The Paul Wells Show - Jill Lepore on AI and democracy

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Paul Wells interviews Jill Lepore, Harvard historian, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winner about The Rise and the Fall of the Artificial State, her latest bestseller."Few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless,” Lepore writes, "than the rise of what could soon be “government without consent, even government without humans.”But she's not here peddling despair. She believes a democracy of and for real people can make a comeback, if people only have faith in institutions and in themselves.The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by Cameco and The Transition Accelerator. For more of Paul's writing, go to paulwells.substack.com

This week, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore on her best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial States. Is that really a public sphere any longer when there were more bots than humans participating in it? I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. You know, one of the interesting things about having this podcast where I don't try too hard to stay on top of the headlines is that sometimes quite by accident I land on top of them. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Jill Lepore. She's a prominent historian at Harvard University. She's a prolific staff writer for the New Yorker. And just this year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for history for her book, We the People,

which is a brick. It's a comprehensive history of the U.S. Constitution. Paul Wells Show was presented by Camaco, a nuclear energy company proudly operating in Saskatchewan and Ontario for nearly four decades. Energy security, national security, and climate security are driving increased demand for safe, carbon-free nuclear energy. With Tier 1 uranium assets, critical fuel manufacturing capabilities, and best-in-class reactor technologies like the AP-1000 reactor, Camaco plays a large role across the nuclear value chain to deliver power to the grid. Camico is thriving as a global leader and Canadian nuclear champion.

It's meeting the moment for nuclear new builds at home and around the world. From ground to grid, Camaco is powering Canada forward. Ball Welsho was presented by the Transition Accelerator. The energy transition is disrupting global power, and Canada needs to act now to secure its place in the emerging clean economy. With its rigorous, independent analysis and uniquely strategic approach, the Transition Accelerator is putting Canada on a path to win, economically and geopolitically.

Visit transitionaccelerator.ca to learn more. Jill Lepore, thank you for joining me. Hey, thanks so much for having me. And before we talk about your new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I want to situate you a few. There will be several of my listeners will be just as excited that you're on the podcast

as I am, but you'll be less familiar to a lot of others. And so the first thing I should say is, Congratulations on your Pulitzer Prize. Thank you so much. Which was your first, and it must have come as some relief that it falls in your field of study, which is you just won the Pulitzer for American History for your book on the history of the American Constitution. Was that weird? Is it different to win a – you've won prizes.

Is it different to win a Pulitzer Prize? You know, I've been a finalist for the Pulitzer a couple times in different categories. So, yeah, I was a little bit of a relief to just win it. Yeah, I think it feels different. It feels different than other prizes. I think it has a lot more international cachet than American book prizes do generally. So that's been interesting to see and just to witness and to learn that. The other thing that comes to mind is that you are just a intent.

intimidatingly productive. The book that's coming out, Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, is, if I'm not mistaken, your 15th book, and you teach and you lecture and you are a contributing writer for the New Yorker. How do you do it as a cheesy question, but how do you do it? I think there's a lot of synergy across the different kinds of things that I do. I think kind of trying to explain something to college students. who maybe are taking a course to fulfill a requirement is a high bar for making something interesting, which is good training for trying to write for a general interest reader,

the kind of writing that the New Yorker is. I often think of some of the drearyest New Yorker assignments I've had over the, I don't know, more than 20 years I've been writing for the magazine. Like I remember once I was asked for, like, write a piece on the history of taxation, American tax people, policy and I was like, I'm not even interested in this. Like, I'm not even vaguely curious about this. And I'm an American taxpayer and an American historian. It was really hard to think of a lead that could possibly make anybody want to read that article and then hold their attention

throughout, you know, 4,000 words. I find that an incredibly fun challenge, but I do find that like the next time I'm in the classroom and I have to try to explain something like tax policy, I have kind of a ready explanation with a hook to it. So the teaching and the writing really it's a it's a kind of a perfect circle. Let us talk then, which I think you would probably rather do, about the new book, which is, kind of has a sharper, polemical point than some of what you've written. There's a should in this book, which is,

the book is very concerned about what you call the rise of the artificial state, what I think most people would, in shorthand call the rise of AI. What made you decide that this was a topic that deserved the next several months of your time? I wouldn't say the book is exclusively concerned with AI by any means. It's a history of certain kinds of technologies that are used by nation states. So it goes back to the census. It's a very long history of the relationship between the state and tools of administering the apparatus of the state. I've written about the history of technology for a long time.

