YouSaid · the spoken record

Jill Lepore

lines on the record: 72
first: 2026-07-20
most recent: 2026-07-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Seems like the next step, it seems like getting the college kids together to boo is like. 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. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for that.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So 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 in discussions around what do we want, what would be right? Like I had to learn a little bit more about this. And I 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 the chief argument of my book. That can still happen. That should still happen. And I think it has to still happen.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 whole 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 constitution. We're going to like crowdsource constitutional drafting. And they did all these experiments. Sure, I think the individuals involved in the democratic 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. They know 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 hyperscaling. 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 represented like that's not deliberative.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to end by asking about a phenomenon that I see more and more, especially after AI got booed at all the college graduations. It's amazing between that and the data center pushback, it seems like the industry has decided they need a new tech, right? They need to communicate more. OpenAI, they're just running around and their executives are like, we have a marketing problem. We just need to market it better. Google CO is on the show and he's like, I don't think it's a marketing problem. We actually have to 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 their guardrails on us. The CEO of SkyDio 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, hear one another out is because of the incursions of the artificial state.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 duty and having like just 12 random people decide like whether or not your kid is guilty of aggravated assault There's no way we would bring it back because kind of trust in one another in civil society has 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our criminal justice system, even if objectively juries often make the wrong decisions, but people believe it's good that we are asked to go to a room with strangers and have and deliberate over what's true and what's not true.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Government. So there's no really easy fix for that. Question, though, sort of structurally like, is there any going back? A hypothetical I often pose is, because my last book was about the history of the US Constitution and 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 unamendable. The U.S. Constitution has been meaningful amended since 1971. And so instead, the Supreme Court amends the Constitution and how it acts, right? So the more the longer that goes on, the more resentful people are of the Supreme Court. When people ask, like, well, would we ever get that back? The example I often give is jury service, right? Like 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. Like they think it's a good thing to have that it involves fairness in a...”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's think about there are some good arguments for this data center that are honest arguments, and then there are some real, you know, arguments against it. Let's have an open forum and let's see what the people think. And let's also educate ourselves and the community. Because there's a lot of dumbass stuff out there about data centers, I'm sure. I'm certainly on both sides. I don't know. 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are showing up and having those arguments. And, you know, if you are a smart community development board, you'd get ahead of that and be like, all right.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? Like the thing that I'm worried about the most is like 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?”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Democratic politics, little D, 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, well, we're doing it anyway because something because the town needs the job. So whatever excuse is being put forward, 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 we see this playing out.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why the students are mad. They're not doing, they're not 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 students, scholar, citizen, member of a community in 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wonderful group of students. And so I said, like, what about, let's just do a, let's just have a good 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, they're like stamping. They're like, let's do that. Like, why can't we do that? Why can't we have a discussion about, you know, in this staff and the faculty, we're like, why are we not doing that? And you're like, why are we not doing that? That's sort of my.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Law firms, big universities. I gave these lectures at 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? Like, 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 Gale so that it's really sexy and people are excited about it? Like, are we going to call it AI? What's the branding strategy here? And the faculty are like, what are you actually talking about? Like, you brought us here to have a branding conversation. So at this lecture, so I'm in a lecture hall.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Institutions, not just individuals, have to have positions of moral integrity in this moment. I don't see a ton of evidence of that. You see it maybe in the publishing industry. So it's very self-interested. I think you see it in some state governments and some local governments, but I don't think you see it in”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it came from those people in a quad and they're sweating and they're stupid caps and gowns making a lot of noise together. It came from 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. Here's your free, not so free. You have to use this tool now or public schools. Like I just, I.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think people like Instagram, and I don't think they're going to give up their phones, right? Like, 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 producer. The height of the tech lashes you just said. I'm watching college students boo AI at 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 pushback that leads to actual change, that's where it comes from. And that still came from the internet itself.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other piece of it that is just 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I totally don't know the answer. 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 tidal wave of the coming tech lash, like it's just higher and higher. Like I just think kind of... I don't see that manifesting itself in Effective way, but I just think we're in for really bumpy times.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm still trying to puzzle that out. Like, do I believe that the agentic 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 to that business model? Wondering if you know the answer because that would be great for me. I could just skip to the end.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really just gonna be machine stalking 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. But where we are now, I just, this continues, I just, I kind of don't see how democracy endures the corporatization of all political, all public discourse”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's now just the one place where the information at City Hall might have about you or the information you might wish to share at City Hall, you know, you're going to, your house has been reappraised and you want to question that or you've got a parking ticket and you want to appeal it, those were in one place. And then like if you're going to go buy ibuprofen 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 going to be for bots in fairly short order. And the humans aren't really going to be on it. She's going to be a gentic AI doing your stuff.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone says listening to them, you know, you're getting on a flight, you know that you guys, someone's gonna offer you dramamine 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, you know, I'm not trying to offer up like a Ludditer like nostalgic reading here, but Know when you walk down a city street, there's city hall and there's the post office and there this is going to make me sound like I'm 112. There's like the JCPenney and the Walgreens like they're different places.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is we're not acting online primarily as citizens. Certainly I don't feel that I am. I chiefly acting online as a consumer. 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, this. Like, remember when you were outraged by that? You're like, I hate that they know that I had a baby. That makes me mad. I didn't tell them that. But now we just accept, you know, that's just.