Technology
Historian Lepore: Tech Giants Play-Act Government While Misreading the Future
A Pulitzer Prize winner argues that Silicon Valley founders mistake innovation for politics and deploy utopian rhetoric to justify corporate takeover of state functions.
TechCrunch — AI
In a forthcoming book, historian Jill Lepore examines a peculiar habit of tech companies: borrowing the language and structures of government to describe their platforms. From Twitter's "town hall in your pocket" to Anthropic's Claude constitution, the pattern reveals something troubling about how these organizations see themselves — and what they imagine they should become.
The Corporate State Emerges#
Lepore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and staff writer at The New Yorker, contends in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State that technology firms have progressively absorbed responsibilities traditionally held by democracies. When Twitter warps public discourse, or Facebook hollows out local journalism, these companies are effectively governing — yet without the checks, representation, or accountability that democracies demand. Worse, Lepore argues, many tech leaders openly express ambitions to supplant the nation-state entirely.
AI as the New Fantasy#
Current AI entrepreneurs are recycling an ancient illusion. Rather than inventing something new, they promise that artificial intelligence will make government leaner, faster, and more responsive — perhaps even redundant. This vision, Lepore suggests, mistakes technological capability for political wisdom. As she notes in a recent TechCrunch Equity podcast appearance, leaders from Sam Altman (who has mused about an "AI president") to the architects of Anthropic's constitution are dressed-up versions of older tech mythologies, stretching back to Apple's iconic 1984 commercial.
The Sci-Fi That Predicted It All#
Lepore draws a striking parallel to E.M. Forster's 1909 dystopian story "The Machine Stops," in which humanity delegates existence to an all-powerful technological system. The novella, once a cautionary tale, now reads to her like "the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber" — a portrait of how unchecked dependence on a single platform erodes autonomy. The parallel is uncomfortable for tech idealists: the story is a tragedy, not a blueprint.
What It Takes to Push Back#
Yet Lepore stops short of apocalypse. She argues that the artificial state is inherently fragile — unsustainable under its own logic. The question is what pressure points might expose those weaknesses and force real constraints on corporate power playing government.
