Jill Lepore is warning that the future being built by major technology companies is not just a product story. In her upcoming book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer describes a deeper political shift: private corporations increasingly doing work that once belonged to democratic government.
What Lepore Means By The Artificial State
Lepore uses the phrase artificial state to describe both a real transformation and an idea. It is the idea that society could be governed, or partly governed, by machines, algorithms, and corporations instead of by the liberal democratic nation-state.
Her concern is not that computers exist, or that new tools are entering public life. She told TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, “I’m not anti-technologist.” The problem, as she frames it, is that companies have gradually taken on functions of the state without the public clearly choosing that arrangement.
In Lepore’s account, some of this began with practical goals. Governments and institutions wanted more speed, lower cost, and greater efficiency. But she argues that, over the last 20, 25 years or so, the trend became more deliberate, with some tech entrepreneurs openly talking about moving beyond the era of the nation-state.
That is why she describes the artificial state in stark terms: “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.”
Why Silicon Valley’s Political Imagination Matters
Lepore’s argument is partly about power and partly about imagination. She says many Silicon Valley leaders are borrowing the symbols and language of democracy while building systems controlled by private companies.
Her examples are intentionally varied. She points to Facebook News responding to critics after the 2016 election by establishing a Supreme Court. She notes that Anthropic hired a moral philosopher last year to write a constitution. She also cites Sam Altman appearing on Joe Rogan and saying, in response to a question from Rogan, that an AI president would be a great idea.
For Lepore, these examples can sound unserious on their own. Taken together, however, they show companies adopting the trappings of political institutions. Courts, constitutions, presidents, and town halls are not just metaphors. They are central parts of democratic life, and using them casually can blur the line between public authority and corporate power.
She argues that the people making these gestures are not operating from a sophisticated political philosophy. Instead, they are often working with what she sees as a cartoon-like version of older technology myths: the belief that newer machines naturally produce better freedom, better governance, and better civic life.
The Older Myth Of Technology As Progress
Lepore places the artificial state inside a longer history of ideas. She says the belief that technological change equals progress is not timeless. In her account, it is an intellectual invention of the 19th century, shaped by the acceleration of technological change and by the period when Charles Darwin was developing and publishing his theory of evolution.
That connection matters because it helped fuse two ideas: evolution as progress and technological change as progress. Once those ideas merged, other meanings of progress began to lose ground. Lepore points to earlier notions such as moral progress, greater freedom, and people becoming better.
The result is a narrow view of improvement. If all technological change is treated as progress, then resistance can be framed as standing against history. Lepore challenges that assumption. By her standard, technology counts as progress only if it actually makes things better.
That distinction is central to her critique of current AI claims. The question is not whether AI can produce impressive results. The question is whether the systems, companies, and leaders around it are strengthening democratic life or replacing it with something less accountable.
What Twitter Shows About Political Side Effects
Lepore uses Twitter as an example of how a tool can become politically consequential without starting out that way. She says Twitter did not launch by claiming it would save democracy or rescue civilization. In its earliest form, she describes it as playful and simple, a place where users might post about ordinary daily details.
That changed as politicians, elected officials, and campaigns found uses for the platform. They used it to amplify messages, reach younger audiences, and maintain constant contact with followers. Over time, Lepore says, Twitter came to embrace a political identity, including the idea that it was like a town hall.
She rejects that framing. At the time she discusses, one in five Americans had a Twitter account, most account holders had never used them, and above 90% of all tweets about politics came from fewer than 10% of the people who used Twitter all the time.
To Lepore, that made Twitter a poor mirror of the electorate. It represented the most intense and politically active users, not the public as a whole. If politicians treated it as a guide to public opinion, they were likely getting distorted information.
Science Fiction As A Warning, Not A Roadmap
The second half of Lepore’s book turns to science fiction because she sees a long literary tradition that anticipated the artificial state. In these stories, machines grow more capable, take over more human functions, and eventually assume forms of rule. Sometimes humans are destroyed. Sometimes they are enslaved. The pattern, she says, goes back to the 1850s and early debates about industrialism.
She points in particular to E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, published, she thinks, in 1909. In that story, people live in small rooms, avoid direct contact with others, receive what they need where they are, communicate through screens, and fear the natural world. Their lives are organized by a machine they come to worship. The climax arrives when the machine stops.
For Lepore, the point is not that science fiction should be treated as a product plan. It is that these stories often warned about dependency, surrender, and the loss of human capacity. Her criticism of some Silicon Valley leaders is that they appear to admire futuristic stories while missing what those stories are actually cautioning against.
The debate around the artificial state is therefore not simply about AI, social media, or the internet. It is about who governs, who consents, and whether democratic institutions can remain central when corporations present themselves as faster, smarter, and more inevitable than politics itself.