I teach classes on the history of technology and on the relationship between the law and technology. So this is stuff I've been thinking about a lot. It's true that this is a somewhat different book than I ordinarily write because it is very engaged. with the present moment, it comes up to the present moment, and it offers itself as a set of observations that might be helpful in thinking more carefully about the present moment and charting a course to the future. And that isn't what I ordinarily do. I had written an article about the artificial state a couple years ago, and my editor asked me if I would turn it into a short book, And then I was asked to give these lectures at Yale on human values.

And so I decided to turn that very short essay into a fairly short book. And I did that last summer. And actually, this summer feels pretty different than last summer in terms of where the AI debate is at because of the big pushback against data centers that's unfolding here in the United States and in many parts of the world right now. So, but I think. some of that sense of urgency that you see in the current data center debate and the way it's really informing everything from municipal elections to national elections, that's quite a bit

of how I was feeling last summer. And so there is that sense of involvement in the present and urgency about the kinds of decisions that are being made right now that animated me and deciding to write the book. It is quite a long history. In fact, it's kind of two passes through a long history. First, it's the attempts to build a functioning polity that incorporates technology, I guess we can put it. It goes back to, you know, the very first machines. And and then it's, then it traces the attempts to think about and imagine what that place would be like. And it's interesting that you do it twice. That's one of several ways you have to show that the thinking and the doing have been

dangerously disconnected over time. So the first thing is a history of census taking, history of development of computers, which was very much bound up in census taking. If we can count, then we can lead and or control. And then the rise of social media. And then you go back for a long, long survey of science fiction writers attempts to imagine what a rule by machine might look like. it, as I say, the strong inference is that we haven't been thinking enough as we've been building. Yeah. I mean, I think it's important to state at the outset that when I talk about the artificial state, it's not some sinister conspiracy. It's not like when people talk about people in the far right talk about the deep state. Like there's a conspiracy that is secretly running our lives. I don't think there's anything conspiratorial or secret about the artificial state. And I think it's largely a happenstance. Like it's a sense.

It's a set of accidents that led to the place in which we find ourselves today. So I really did want to spend some time. I mean, the first half of the book is the rise of the artificial state, and the second half is the fall of the artificial state. And I wanted to spend some time thinking about what was the series of events, the kind of concatenation of the kind of chain of individual technological innovations and state decisions that gets us to where we are now. And at what point did it become intentional?

Because I do think it now, in some ways, is an intentional thing. And I also wanted to insist that it's not inevitable and kind of has never been inevitable. So laying out a kind of timeline, it's like a sequence of events that gets us to, you know, sort of like at the current moment where the trappings of, of a democratic constitutional nation state are invoked all the time by tech companies. But what that illustrates is their lack of a commitment to those ideals. So, you know, Facebook, I think starting in 2016, had its own Supreme Court, you know, to decide about content.

Anthropic issued its own constitution earlier this year for its chatbot Claude. Sam Altman of OpenAI has talked about how much better it would be to have an AI president than an actual president. I think you hear the language of the Democratic constitutional nation state coming out of some of these companies. It has nothing to do with actual self-governance. So I wanted to sort of chart that history and allow readers to see what I think sometimes feel like I just – I woke up today and suddenly, like, and now we have this? Like, now humanoid robots are coming into my living room. And I have to, like, like, what's next?

