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

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. Hello and welcome to Equity Tech Hunches, a podcast about the business of startups. I'm Anthony Ha, and this week I spoke to Jill Lepore, who is a historian at Harvard and a writer at The New Yorker. She has a new book coming out called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. It's out on August 25th, and in it, she argues that corporations, especially big tech companies, have essentially taken over the functions of our liberal democracy, which she definitely sees as a bad thing. She also argues that a lot of this comes from a bad reading of science fiction. So we get into all of that. You are going to hear a little bit from her dogs in the background, which we've done our best to edit out, but I think we had a great conversation, so stick around.

• 0:45Anthony Ha?

  Jill, thank you for joining us.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Sure, thanks for having me.

• 0:48Anthony Ha?

  So you've probably had to do this a lot already, but can you explain what you mean by the artificial state?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  By the artificial state, I mean a kind of state that is replacing the liberal democratic nation state in the United States and around the world, and I think slowly. It's both a thing, a real thing, a construct, but it's also an idea. And so in this book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I trace the rise of the idea that we should live under an artificial state or government by machines. And I also trace the notion that this is an inevitable failure, that the artificial state cannot survive, and I trace that idea through science fiction.

• 1:38Anthony Ha?

  Right, and you connect it to a lot of different, I mean, both science fiction and different kind of philosophies, including this kind of technocratic philosophy that I think a lot of probably tech country readers and Equity listeners are familiar with, maybe even find appealing in some ways, this idea of how technology can make our lives better, technology might improve some aspects of how we govern ourselves, while also, I think, recognizing that a lot of what you described as the artificial state is also pretty grim and dystopian. But you write about it as, at one point, you say, "The rise of the artificial state marks the end of centuries of democracy and equal rights, and it's a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines." So I think a pretty negative view of it. Can you just say a little bit more about why you see it in such stark terms?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do have a pretty negative view of it, and I think it's important to distinguish the artificial state from technology itself, or modes of technology, really. I'm not an anti-technologist. I'm married to a computer scientist. I'm really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we're in the midst of right now, and that's not my beef, right? My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state. No one consented to that. This has been a kind of gradual, largely accidental transformation of how many nation states around the world work. It's happened first in the United States.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  I think often these innovations in bringing new technologies to the operations of government have been extremely well-intentioned. They originate with an interest in efficiency and speed and cheapness. And then I think only in the last 20, 25 years or so have these decisions been, I think, been purposeful and deliberate as a kind of usurpation of the role of the nation state. And that's not my speculation, right? You hear a lot of very prominent tech entrepreneurs talk about wanting to move beyond the era of the nation state.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  You could take a Peter Thiel's idea that freedom and democracy are not compatible, that the era of the, people who are looking forward to an era of statelessness. I mean, even going back to the early discourse around the opening of the internet as a kind of post-state place. Think of a John Perry Barlow in the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, or the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. A lot of futurists in the 90s were libertarians, and they had a specific interest in using the advance of the internet and the successive innovations that followed as a means to eradicate the nation state.

• 4:26Anthony Ha?

  Well, it's interesting, because, yeah, you talk about, on the one hand, the technologies themselves, and then also the philosophies behind them, the role the corporation has increasingly played. And I'm curious to what extent we can separate them. Can we actually have a version of the internet and of social media that doesn't necessarily lead to this kind of future that it seems like we're hurtling towards?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and we could have had, right? One of the things that, I'm a historian. I'm not a tech writer, I'm not a tech journalist, I'm not a computer scientist. I'm a historian, and I'm chiefly a political historian, though I'm also a literary historian. And so one of the things that I'm really interested in unraveling for readers in this book is all the what-ifs, all the alternatives, the paths along the road that were not taken, and why. There was, of course, a really avid discussion in the 1990s about what the internet should look like when it was opened up, and what we ended up with with the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people would say just was a mistake, not an act of sinister intent, right? People were like, oh, maybe we should do this, and actually, these libertarians have a point. But it was a product of a particular political moment, really was deeply influenced by Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, and it's been very difficult to revisit. But I think it's worth thinking about what were the alternatives that were in play at the time. And you could say the same thing about the personal computer, right? So to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer

