Jill Lepore Warns Silicon Valley Is Replacing Democracy

In her upcoming book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues that private technology corporations are gradually usurping the roles of democratic nation-states. Speaking on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Lepore explained that this shift is not an inevitable result of technological progress, but rather a deliberate push by libertarian-leaning tech leaders. She points out that prominent figures like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are building corporate structures that mimic state functions, such as when Facebook established its own "Supreme Court" in 2016, or when Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to draft a constitution last year.

According to Lepore, these executives are fundamentally misreading classic science fiction. Instead of viewing cautionary tales like E. M. Forster's 1909 story "The Machine Stops" or Laurence Manning's "The Man Who Awoke" as warnings, tech leaders treat them as instruction manuals. She notes that while Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh commercial framed personal computers as tools of liberation against totalitarian mainframes, today's tech giants have embraced what she characterizes as a fantasy of corporate rule. This includes Altman suggesting to podcaster Joe Rogan that an artificial intelligence president could be a viable concept.

This corporate expansion has real-world consequences for public discourse and local resources. Lepore criticizes the myth of social media as a digital town square, pointing out that when Twitter published its Politics and Elections Handbook in 2012, only one in five Americans had an account, and over 90 percent of political tweets were generated by fewer than 10 percent of those users. Today, the physical footprint of this "artificial state" is sparking local resistance. In Salt Lake, for instance, over 70 percent of residents opposed a new data center, yet local representatives approved it anyway, highlighting a growing disconnect between the public and their elected officials.

For AI practitioners and software engineers, Lepore's critique suggests a need to look beyond the 19th-century assumption that technological change automatically equals moral progress. Rather than designing systems under the assumption of "disruptive innovation"—a business theory Lepore famously challenged a decade ago—developers must actively engage with the social and political guardrails of their work. Building sustainable technology requires technologists to collaborate with historians and the public to ensure that new tools support, rather than dismantle, democratic consent.