A Pulitzer-winning historian just put a name to something that’s been bugging me about how AI’s biggest players talk about the future. Her name is Jill Lepore, and on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, as reported by TechCrunch AI, she laid out the argument behind her upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. The short version: tech companies aren’t just shipping products anymore. Lepore says they’re quietly absorbing the functions of democratic government, and most of their leaders don’t seem to notice the old story they’re retelling.
What stands out here is how ordinary the pattern has become. Twitter once called itself a “town hall in your pocket.” Anthropic wrote a constitution for its Claude models. Sam Altman has floated the idea of an “AI president.” Lepore draws a straight line from the famous 1984 Macintosh ad all the way to today’s AI mission statements. Different decades, same fantasy: technology dressed up as political progress.
📉 The core argument
Lepore’s claim is blunt. Tech firms have drifted into roles that governments used to hold, and it happened without a vote.
- Social platforms shape how we see the electorate, often through a distorted lens.
- Facebook helped hollow out local news, which used to hold power to account.
- AI leaders now pitch a world where software makes government more efficient, more responsive, and eventually optional.
That last promise is the one to watch. When founders say AI will make the state unnecessary, they’re not describing a feature. They’re describing a transfer of power, and Lepore thinks they’ve mistaken engineering wins for civic ones.
🤖 Why the sci-fi jab lands
The title of the podcast segment isn’t just a shot at reading habits. Lepore points to E.M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops” as the real blueprint for what she calls the artificial state. In that story, people live isolated in pods, fully dependent on a machine that runs their lives, until it breaks. She jokes it now reads like “the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber.”
Her point is that the genre these leaders love was often written as a warning, not a roadmap. Build the machine that replaces human systems, and you also build its single point of failure. Lepore argues the artificial state is ultimately unsustainable for exactly that reason.
💡 Why this matters now
This lands at a moment when AI companies are gaining real leverage over public life. They run the platforms where politics happens, they lobby on their own regulation, and they increasingly pitch products directly to governments. When a Harvard historian says the whole framing is a fantasy in new packaging, that’s a useful check on an industry that rarely gets one from outside its own ranks.
It also reframes the regulation debate. Most policy fights focus on safety, bias, or jobs. Lepore is pointing at something bigger: the slow handoff of governing functions to private companies that answer to shareholders, not citizens.
🧭 Practical takeaways
For people building or buying AI, a few things worth sitting with:
- Watch the language. When a product is described as a “town hall,” a “constitution,” or a replacement for institutions, ask what accountability comes with it. Usually none.
- Design for the machine stopping. Forster’s warning is a systems lesson. If your operation can’t function when one vendor’s model goes down, you’ve built a pod.
- Keep humans in the civic loop. Efficiency isn’t the same as legitimacy. A faster decision made by software still needs a person who can be held responsible for it.
- Read the critics, not just the boosters. Lepore has spent a career tracing how American institutions rise and fall. Her track record as a historian is exactly why this argument deserves more than a shrug.
Where this goes next is the real question. If Lepore is right that the artificial state can’t hold, the interesting fight over the next few years won’t be AI versus humans. It’ll be private tech power versus public accountability, and who gets to decide which functions of government are actually up for grabs. You can hear her full case on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.