• 6:09Speaker 01

  technology would make for better democracies, I think the kind of moment you would first look to would be 1984, January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh with the sort of George Orwell 1984 moment. Apple was really big on the idea that mainframe computers represented totalitarianism. They were kind of trying to dismantle the giant gray IBM machines, representing them in that ad as a totalitarian state.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And the lit, beautiful, quick, adorable, personal Macintosh would be the axe that would destroy that machine and would usher in a new era in which 1984 would not be 1984, right? I think it's like the tagline, or something close to that ad. And that just became, like, that was clever advertising. I doubt that anybody at Apple really believed the personal computer was going to be an instrument of personal liberation. I mean, it was going to make possible a lot of cool things, right? Like, I remember when I got my first Macintosh, certainly it wasn't 1984, but it was really cool, it was really fun, it was really exciting. I did a lot of things on it.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  It would never occur to me that it was improving my capacity for citizenship or my ability to function better in civil society. It was a cool tool, did a lot of things. But that, if you kind of go, like, wind the reel forward in time down to 2026, you get to, like, stops along the way include the 2016 election, when Facebook News, in response to its critics, establishes a Supreme Court. You get to last year, when Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to write a constitution. You get to recently, when Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan and said, oh, an AI president would be a great idea.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And so in some ways, they're silly examples, but you see the ways in which these corporations, these tech companies from Silicon Valley, and especially their charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders, are just taking on the trappings of the nation state, right? And the functions of democracy, like, oh, well, we can do, at scale, it'll be better. We'll have a hyperscale democracy with our input. And they're not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it's like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad, except that it takes itself so seriously, right? And these companies have so much power.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  So that's just, that example of like, 1984 and the Macintosh down to 2026 and Anthropic's constitution, like, that's a really important history, and I think American historians have not been particularly attentive to the history of technology and its relationship to our political order and to the functions of our democracy. But as a person who is an American political historian, I'm really interested in that. So this was an occasion to really closely inspect that. But that said, the book doesn't begin in 1984. I just think that's like a good example of our modern era, and the way a kind of fun

• 9:36Speaker 01

  advertising campaign turns into a kind of delusional fantasy on the part of people like Sam Altman.

• 9:44Anthony Ha?

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• 10:21Anthony Ha?

  No, I really like this section about the 1984 ad. You also then, I think, like, there's a number of examples that you just cited. And also, like, you talk about kind of the promise of like the quote unquote Twitter revolution and this idea that it would sort of bring democracy everywhere. And, and, you know, that can't, I can't help but let that color the way I look at when Sam Altman or some other AI CEO now says that AI is going to bring all these incredible gifts and therefore if you stand in the way, you're, you know, standing in the way of progress and the way of history and all these things. Because clearly, technology does affect our lives and in some way this makes our lives better. So to what extent should we just dismiss all these claims out of hand? Or are there ways that it might come true?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, Twitter's actually a good example, right? Twitter didn't, when it was launched, when Jack Dorsey started it, like, it didn't announce itself as we're going to save humanity, we're going to rescue human civilization from extinction. Like, it was kind of a goof, right? Like, and I think people that used Twitter really early on and would have like, you know what, it was actually really fun. It was like, I made a tuna fish sandwich today, what did you have for lunch? Like, and it was like, as if you had your own personal telegram, did it, did it, did it? Like, Twitter as a company did not launch itself on a stage saying, we're going to, we're here to save democracy. And really, what happened was that politicians, elected officials began using Twitter in