Like, that sense of powerlessness around this kind of cascade of invention seems to be accelerating. Very little of it feels chosen. I mean, in the U.S., like, well, more than 70% of Americans think that AI is much more likely to cause them harm than to bring them benefits. And yet, you know, you can't go on to Google without Gemini giving you an AI response to any search that, you, like the sense that like something has kind of descended upon us is a feeling that I have, I think many people have, but I think it's worth questioning that and understanding what were the series of decisions that led to this moment. For a lot of your survey of the development of, I say these technologies, but I'll take your point, various technologies to achieve various

ends and in the end, some people start to think maybe we could build politics around some of these things. At first year, survey is kind of merry and carefree, a succession of sort of great American eccentrics doing funny or, you know, interesting, promising things with early computers and counting systems. And there's two in particular dialogue about. One is something called simulmatics, which you had written a book about before, which was computers in political campaigns in their late 50s, early 60s. And then there's another one we'll get to. But tell me about simulmatics. And am I even pronouncing it correctly? That's a good question. I had to ask the one person who's still alive, who worked for the company in the...

the 50s and early 60s. And he says simulmatics. Simulmatics, which is sort of meant to be like a synonym for cybernetics, like the simulation of automation, simulated automation of human intelligence. It was a company founded in 1959 by a Madison Avenue ad guy, a madman. And an MIT political scientist who was very computationally minded, a behavioral computer scientist from Colombia, a computer scientist from IBM who had been at the first media,

of the sort of famous Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence in 1956. And their idea was to build what they called a people machine, that they would use the first mainframe computer, the UNIVAC, which had been built, the first peacetime computer, built an adaptation of a wartime computer called the ENIAC. It had been built for the U.S. Census Bureau. They would use that in its early descendants to create a simulation of the American electorate,

census data, voting returns from elections dating back to 1940 and 1944 and public opinion surveys. So they just had like hundreds of thousands of punch cards with all this data on it. Like a minuscule amount of data by our standards, but from their point of view, they referred to it as massive data. We call that big data. And they fed all these things into a computer and they wrote a program for it to simulate the American electorate and proposed to the Democratic National Committee and subsequently to the John F. Kennedy campaign that you could ask this people machine any question, a kind of if-then question. So Kennedy could say to it. In fact, this is one of the things they ran. If Kennedy talked more about its Catholicism, would that draw or turn away

Protestant voters or Jewish voters? They assumed Catholic voters would be attracted to that. And then they could, but they could ask that question almost precinct by precinct because they had these public opinion polls and voting returns. So they would supposedly create a simulation of the electorate from any particular, you know, congressional district. And then they would have all this data about that electorate, you know, so would a 47-year-old Detroit housewife who was Catholic like or not like Kennedy's foreign policy if he talked more, about the missile gap. And they ran these reports for the Kennedy campaign in 1960, and it then was leaked to the press by them. Like they wanted credit for his victory. So I shouldn't use the passive voice there. Simomatics leaked to the press that they were instrumental in his victory. And then that was reported across the country, and the Kennedy campaign denied it.

Like, they absolutely retained Simomatics, like the records are all there, the Kennedy papers at the Kennedy library. But they just lied and said they hadn't because they, because a lot of the headlines were like, a robot elected Kennedy. Like people were so anxious about any hint that there had been any machine interference in the election that it was necessary to deny it. I mean, partly Kennedy had run on a kind of anti-automation campaign. He was running, trying to get labor unions to support his candidacy. So very closely identifying automation with the Republican. and Richard Nixon. So it's just kind of an interesting moment

to think about how far back. I mean, when I came across this story years ago, I ended up writing a book about it because I was really surprised how early that work really was. And then how controversial. Ultimately, their project failed. The company went bankrupt in 1970

because there just wasn't enough data to do all the things they wanted to do. They wanted to do basically like Amazon and Spotify and you know, Fandango, like they wanted to be able to tell movie studios how their movies were doing in different markets and with different demographics. And they just found out like they went to Hollywood and they were surprised to discover the movie studios just didn't even keep track of like ticket sales in different parts of the country. Like there was no data. And to the degree there was, it wasn't computerized. But the idea of doing this using a large body of data to simulate a response and run if then experiment. in order to influence people, come up with campaigns, whether there are ad campaigns or political campaigns to influence people's behavior, was already thought of in quite a sophisticated way in the 1950s and 1960s.

