Jill Lepore on the ‘Artificial State’ and why Silicon Valley's leaders are bad sci-fi readers

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Aug 7, 2026

Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker writer, examines how tech firms start acting like governments. She traces the rhetoric from the 1984 Macintosh ad to AI constitutions. She connects sci-fi misreadings to tech hubris and argues the so-called artificial state undermines democracy and is ultimately unsustainable.

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INSIGHT

What The Artificial State Means

The artificial state is a private-corporate replacement for the liberal democratic nation-state driven by machines and ideas.
Jill Lepore traces it as both a material construct and an ideological project that promises rule by machines.

INSIGHT

How Corporations Quietly Took State Roles

Private corporations have quietly assumed state functions without public consent by offering faster, cheaper services.
Lepore argues this shift began as efficiency-driven choices that accumulated into a de facto transfer of power.

INSIGHT

Policy Choices Shaped The Internet We Got

The internet’s outcome wasn't inevitable; policy choices like the 1996 Telecommunications Act shaped a privatized web.
Lepore points to political moments and actors (Newt Gingrich era) that made alternative paths difficult to recover.

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Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they're forming a new government. And whether you're thinking of Twitter's old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic's Claude constitution, it's a theory that doesn't paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light.

In Lepore's upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker writer argues that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government — whether that’s Twitter giving a distorted picture of the electorate or Facebook displacing local news. In her view, these leaders often mistake technological advancement for political progress, all while outright declaring their intention to replace the nation-state.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Anthony Ha talks with Lepore about her book and why she thinks today's AI leaders — who promise a future where AI makes government more efficient, more responsive, and maybe even unnecessary — are selling an old fantasy in new packaging.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Why Lepore sees a straight line from the classic 1984 Macintosh ad to Anthropic's AI constitution and Sam Altman's comments about an “AI president”

How E.M. Forster’s 1909 sci-fi story “The Machine Stops” provides a blueprint for the artificial state, and why Lepore says it now reads like “the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber”

Why Lepore believes the artificial state is ultimately unsustainable, and what she thinks it would take to rein it in

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

0:49 Defining the “artificial state”

2:17 Why corporations quietly took over state functions

4:43 Could the internet have gone another way?

9:01 From the 1984 Macintosh ad to Anthropic's constitution

10:20 The Twitter “town hall” myth

13:36 Structuring the book: history meets science fiction

17:46 The Machine Stops, and other bad manuals for the future

19:16 Musk, Heinlein, and misreading sci-fi

19:41 Why Lepore thinks the artificial state is “doomed”

21:51 Data centers, local politics, and the death of local news

24:44 Revisiting disruptive innovation, ten years later

26:54 Outro

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