• 11:45Speaker 01

  ways that enhanced their political power, that in ways that amplified their messages and ways that allowed them to reach a younger audience and ways that allowed them to have a kind of constant connection with an audience. And politicians and political campaigns really kind of convinced Twitter, at least insofar as I see it, I mean, I don't have like an inside account of the company, but somewhat begrudgingly, Twitter kind of came around to like, oh, well, Twitter's gotten so big and people, you know, post about politics so often about it, that it's almost like Twitter is a town hall. And so by the time you go to, I think it's 2012, right? So several, many years into Twitter's fairly short history, as it would turn out.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  You know, they published this thing called the Twitter Politics and Elections Handbook, which is really a guide for political candidates and elected officials and how to most effectively use Twitter. And then they began the kind of rollout of like, it's like a town hall in your pocket and it's improving our democracies because we're restoring the New England, the defunct New England Town Meeting. And that's all just bananas. Like, like objectively, nothing could be further from the truth. Like, at that time, one in five Americans had a Twitter account. Most people who had Twitter accounts had never used them. And like, above 90% of all tweets about politics were posted by fewer than 10% of

• 13:13Speaker 01

  the people that did use Twitter all the time. Like, there was no way in which Twitter was a representation of the electorate. Twitter was a representation of the most extreme politically active, hyper partisan among Americans who were following politics really avidly. So, you know, looking at it now, we can see, well, then that's a, that's really just a distortion machine. And if politicians are using it to gauge the electorate, they're getting really bad information. Again, like, you can say like, Twitter was not trying to participate in the artificial state or undermine democracy. Twitter's trying to do business and get more users, you know, and sell more, whatever. But it had these unintended consequences that then kind of, it sort of settles into and becomes comfortable with.

• 13:58Anthony Ha?

  Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the structure of the book and the fact that, like you said, it sort of starts with this kind of history, like history of technology, history of ideas. And the second half is about kind of science fiction and depictions of things like robotics. Can you say more just about kind of how that structure came to you and why you wanted to address things that way?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I became really interested, on the one hand, in how often science fiction stories predict the arrival of what I then came to call the artificial state. And so I really wanted to identify a literary tradition that I think of as the parable of the artificial state, right? In which machines get more and more sophisticated, they take over more and more of the functions of humans, including the functions of government, and eventually they come to rule the humans and then maybe they destroy all the humans because they don't really need them anymore. Maybe they, maybe they just enslave them. Like, it kind of depends. Are we in the Terminator or are we in Battlestar Galactica? Like, it's just, it's like, there's different versions.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And these stories go way back, they go back to the 1850s and the 1860s and, you know, the early decades of kind of rumination about the consequences of industrialism. I think a lot of, a lot of people, I mean, say, this is certainly true of my students, my undergraduates, really believe that technological change equals progress. And not only that, but the only kind of progress is technological change. That's a novelty in human history. That's an invention, intellectual invention of the 19th century. And it is partly because technological change was accelerating right at the time that Charles Darwin was devising and then publishing his theory of evolution, right?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  So there's a kind of weird marriage between evolution as a kind of, as progress and technological change as progress. And what drops out of that are all other earlier notions of progress, which chiefly involve moral progress. Like, things are getting better because people are becoming better or things are getting better because people are more free. Right, there are a lot of other ways we might think about progress. But what dominates today is this kind of 19th century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress and therefore all technological change is progress, as opposed to like, it's objectively, it's only progress if things are getting better. But in any event, that confluence in the 19th century of the idea of technological

• 16:23Speaker 01

  progress and the idea of evolution meant that people who were thinking clearly were like, well, if the machines keep getting better and faster and able to do more things, not just labor, but maybe talk or think or move around, like, what if they evolved to become better at everything than we are? Not just better at running a loom, not just faster at moving through time and space like a railroad car. And with that grew an incredible anxiety that found form in science fiction again and again and again and again and again.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  My favorite one of these stories is, was published, I think, 1909 by Ian Forster. Like, right around when he was writing Room with a View. But he wrote this story called The Machine Stops, which like, could be subtitled The Room Without a View. And it's, it's, he imagines a future world, a near future, in which everybody just lives in these rooms, these kind of little cells. They never see, you never see other, other people because everything you need comes right to your room. It's like DoorDash, like, your food is delivered, you have like a screen where you can communicate with other people, all your needs are met. The thing that people fear most is the natural world. Like, no one wants to be, ever see the sun. You know, it's a little like Matrix-y.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And they're, they all worship the machine that organizes their lives and brings to them in their little, like, cubby-like rooms, all the things that they need. And so the story is about humans have become essentially slaves of the machine, which is stronger, more powerful and has more capacity than humans do. And humans lose, have lost what capacity they had. And then this, the action of the climax of the story is when the machine stops. So I think, you know, like, if, if readers were to go look at that story, it feels like it could be written today, except that it's, it's less science fiction-y today than it is the kind of diary of a very unhappy YouTuber.

