Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has a stark warning for the era of AI and big tech: Silicon Valley is not just building products, it is quietly replacing the functions of democratic government. In her upcoming book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Lepore argues that this shift marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.”
On a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Lepore, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the U.S. Constitution, detailed how private corporations have gradually, and then deliberately, usurped the role of the nation-state. “No one consented to that,” she said, emphasizing that this transformation has been “a gradual, largely accidental” process that has accelerated in the last two decades.
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The Rise of the Artificial State and Its Science Fiction Roots
Lepore’s book traces the intellectual history of the idea that society should be governed by machines, a concept she says has deep roots in 19th-century industrialism and the conflation of technological change with moral progress. She points to early science fiction like E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops” as a prescient warning about a world where humans become dependent on a totalizing machine, a narrative she says feels like “the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber” today.
She argues that many of Silicon Valley’s most prominent leaders, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, are effectively “bad science fiction readers” who treat dystopian or ambivalent cautionary tales as “manuals for the future.” Lepore noted the irony in Musk’s tastes, stating, “The stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.” She also highlighted recent examples of this corporate overreach, including Anthropic hiring a moral philosopher to write a constitution and Sam Altman suggesting on the Joe Rogan podcast that an “AI president would be a great idea.”
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From 1984 Ad to 2026: The Unfulfilled Promise of Tech Democracy
Lepore traced the modern origin of this delusion to Apple’s iconic 1984 Super Bowl ad, which framed the personal computer as a tool of liberation against mainframe totalitarianism. While that was “clever advertising,” she argued the fantasy has since curdled into a “delusional fantasy” among AI CEOs. She drew a parallel to the “Twitter revolution” narrative of the early 2010s, which promised to restore democracy but instead created a “distortion machine” that amplified the most extreme voices, giving politicians “really bad information.”
Lepore’s critique extends to the very theory that underpins much of the tech industry’s self-image. She stood by her decade-old New Yorker critique of Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, which she called “a theory of history” that fails to meet basic historical standards of evidence. She expressed a wish that historians and technologists had been in more conversation over the years to help entrepreneurs understand the guardrails—like traffic laws and driver’s licenses—that society built around the automobile.
Why the Artificial State is Doomed and What Comes Next
Despite its immense power, Lepore contends the artificial state is “doomed to failure.” She argues that it is fundamentally at odds with the natural world, requiring the destruction of the very resources it needs to sustain itself. This tension, she says, is the central parable of the science fiction she studies.
She points to grassroots resistance as a sign of hope, citing local town meetings where citizens are pushing back against data center construction over concerns about energy costs, water consumption, and local jobs. “That’s not representing the people,” Lepore said, referencing a Salt Lake City example where over 70% of residents opposed a data center that their representatives supported. She believes there will be political costs for such decisions, but cautioned that “enough of democratic functioning has to be intact for people to actually be able to respond to malfeasance.”
Lepore does not offer a specific playbook for dismantling the artificial state, but her recommendation is clear: decisions must be made “in consultation with the governed.” The book serves as a historical argument that the current trajectory is neither inevitable nor natural, but a choice that can be reversed.
This article is based on an interview conducted on the TechCrunch Equity podcast. It is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice.
