Historian Jill Lepore argues AI backlash is essential, not incidental

What happened

Dr. Jill Lepore—Harvard professor, New Yorker staff writer, and one of the foremost historians working in American letters today—appeared on The Verge's Decoder podcast to discuss her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which will be published on August 25. The conversation centers on Lepore's effort to place the current AI moment inside a longer institutional history, examining how states, corporations, and technologies interact across decades rather than news cycles.

Decoder, hosted by The Verge's editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, is a show explicitly about systems—how organizations, platforms, and power structures work (or fail to). Lepore's strengths align closely with that premise: she is known for identifying recurring institutional patterns in history and translating them into accessible, often uncomfortable narratives. The episode uses that lens to examine AI not as a sudden disruption but as something embedded in a much older story about governance, industrial concentration, and public pushback.

The book's title, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, signals an ambitious scope. While the full contents are not yet public, the podcast discussion and the episode's framing suggest Lepore is tracing how artificial intelligence has become entangled with state power and corporate consolidation—and why the backlash against it is not a side effect but a structurally important phenomenon.

Why it matters

Most AI coverage oscillates between hype and alarm. Lepore's contribution is different: she treats backlash as a constitutive part of how transformative technologies actually develop. From that perspective, resistance to AI—whether from regulators, workers, artists, or civil-society groups—is not noise to be filtered out but a force that determines which futures become real and which are abandoned.

This framing matters for several audiences. For technologists, it suggests that public opposition is a design constraint, not an externality. For policymakers, it offers historical precedent for how earlier waves of industrial and computational change were shaped by organized pushback. And for the broader public, it reframes the current moment: the fight over AI is not a referendum on whether progress should happen, but a negotiation over who controls it, who benefits, and who bears the costs.

Lepore's institutional lens is also a corrective to personality-driven AI narratives. The Decoder episode's URL references Elon Musk, suggesting the conversation engages with the tendency to explain AI's trajectory through individual founders and CEOs rather than through the systems that enable them. Lepore's work consistently pushes against that instinct, arguing that institutions—not singular figures—are the real protagonists of technological history.

What to watch

• August 25 book release. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State will be the primary artifact to evaluate. Expect reviews and commentary to quickly test whether Lepore's historical framework holds up against the specifics of the current AI boom.
• Regulatory and labor developments. If Lepore is right that backlash is structurally important, then ongoing actions—EU AI Act enforcement, U.S. state-level legislation, union campaigns around AI deployment—are not background noise but leading indicators of how the technology will actually be adopted.
• Institutional consolidation. Watch whether AI infrastructure continues to concentrate among a small number of firms and whether that concentration becomes a central political issue, as Lepore's framing would predict.
• Broader reception among technologists. Lepore's audience has historically been general readers and academics. Whether her arguments penetrate AI engineering and policy circles will determine their practical influence.