• 18:28Anthony Ha?

  Well, and then you connect that thread to some of the, you know, folks running companies and arguably running aspects of our government today, like Elon Musk. And I think essentially you suggested they're, in some ways, they're very bad science fiction readers, that they've read a lot of sort of warning stories or at least sort of ambivalent stories as if they're manuals for the future. And I bring this up partly because this is something I wrestle with as, you know, a reader of science fiction, someone who loves Isaac Asimov, for example, that I think it's true that, that like, when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, yes, this story, you know, this story is a template for what I should do with my company, like, that's bonkers. But there is this sort of like, also this kind of technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on.

• 19:12Anthony Ha?

  It's not something they're sort of making up out of whole cloth, right?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, although weirdly, like, that's Heinlein, that's not Asimov, right? That's, that's not Douglas Adams. Like, sure, there is that thread in science fiction. But what they tend to, I mean, I don't know, I guess Bezos is a big Robert Heinlein fan. Like, you could say, okay, that lines up well. Like, they're literally, they're reading it literally, but at least they're kind of getting the political message that's, that you could find, any rational person could find within that literary work.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  But what's funny about Musk is the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs. So I don't know, it's like, it's too hard not to bother to note that.

• 19:58Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, if anyone who reads Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and thinks that that is a pro-capitalist Mars, like, novel, like, that is, yeah, that's just totally bonkers. So, you know, despite, I think, some of the pessimism that you bring to this, you do say repeatedly that you don't think that the artificial state, in its current form, is already incomplete and it's doomed to failure. Why is it doomed to failure?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Oh, I just think, you know, we kind of already see, and this is something that's foreseen in all the science fiction that I discuss, is this great? It's not an Asimov story, but it's one of Asimov's famous stories from his boyhood about a future in which the foresters have defeated the wasters. But it's like, Asimov was a big environmentalist, and even as a younger man, but he read the story in the 1930s in like a Hugo Gernsberg kind of knockoff science fiction magazine about using up of the fossil fuels and the consequences of deforestation. And the war that the future humans had was between the wasters who just figured you could just use everything up and waste it, and the foresters

• 21:08Speaker 01

  who really believed in, I don't know, we would call reforestation and rewilding. And that's generally the tension in these stories. It's between the artificial state and the natural world, that to erect an artificial state and rule humans within it, you must alienate them from the natural world because you are destroying it. The artificial state will destroy the natural world, and yet it needs the resources of the natural world to run. In some of these stories, we are very much in the kind of world where now, oh, it'll be fine, we'll put the data centers in space, you know, don't worry, we'll keep the earth as a nature preserve, and all the humans will leave, which was, you know, Jeff Bezos's high school graduation speech. So it is doomed in the sense that there is not

• 21:53Speaker 01

  a possibility that the natural world, a habitable planet, habitable for humans, can survive the full construction and reliance on the devices of the artificial state. So I mean, like, that's how the science fiction works, in any event.

• 22:11Anthony Ha?

  So, I mean, like you said, you're a historian, not a politician or, you know, a futurist, but I, do you think that then, what the defeat of the artificial state looks like, is it basically sort of just dismantling all these companies, tearing down the data centers, or is there a future that's sort of more about kind of bringing it under control, or is there really no bringing it under control?

