Historian Jill Lepore argues in an upcoming book that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government, from controlling information flows to shaping political discourse.
She contends that today's AI leaders—who promise AI will make government more efficient or unnecessary—are repeating a familiar Silicon Valley fantasy in technological guise, mistaking technological progress for political progress while openly declaring their intention to replace the nation-state.
What happened
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker writer, discussed her upcoming book *The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State* on TechCrunch's Equity podcast. In it, she argues that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government — from Twitter's distorted picture of the electorate to Facebook displacing local news.
Why it matters
Lepore contends that today's AI leaders, who promise a future where AI makes government more efficient and responsive, are selling an old fantasy in new packaging. She sees Silicon Valley's soaring language — from Apple's 1984 Macintosh ad to Anthropic's AI constitution and Sam Altman's comments about an "AI president" — as evidence that tech leaders often mistake technological advancement for political progress while declaring their intention to replace the nation-state.
What to watch
Lepore points to E.M. Forster's 1909 sci-fi story *The Machine Stops* as a blueprint for what she calls the "artificial state," and argues it is ultimately unsustainable. She also discusses what it would take to rein it in, though the podcast episode itself contains the full details of her argument.
On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, host Anthony Ha discussed Jill Lepore's forthcoming book *The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State* with the author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard and staff writer at the New Yorker. Lepore's central thesis is that tech companies have progressively assumed roles and functions normally associated with democratic government—a trend she illustrates with concrete examples: Twitter's "town hall in pocket" framing has given a distorted picture of the electorate, while Facebook has displaced local news as a primary source of public information. More broadly, Lepore identifies a pattern in which tech leaders confuse technological advancement with political progress, all while openly stating their goal to replace the nation-state. The podcast explored several dimensions of this argument. Lepore traces a historical line from Apple's iconic 1984 Macintosh advertisement—which positioned the computer as a tool of liberation against institutional control—through to Anthropic's framing of Claude with a constitutional approach and Sam Altman's public statements envisioning an "AI president." She also invoked E.M. Forster's 1909 science fiction story *The Machine Stops*, in which society becomes dependent on an all-controlling automated system, as a literary blueprint for what she calls the artificial state. According to Lepore, this story now reads like "the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber"—a characterization that underscores her view that the fantasy underpinning tech utopianism is neither new nor uniquely suited to the digital age. Finally, Lepore argued that the artificial state is inherently unsustainable, though the podcast episode itself contains her full analysis of what structural changes would be required to constrain it. The conversation positions AI leaders' current promises—that AI will make government more efficient, more responsive, and potentially superfluous—as a recycled version of older technological fantasies, dressed in contemporary language but fundamentally unchanged in ambition or blindness to the realities of political power.
Lepore's argument rests on the observation that tech leaders have long deployed grand, almost governmental rhetoric to describe their products—a pattern that predates the current AI era by decades. What distinguishes her intervention is the historical lens: she traces this language from the personal-computer era through social media to today's AI boom, suggesting it reflects a consistent conviction that technology can and should replace politics. The framing of products as systemic replacements for democratic institutions (a "town hall," a "constitution") is not accidental, in her view, but rather reveals tech leaders' true ambitions and their misreading of how power actually works. Her invocation of Forster's century-old dystopia suggests that the fantasy itself is not new; what has changed is the machinery through which it might be pursued and the willingness of venture-backed companies to state their ambitions openly.
AI-summarized, only the topics you pick — one digest a day via Email, Slack, or Discord.
Free · takes 30 seconds · unsubscribe anytime
Ask AI anything about this article. Q&As are published on this page for other readers too.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay Monday outlining his vision for artificial intelligence…
ServiceNow has announced AI-powered agents designed to operate within security operations centers (SOCs), auto…
CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks jumped more than 5% to new highs on Monday following the Black Hat cyber co…
Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and 18 other House Democrats sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson calling for open…
An article identified five Japanese cybersecurity-related stocks that the author views as having strength to r…
The Japanese government has begun studying the introduction of domestically developed AI into the Self-Defense…
The AI news that matters, in one minute each morning.
Sign up free