Historian warns Silicon Valley leaders misread dystopian fiction to justify corporate takeover of government

In her upcoming book "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," historian Jill Lepore makes a stark case: technology companies are systematically absorbing functions that belong to elected governments, ushering in what she calls a return to "tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines."

A Harvard scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner, Lepore recently discussed these concerns on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, explaining how visionary tech leaders—particularly Elon Musk and Sam Altman—are borrowing aesthetics and power structures from dystopian fiction while fundamentally misreading their warnings.

The Corporate State vs. Democracy#

Lepore distinguishes between technological innovation itself—which she supports—and the political consolidation of state authority into private hands. "My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state," she said. No democratic process authorized this shift; it emerged partly through well-intentioned efficiency efforts and partly through deliberate ideological moves by libertarian-leaning entrepreneurs who explicitly reject the modern nation-state model.

The transformation accelerated over recent decades, she argues, as once-fringe tech figures became powerful enough to reshape governance itself. Tech platforms now run content moderation systems, set information policy, and even—in some cases—position themselves as alternatives to democratic institutions.

How Bad Readings of Sci-Fi Became Corporate Strategy#

Lepore traces a literary tradition spanning from the 1850s through today: cautionary tales where machines grow ever more capable, assume greater control over human life, and eventually dominate or discard humanity altogether. E.M. Forster's 1909 story "The Machine Stops" captures this anxiety perfectly—a world where people live isolated in cells, completely dependent on an all-powerful machine, until catastrophe strikes.

The problem, Lepore suggests, is that current tech leaders treat such stories not as warnings but as instruction manuals. They absorb the aesthetic and rhetoric of technological inevitability while ignoring the cautionary intent. "What's funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs," she observed, noting the irony in their embrace of systems designed to concentrate power—precisely what dystopian fiction warned against.