• 22:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't have a playbook here, but, except for the recommendation that we live in a democracy where decisions have to be made in consultation with the governed. And these decisions are not popular. Our elected officials who, and you see this in all the little data center crises, town to town, county to county, state to state, which are partly a consequence of the decline of local newspapers and the destruction of journalism, but that has been one of the many consequences of social media. And in the case of Zuckerberg, I think, a somewhat intentional consequence. Facebook News knew what it was doing with

• 23:17Speaker 01

  the news feed. But so what you see is a lot of people show up at these, like, town meetings and say, like, what are we, like, we don't even have housing, we don't have healthcare, we don't have jobs. Who said we're building this data center? Like, I need to know a lot more about it. I need to know what its energy costs are going to be. Tell me about the water consumption. Are there going to be jobs? Are the jobs going to be long lasting? Or are they just going to be for six months? Like, what's going to happen, you know, to the egrets that live in this area? Whatever it is that people want to know. And you see, people are generally shocked to hear that this thing is kind of like a done deal, or nearly a done deal. And that's because they don't have a source of local news. So people

• 23:59Speaker 01

  don't even know what's going on. And I think when people kind of do know what's going on, the data center stuff is a way for people to stop and say, hey, like, wait a minute. Like, maybe this is great. I don't know. Maybe this would be great for my community. I'm really excited about it. I support it. I vote for it. I'll re-vote, you know, I'll return you to office if you support it. But that's not what's happening. More and more you see people are like, we're, you know, like in the Salt Lake example, where, you know, I think upwards, well over 70% of the people really were opposed to this data center, and their representatives supported it. That's not representing the people. Like, I think there are political costs, and we'll begin to see those at elections. Or maybe we won't.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  Like, enough of democratic functioning has to be intact for people to actually be able to respond to malfeasance on the part of their representatives.

• 24:54Anthony Ha?

  Well, I think we're pretty much out of time, but I did want to ask one other thing, which, as I understand it, it sounds like part of where you're thinking about this kind of started was with this great piece you wrote more than a decade ago for The New Yorker about Clayton Christensen, and kind of critiquing his idea of, you know, the innovator's dilemma and, you know, disruptive innovation, which, like it or not, is very closely associated with TechCrunch, because we have a big conference called Disrupted.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:19Anthony Ha?

  It's a thing that, you know, I think uncritically, we've settled rated in the past, maybe more critically now, but I'm curious, you know, 10 years on, how do you feel about that idea of disruptive innovation?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I stand by everything in that piece. I reread it last summer when I was working on this book. I mean, what I would say in here is, trying to be a peaceable human being, I think it really is a problem that historians have not engaged with these ideas. One of the reasons I wrote that article about disruptive innovation, which was not an idea of mine, it was an assignment, I mean, I guess I could have turned it down, was because I just felt like, wow, here's a, disruptive innovation is a theory of history, right? It's a theory of historical change, and it's based on evidence from the archives. And I just thought, like, it makes, as a historian, like, it makes no sense. This use of evidence is completely unacceptable by any proper understanding of historical

• 26:09Speaker 01

  method. Its argument is in conversation with no meaningful understanding of how change happens. So I went and redid the research, and it just did not stand up at all. And I felt like I had to write it. And I wish, I wish that it felt like there were more engagement in the years since of academic historians thinking through the nature of change, which are questions that are, I think, are genuinely and authentically interest people who are involved in developing new technologies. People really want to think, like, what is this? What am I doing? What is this? What are going to be the consequences? Is there anything I could learn from history? What happened when the automobile replaced the horse? Like, what happened to the law? How did we end up with driver's licenses? How

• 26:53Speaker 01

  did we end up with traffic law? We didn't have traffic rules before the automobile. We didn't have certain kinds of insurance systems. We didn't have driver's tests. Like, how did those things emerge? How did those guardrails on a technology that was tremendously exciting, improved people's lives in many, many ways, utterly changed the landscape, revolutionized tort law? Like, maybe I should think about that. Maybe there's something that I could learn from his, like, I just wish that historians were more in conversation with technologists over these years and with entrepreneurs. And not just because we can stand around and say, oh, you know, I have a lecture to offer you on history, but I think there's a real conversation to be had. So, which all of which is just to say, thanks for having me on. This has been really fun talking to you, Anthony.

• 27:37Anthony Ha?

  No, thank you so much for joining us. The book, again, is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. It'll be out very soon. You should check it out. And of course, you can always follow us at EquityPod on X and Threads. Thanks so much.

• 27:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.