And 50 and 60 years later, two very different presidents, Barack Obama and then Donald Trump are separately reputed to have become presidents who were elected because of social media. that this kind of massive analysis and then micro-targeting of message ends up being very significant in American politics. Yeah. And, you know, like, I think listeners are probably thinking, well, isn't that just a continuation of what happened before? Like, used to have campaign workers go and knock on doors.

And then you had mass circulation newspapers that could send out, use kind of like Edward Brunay's style, like propaganda campaigns. Then you had radio spot ads. And then by the 1930s, the first political consulting firm, which is called Campaigns Inc. has started. And they're using the tools of the advertising industry and bringing them into politics. And they have billboards. And then there's direct mailing.

Like there's just a, you know, it's a cat and mouse game. There's people who are developing better, cheaper, faster, more effective ways to reach in a very specific way, targeted voters with very specific messages. And so I think that's like that's a fair guy. And that's part of what I'm trying to show is like there is a kind of arms race around political communication. That's been going on for a very long time. But I still think there's a question to ask, like, at what point have we crossed some kind of a line?

And I think now is a point in time where that's really worth asking because even if you think about, you know, I think Bob Dole was the first American presidential candidate to have a website. It wasn't like a really big deal. Howard Dean had a very effective social media campaign, like in the kind of MySpace, AOL era. As you mentioned, the Obama campaign used not only Twitter, but also text messaging was kind of a big deal. They did a lot of text messaging for that campaign. And Trump communicates, especially his first term when he was still on Twitter, to a

large number of people by social media posts. what's different in this moment in time is that on all of those online platforms there are more bots than humans. So it's not just that there are political campaigns that are hiring data analytics firms to do whatever it is they're doing by way of direct messaging and micro-targeting that has the consequence of further atomizing society. There are these highly individual messages. People don't. This is one of the things that is haul out at the parties and why you have kind of different. kind of populism are these these technological forces but like all those things you'd be like well that's you know that's that's that's change happens change comes and fine like that's that's that's

i'm not disagreeing with that but i do think when you go to a point where robots aren't known for humans on those platforms and those robots are not just even if the even if they were all hired by political campaigns and packs they're not some of them are um are being directed by foreign actors their foreign influence campaigns some of them are terror organizations. Some of them are just petty criminals. Like there's just, some of them are fairly innocent bots, right? We, I do think there are questions to ask about the artificiality of our political discourse. Is that really a public sphere any longer when there were more bots than humans participating in it? While Wells Show was presented by Camico, a nuclear energy company

proudly operating in Saskatchewan and Ontario for nearly four decades. Energy security, national security, and climate security, are driving increased demand for safe, carbon-free nuclear energy. With Tier 1 uranium assets, critical fuel manufacturing capabilities, and best-in-class reactor technologies like the AP-1000 reactor, Camaco plays a large role across the nuclear value chain to deliver power to the grid. Camaco is thriving as a global leader and Canadian nuclear champion. It's meeting the moment for nuclear new builds at home and around the world. From ground to grid, chemical is powering Canada forward.

Even earlier in your sort of prehistory of the current moment, you talk about something called the technocratic movement, which I thought a technocrat was just a word to describe an expert in government or something like that. But you trace a really quite influential. For a minute, technocracy was the thing in American discourse. There were hundreds of articles in the New York Times about it. This takes us back to the early 1930s. What was the technocratic movement?

The technocratic movement, Technocracy Inc. was the leading organization of it, although there were others, was really a North American political movement. It was as much Canadian as it was American. And it started in the really at the beginning of the Great Depression when democracies all over the world were pondering the possibility that a liberal democracy might not be adequate to the challenge of a modern industrial economy, that democracies were falling all over Europe as people turned to strongmen to get them out of dire economic circumstances. And Americans were thinking about that, too. There was a real fascist following in the United States.

There were a lot of people who were turning to communism in the United States and, of course, around the world. And before FDR was elected, in 1932, promising a new deal that would be a third way that would be a compromise between a state-regulated economy in a communist sense and a laissez-faire capitalist economy. He would have a new deal that would kind of marry the two. And that's what got the United States out of that crisis. And that's in a lot of other forces are why democracy survived in the United States in the 1930s when it was by no means clear that it would.

