Historian Jill Lepore: Tech's "artificial state" is quietly displacing democracy

Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues in her forthcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” that private tech corporations are steadily absorbing functions that once belonged to democratic governments—a shift she frames as a slide toward rule by algorithms and unaccountable machines. She’s careful to say she isn’t anti-technology; her objection is that no one consented to this transfer of power. What began decades ago as well-meaning efforts to make government faster and cheaper has, over the last 20-odd years, hardened into deliberate attempts by prominent entrepreneurs to move past the nation-state entirely, an ambition she traces back to 1990s libertarian futurists.

Lepore reads Silicon Valley’s political imagination as a shallow misreading of pulp science fiction and comics, singling out figures like Elon Musk whose tastes she says contradict their stated politics. She points to a lineage of tech outfits appropriating the trappings of statehood: Facebook standing up an “oversight board” styled as a Supreme Court, Anthropic hiring a philosopher to draft a “constitution” for its AI, and Sam Altman musing on a podcast that an AI president sounds like a good idea. These leaders, she contends, lack any serious political philosophy yet wield enormous power while taking their cartoonish self-image seriously.

Her throughline runs from Apple’s 1984 Macintosh ad—clever marketing that recast the personal computer as an instrument of liberation—to today’s claims that AI represents inevitable progress you oppose at your peril. Lepore treats the failed promise of the “Twitter revolution” as a cautionary parallel: the same utopian rhetoric now attached to AI. Her larger point is that none of this was foreordained. Choices like the 1996 Telecommunications Act were products of specific political moments, not destiny, and the paths not taken are worth revisiting rather than accepting the current trajectory as fixed.