Jill Lepore on the ‘Artificial State’ and why Silicon Valley’s leaders are bad sci-fi readers

Jill Lepore has spent her career picking apart the myths America tells about itself, and her latest target is Silicon Valley's habit of borrowing the language of statecraft. She points to Twitter's old pitch as a "town hall in your pocket" and, more recently, Anthropic's decision to publish something it literally calls a constitution for Claude. These aren't just marketing flourishes, Lepore argues. They're symptoms of an industry that thinks of itself as building sovereign power, not shipping software.

Her upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, traces this impulse back further than most people would guess, well before ChatGPT or even before Twitter existed. Lepore, a Pulitzer-winning historian at Harvard, has made a habit of connecting tech's present-day rhetoric to older political traditions, and here she's asking why founders and executives keep reaching for words like constitution, charter, and governance when what they're actually doing is running a company that answers to shareholders, not citizens.

Part of her argument is almost a literary critique. She suggests that many of Silicon Valley's most influential figures grew up on science fiction but read it badly, absorbing the imagery of grand civilizational projects without absorbing the warnings baked into those same stories. Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick weren't writing blueprints. They were writing cautionary tales about power concentrating in the hands of institutions that convince themselves they're benevolent. Lepore's point is that the aesthetic got copied while the skepticism got left behind.

What makes this more than an academic gripe is the timing. As AI companies write documents that read like founding charters and talk about aligning systems with human values in language borrowed from political philosophy, the stakes of conflating a product roadmap with a system of governance keep rising. A constitution implies consent, accountability, and the possibility of amendment by the governed. A terms-of-service update does not.