But just before FDR was elected, the same thing. technocracy ink outfit, a huge following. I mean, tens of thousands of people would show up in stadiums to attend the American leader of the technocracy movement, Howard Scott, and the Canadian national chairman, who was an aviator and chiropractor from Saskatchewan named Joshua Haldeman who'd lost his farm in the Great Depression. So technocrats, like it seemed, and historians have been very clear about this, like, it seemed for a minute like technocracy might prevail. So technocrats in this sense, with a capital T, didn't believe in democracy. They didn't believe in politics or banks. They didn't believe in money. They thought that in a modern industrial economy,

societies should be run by scientists and engineers who are the only people that could really understand how to run a society. And there would really be no like jobs or money either. Maybe something a little bit like akin to universal basic income. People wouldn't have names, they would just have numbers, it would be more efficient. They were kind of comically fascistic in their aesthetic, like they wore these identical gray uniforms and they drove identical gray cars, and this was known as the gray fleet. And then it kind of all fell apart in the U.S. When FDR was elected and in 1933, it was revealed that the American leader of the movement was something of a fraud. But it remained fairly strong in Canada. Would they're proposing to,

but they were proposing to eradicate the United States and Canada and build instead what they called the North American Technate that would replace Canada in the United States. And Joshua Haldeman, the Canadian leader of the movement, remained a stalwart throughout the 1930s, even as the movement just fell apart in the United States. In 1940, Canada declared technocracy incorporated a subversive political organization that was banned. Haldeman was actually arrested and briefly went to jail. He tried to enter the United States to go on a technocracy speaking tour, and he was denied entry. And he became increasingly discontent with Canadian politics. He became the head of Canada's Social Credit Party,

which was an infamous anti-Semitic party, which was also attacked by the government. And in 1948, when South Africa declares the policy of apartheid, Haldem, and becomes really interested in moving to South Africa, and he does so in 1950 with his family. And he's an important figure in his own right, but he's important for my storytelling because he happens to be Elon Musk's grandfather. Now you know the rest of the story, as we used to say.

I've heard you answer this question on another podcast. Did Elon Musk know a lot of this story about his grandfather, do you think? I don't know. I've certainly never had the occasion to ask him. There's another member of Musk's family who has written a self-published a memoir, a guy named Scott Haldeman. And he includes quite a bit of detail about Haldeman's political activities in that article. and he cites the Haldeman papers, which were clearly in family hands. I mean, this was published, I don't know, not all that long ago. Like, Musk was already famous.

Maybe it was the early 2000s or the 2010s. I don't recall. So it's like a, he was a legendary figure in the family. He was like a famous amateur aviator, and he died in a plane crash in 1973, maybe. Musk was just a toddler at the time. So Musk didn't know his grandfather, but I think he's the lore of Haldeman and the family history is fairly prevalent one. And of course, when Musk left South Africa as a very young man, he wanted to go to the United States, but he couldn't. But he could only immigrate to Canada because of his Canadian family, because of his grandfather.

So he, in fact, immigrated to Canada, right? And he went to Queens University for a while before he was able to immigrate to the United States and then ended up going to Penn. He went to Saskatchewan, and I think and spent some time with that branch of his family. So I think he had close family ties. The Haldeman's writings, which are violently anti-Semitic and pro-apartheid, conspiracy tracks is one that's about vaccination. It's opposed to vaccination. A lot of it is about the Jewish world conspiracy.

He typed them up himself and seems to have copied them himself, like mammographed them and sent them out. He charged people like a small amount of money for them. I've only ever been able to find a handful of copies of his self-published conspiracy writings which leads me to think that they've maybe been a bit purged. Like, it's not a family story that a famous person would want widely known and online. You know, the writings are really distressing. So I'm sure there are a lot of documents and family hands that will, you know, unlikely to see the light of day.