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's helpful to remember that that's not an invention of, you know, the internet or the personal computer era or certainly not of the artificial intelligence era. There's a great book by my colleague Liz Cohen, Consumers Republic, that argues that the kind of consumer replaced the citizen as the individual entity of consequence in the United States, you know, in the 1950s, in the post-war era with the peacetime conversion of wartime factories. So like really consumption was what was going to save the country and advance the country's interest. American growth and American strength was associated with consumerism. And that we, like my lifetime, that's been the way that we live. country was founded and that's also not inevitable right but the the system that you're describing of of the targeted advertising which is really effectively what the internet currently is i don't i actually don't think that's going to last but what it currently is”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supposed to do that, we've actually made illegal. And the algorithms don't know this. The platforms maybe 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 a phone mattress that you'll pay for as a direct to consumer, 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 going to measure everybody, quantify everybody, we'll do capitalism at scale, and now we're going to subsume our politics into it because you're saying that the politicians themselves understand maybe they shouldn't do that.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said I was going to ask about targeted 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 targeted advertising. And just think about your line about identity politics and how it's made possible by a computer unsorting and targeting. Computer runs 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, you know, the big tech companies have all gotten in trouble for oversorting people. Meta got 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I have to use these tools because there's no moratorium on using these tools, and therefore I have to use the tools. 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 most people in politics are not loving this moment.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Representative democracy works. Like 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. Like 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Processing device to being a communications device, being both of those things. And Poole said, you know, 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, of shared political priorities. And I don't think we'll even have interest group politics like the Black Congressional Caucus as an interest group, right? Or corn growers, farmers, corn farmers association is 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, like we will, I just think that our notion of a representative government where we agree to elect people to represent not, you know, my individual interests, but like the interests 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember being quite struck reading an article from 1968 in a magazine that I think was called Science and Technology, like a popular magazine, like The Wired of the 1960s by this guy, Ithiel de Sola Pool, who was an MIT political scientist. In 1968, he was asked with JCR Licklider, the inventor of the intranet, to speculate on what the computer revolution would mean by the year 2000. And they were both really smart guys and they had really, really fascinating things to say. And ethiola solo, this political scientist said, certainly by then there will be personal newspapers. Like you will log on to your computer in the morning and it will be networked because the computer was moving in 1968 from being a storage and data.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was going to ask about targeted advertising, and one of the reasons I think the 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? That's too woke, and you can see 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 the identity politics”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Industry is imploding. So I don't think this is like a magnificent time to be out there. Being an influencer, or you just still don't have health insurance. I mean, we still can't buy a house. Like, I just don't think we're in a moment of emancipation that's responding to that consolidation. Some people like, it's great. I like these billionaires have all this power over our culture. I don't. But we're continuing to rotate in their direction. I don't think it's kind of turning back. I guess that's how I would grant for you that there is 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The elites regain the power, right? Like they don't like it, right? They don't like the newsboys becoming beat reporters, becoming editors. They're like, who are these nouveau people that are like, they yearn to use your metaphor, 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, we're keeping to go 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? The whole culture.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reporting the wire service in the Mexican American War. It 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 all turn on new emerging communications technology, which unsettles the relationship between the elites and the people. Like the people get more power, the parties just have to get realigned. But what always happens is...”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Paper or the twice daily paper, right? It creates all kinds of opportunities for the interview is invented. You know, eyewitness reporting is invented, the byline 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 first weekly newspapers, with the Penny Press in the 1830s, with the telegraph in the 1840s. It happens with how the telephone changes newsrooms.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not purely an ad campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and 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, you know, mostly men, but there are a lot of women beat reporters and women editorial writers who started out delivering newspapers, you know, working at the press, working the printing presses at newspapers, climbed their way up. I mean, you know, there's a reason Jimmy Olson is in the newsroom with Clark Kent in the 1930s comic books. Like, these are just, they're like street kids and they know the streets and they start reporting. I don't think they're that different from 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you put that in the context of the artificial state? I'll just preview. My next question is going to be about targeted advertising, which I think is enormously influential piece of the puzzle. But it's that dynamic that I struggle with, right? It's not purely an ad campaign”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it was known as Twitter, lots and lots of activists could find each other and shape public opinion. And now X's whatever X's and mostly like racist find me, right? Like 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 their 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, no moderation. There's some kind of pendulum 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.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 YouTubers, that they know that they can go 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 previous to the internet where a guy like me who grew up in Wisconsin with no connections to the media ends up interviewing you, a Harvard professor. Like the internet needed to arrive, publishing needed to be democratized.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 so it's like already two strikes, but then you get to like 2004. And all the social emerging social media is like, oh, Facebook, like we're going to democratize this. We're 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 what we need is democratic AI and that doesn't mean we have a say in we as like a polity have a say it's just means that like democratic countries should lift all restrictions and regulations so that democracies can have ai before authority like It's just an old story”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is like, no, but the internet is going to democratize societies. Well, well, they didn't. That was just an ad campaign. And not that there aren't like plenty of people that sincerely believe that or there certainly is.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you begin to see new tech, 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 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 that are going to be linked to one another. And so society is going to become emancipated and democratized, right? We're going to have a digital democracy. Even though, like, it's a little bit like, you know, when political pundits make election forecasts and they're wrong half the time, but no one ever remembers even what they forecast. And it's like, how do you even have a job? Like the people in the 80s that sent the personal computer was going to liberate people. Well, it didn't, right? But then in the 90s,”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's an ad kid. 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 it's great. I would like one. It's fun to have like it's like I also like a nice toaster, but like my toaster isn't gonna emancipate me. Like what is it about?”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The so called California ideology that Mary's 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 that's associated with two things at the time businesses, big businesses, which are the only places they 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 like a kind of libertarian version, but it's about emancipation.”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, 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 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 you know in 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”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These really thrilling inventions within it I don't know. I find it bizarre. I mean, and this causes a lot of self-reflection on my part. Like a lot of these people are my former students, right? I teach at Harvard. We send so many students off to work in Silicon Valley. And then they talk this way. And they'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?”
2026-07-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Dr. Jill Lepore on why the AI backlash is vital for the future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT