Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
TechCrunch Anthony Ha ● Covered by 2 sources
Jill Lepore says tech firms are edging into government’s job. She says that’s not efficiency — it’s rule by machines, with democracy getting squeezed out.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Anthony Ha — read the original for the full story.
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Jill Lepore’s new book argues that Silicon Valley is doing more than building tools. It is, in her telling, quietly taking over parts of government itself. That is the core of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, and on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast she drew a hard line between technology and the way private companies now act like public institutions.
Lepore is a Harvard historian, a New Yorker staff writer and a recent Pulitzer Prize winner for her history of the U.S. Constitution, so she comes at this from the angle of power, not product launches. Her complaint is not that technology exists. It’s that corporations have increasingly taken on state functions without anyone voting for that shift. What began, she said, as efficiency and speed has become more deliberate over the past 20 or 25 years.
She also thinks Silicon Valley’s favorite stories about the future are badly read. The heroes of her book are not just executives, but the old fantasies they seem to be living inside: machine rule, escape from the nation-state, the idea that a corporation can stand in for democracy. Elon Musk comes up as a prime example of someone pulling from comic books and pulp sci-fi while also, in Lepore’s view, contradicting his own politics.
The examples she gives are pointed. Apple’s 1984 Macintosh ad promised liberation from totalitarian computing. Twitter was later sold as something like a public square, even though, by Lepore’s telling, one in five Americans had an account and more than 90% of political tweets came from fewer than 10% of the most active users. She calls that “bananas,” and it’s hard to argue with the phrase.
Her bigger argument is that the fantasy of better democracy through better machines keeps getting recycled, from the internet to social media to AI. The book starts with political history and then moves into science fiction because she thinks the warning has been there for a long time. We just keep mistaking the warning for a product roadmap.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Silicon Valley loves to dress power up as progress, then act shocked when people notice the crown. The real tell is how often these companies end up borrowing the language and rituals of government while insisting they’re just building neutral software. That’s not innovation; that’s municipal cosplay with a valuation attached.
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