So I don't, and I don't think there's, I have zero evidence whatsoever that Elon Musk, you know, is an alkaliate of his grandfather's ideas. That said, the manifestos of everybody in the technocracy movement at the time, because a lot of what they did was publish, you know, what is technocracy? The elements of technocracy, they published all these tract to try to woo followers. They're very similar to the manifestos that come out of Silicon Valley and have been coming out of Silicon Valley for a number of years now. So I think there's a lot of continuity across of the ideas of the technocracy movement from the 1930s. And I think that's important to think about because, you know, these, the tools that have

come out of Silicon Valley, I mean, just thinking about large language models, they're just incredible. They're fascinating. They're marvels. They're of tremendous importance to all manner of things that we might do and use them for from public health to space exploration to oceanography to decoding animal communication. The tools are tremendous. But the political ideas of these people almost all harken back to the worst and most discredited

ideas of the 1930s. This is something that you sort of insist on more towards the end of the book is that these folks think they're imagining and building the future. But they are echoing some thoroughly discredited notions from the darkest chapter of our not that distant past. Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's not in some ways that surprising that people who are great engineers or, you know, innovative technologists and daring serial entrepreneurs wouldn't have really great political idea. Like, it's like, they're just very different ways of thinking about the world and different kinds of expertise.

I think what's been dangerous and has real costs for everyone else is the degree to which the sort of 1990s culture of worship of like lifestyles of the rich and famous that also kind of brings you Donald Trump was very much married to the media's fascination with and deification of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the kind of like putting Mark Andreessen on a golden throne on the cover of Time magazine. Like these are the new heroes of the of the new era of human history. And investing them with kind of prophetic powers that move from their really incredible achievements in technology to some imagined singular capacity for order.

our politics and our society. A lot of these characters have been on a bit of a journey themselves over the last 10 or 15 years. Like, I mean, one reason the Washington Posts is a different paper in 2016 and in 2026 is that Jeff Bezos is a different guy in 2016 and in 2026. And you quote Elon Musk speaking in very lucid terms about the potential threats of artificial intelligence in 2013. And at some point near the end of the 20th,

of the teens, he starts to say, essentially, get out of my way. Anyone who wants to regulate or put guardrails around AI and a lot of these new technologies are guilty of committing woke AI. They've, they're their manifestations of the woke mind virus and any attempt to reign some of these technologies in, limit their blast radius, is seen as the worst kind of treason. Yeah, or, you know, Peter Thiel talks about people who are decelerationists, so-called,

people who would like maybe a pause, or people who are calling lately for a moratorium on data centers until kind of democratic deliberation can inform its development. Teal calls them legionaires, legions of the Antichrist. So, yeah, there is a very strong and fairly new demonization of critics. But I think another big change, just as you say, a lot of these people have had real intellectual journeys and real political journeys as well, is the abandonment of Silicon Valley's commitment to greenhouse gas emissions controls. So all these companies had, and this wasn't just like bowing before the Biden administration.

This goes fairly far back. I mean, of course, Elon Musk starts, you know, is involved in the starting of Tesla. He's not the founder of Tesla, but because of sustainability concerns. Like he says as a very young man, you know, the three things he wants, one of the three things he wants to do is his deal with climate catastrophe. And he's not alone. That's a huge part of a lot of the commitments of Silicon Valley, of many, Silicon Valley companies. But after the chat

GBT moment in 2022, they all abandon their greenhouse gas emissions goals. You know, most of them pledged to be, you know, carbon net zero by 2030, say, they all just kind of quietly set that aside when they decided that

there was this race to win the AI race with China. Even that way of describing what the race is, is something of a novelty. So, yeah, I mean, I do think it's worth thinking

about those evolutions. And not to say, like, oh, what a bunch of hypocrites, but to say, like, these people are flawed. Their ideas are being informed by concerns that are not ours. And they have been subject to very little sustained scrutiny kind of really until now. I mean, in the U.S., I think in the 118th Congress, there were 150 laws proposed relating to AI,

most of which were kind of small adjustments about things like watermarking, and not a single one of them passed. Like, there just really hasn't been, our elected representatives, certainly in the United States, have not really been involved in the process of educating themselves to a point where they could, could, in fact, make and engage in meaningful deliberations and pass meaningful laws that are any kind of a pushback against the profit goals of these corporations. And yet, the book is not entirely a lament or it's not a, the tone of the argument is not that all is lost, but that we simply have to go back and put some politics into it, some debate into it, that the remedy to the artificial state is a kind of a functioning traditional state.

