable phenomenon of the present, one which she says compelled her to write her latest book. It's called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and Jill Lapore is here to tell us what that is. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.
Hey, good morning. Thanks so much for having me.
So everybody's heard by this time about artificial intelligence, but what is the artificial state?
It's the successor state to a liberal uh democracy, right? A kind of a new kind of state that is fast emerging. In which public discourse is owned by and controlled by privately owned corporations. And much of the functions of nation states are being taken over by corporations and run by machinery. So it's essentially government by machine instead of government by consent.
And you're saying that this has really already happened to some degree.
I think it's very much underway. And what I wanted to do when writing the book was to name it because I think it's kind of baffling. Like what people wake up and read the newspaper and say, What is actually going on? And I I think having a name for what's going on is maybe helpful.
You say that their effects and this is your main focus here, their effects on political discourse, representative democracy, and constitutional government have been almost wholly malign. You say that liberal democratic states make citizens, the artificial state makes trolls. So tell us why it is that you say that.
You know, I people that have been hawking innovations in computer technology since the nineteen eighties have been really interested in making promises that every new step in the evolution of these technologies would abet democracy. And then there's the same promise now with artificial intelligence, right? That it's that it that it that it will abet democracy. But like w we actually take stock historically, you know, using quantitative evidence and inspecting the studies of political theorists about democratic erosion. Especially since the era of social media, we really see abundant abundant evidence across the world of the degree to which these tools have undermined democracy and have aided and abetted the rise of authoritarianism around the world.
And what about places around the world where there was never a particularly robust kind of local news ecosystem? What what there?
Yeah, I mean it's interesting the the decay, the democratic backsliding that are the that is uh among the effects of social media is much more severe in healthy democratic societies, right, than in places that just don't have a democratic infrastructure. There's less less to unravel.
The strong impression I get from your book is that you actually think this is intentional. Is that accurate?
So an not exactly. So I think most of it happened by accident. Like most of these things are perfect.
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