Tell me more about that. And do you think that this controversy over data centers is an expression of people reminding politicians of their responsibilities. I do think it's that. I have no idea if it will last, if it will be effective, if it's just a blip. But what it really does look like, and certainly when you watch footage of, you know, town hall meetings or city council meetings or places where you see a community discover really, in many cases after the fact, that their elected officials have made deals to sell massive amounts of local land to companies to build, you know, not housing, which people are

desperate for, or certainly not housing for people, but housing for machines. And without at any point consulting their constituents. And in many cases in the U.S., often these elected officials have signed nondisclosure agreements. They have pledged not to tell anybody what they're doing. And then another reason why people, I think, tend to be so surprised to discover there's this massive hyperscale data center being built down the road is because there's very little local news left in the United States. Local news, you know, as you know, better than anybody, has really been undermined and to a considerable degree in many parts of the world really lost due to social media. So people read the news, but they're reading a very, because they're reading

like national headlines on TikTok or they're following the news on X, and they're getting a, they're getting snippets of news. It tends to be highly politicized. All politics is national, and there's very little reporting about what's going on locally. So I think the kind of howl of frustration and surprise that it's not just our elected officials, did something and we don't agree with it and they didn't ask us about it. It's like we didn't even know about it. And so I think that's a kind of organizing fury. I think it's, you know, it's possible that that just peters out. The companies realize, well, we have to give, oh, you know, META gave $50,000 bonuses to school teachers in an area where they were putting in a data center, like

that they could just kind of bribe their way. out of the community discontent, or there can be tax arrangements that, or profit sharing, or there can be means that companies can use to mollify people who are upset about the data centers. That is happening, but I don't think it's diminished it yet. And it is just actually very interesting to see where what you're looking at is courts and legislators have not done this work, and voters are angry about that. I think people really expect it to affect upcoming elections, certainly here in the U.S. this fall. In our midterm elections, it's maybe the issue.

It's also one of the only cross-cutting political issues in the United States today where people on both sides of a very wide political chasm seem to agree about it. It's, again, like upwards of 7% of Americans oppose data centers near them. what that means where else they want them is unclear. But it is a striking issue. And it's like it's just a very different situation than a year ago when I was finishing writing the book. Encouraging? Yeah, I think it's encouraging.

I think it's also a little terrifying. I think the kind of like AI populism, you know, like I don't want people going and burning all these data centers down. You know, there's a lot of political violence in the United States today. there's a lot of like you walk down the street walking down a street in Philadelphia there was like one of these like DoorDash robots doing a food delivery thing

and like people walk up and kick it like people are mad people are mad and that's I think there needs to be and I understand that but it seems also a little potentially dangerous and violent as a movement and I think

it will really move political candidates and elected officials to find ways to be responsive to these concerns and to organize across the aisle to allay concerns, to address concerns, to really hear constituents out on these issues. And, you know, I think it is the optimistic thing is it is maybe a means for people to realize it is important to go to these meetings to show up at the city council meeting, to show up for county elections, to talk to one another about what a community might want. Well, you've given us all a lot to talk about. The book is called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.

I've been talking to Jill Lepore. Thank you so much for joining me. It was a great pleasure. Thanks a lot, Paul. Nice to meet you. Thank you to my presenting sponsor, Camaco, a global leader and Canadian champion in nuclear energy, here at home and around the world.

Camaco is powering Canada forward. Thank you to my presenting sponsor, The Transition Accelerator. Visit Transition Accelerator.ca to learn more. And that's the Paul Welles show for this week. Remember to tell your friends about this podcast. Like and subscribe this show on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch these interviews on my YouTube channel.

And you can find all of my writing, including new articles and a complete archive at Paul wells.substack.com. Thank you to my presenting sponsors, Camico and the Transition Accelerator, for making all of this possible. And thanks to you for listening. Have a good week.