Silicon Valley misreads democracy the same way it misreads its favourite science fiction: as a manual rather than a warning. That is the central argument in Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, due from Liveright/Norton in the US on 25 August 2026 and from Allen Lane (Penguin) in the UK, priced at £25.
Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the US Constitution, spoke to TechCrunch’s Equity podcast about what she calls ‘the artificial state’: a form of governance in which private corporations have absorbed the functions of democratic nation-states without anyone having consented to the transfer.
The Corporate Takeover Nobody Voted For
The pattern by which Silicon Valley misreads democracy starts, in Lepore’s telling, earlier than most people assume.
‘My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state,’ she said. ‘No one consented to that.’
She is careful to separate her argument from a blanket suspicion of technology. She calls herself ‘not an anti-technologist’ and says she is ‘really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions’ currently under way. Her target is narrower: the moment at which a rhetoric of efficiency tips into a quiet usurpation of democratic legitimacy.
One origin point she identifies is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major overhaul of US communications law in almost 62 years. Signed by President Clinton on 8 February 1996 as Public Law 104-104, it was designed, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to let any communications business compete in any market against any other. Lepore reads it as a product of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, well-intentioned in places but very difficult to revisit ever since.
A second origin point: Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl advertisement for the Macintosh, which cast IBM mainframes as totalitarianism and the personal computer as the liberating axe. Lepore doubts Apple’s marketing team genuinely believed the personal computer would improve democratic citizenship. ‘It was a cool tool,’ she said. The damage came later, when Silicon Valley’s current generation absorbed that advertising conceit as a serious political philosophy.
How Silicon Valley Misreads Democracy Through Science Fiction
The misreading runs, Lepore argues, straight through the science fiction these leaders consume. She has assembled what she calls a literary tradition of ‘the parable of the artificial state,’ running from E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story ‘The Machine Stops’ through to present-day AI anxieties. Forster’s story imagines every human need delivered to a small room by a vast machine, while the natural world becomes an object of terror. ‘If readers were to go look at that story,’ Lepore said, ‘it feels like it could be written today, except that it’s less science fiction-y today than it is the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber.’
The parable’s internal logic also predicts the artificial state’s collapse: the system destroys the natural world and the resources it requires to run. Science fiction has been iterating on this point, Lepore notes, since the 1850s.
Elon Musk receives particular attention. The way Silicon Valley misreads democracy through its sci-fi diet is, for Lepore, most visible in Musk’s case. Her assessment is brisk: ‘What’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.’
Twitter, a 136-Page Handbook, and the Town Hall Myth
Lepore uses Twitter as a case study in how democratic rhetoric gets retrofitted onto a product after launch. The platform began as a novelty and only gradually acquired the language of civic participation, nudged along by politicians who found it a useful amplifier and by a company that came, somewhat begrudgingly, to accept the ‘town hall in your pocket’ framing.
By the time that framing took hold, above 90% of all political tweets were being posted by fewer than 10% of active users. ‘There was no way in which Twitter was a representation of the electorate,’ Lepore said. It was a representation of the most partisan, most politically engaged slice of Americans.
The platform formalised that posture in a handbook for politicians and elected officials. NPR reported that a later edition of this guide ran to 136 pages, which is quite a commitment for a platform built on 140-character posts.
She draws a straight line from that playbook to today’s AI executives. When Sam Altman tells Joe Rogan that an AI president would be a great idea, Lepore hears the 1984 Macintosh advertisement playing again, louder, and with a considerably larger marketing budget.
What Resisting the Artificial State Actually Looks Like
Lepore declines to produce a policy manifesto. Her prescription is procedural: decisions affecting the public must be made in consultation with the public. She points to local battles over data centres as evidence that communities are already attempting exactly that, raising questions about energy costs, water consumption, job duration, and ecological impact.
In one case she cites, well over 70% of residents in a Salt Lake area opposed a proposed data centre while their elected representatives supported it. ‘That’s not representing the people,’ she said.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State arrives on 25 August 2026, per Kirkus Reviews. Given the pace at which data centre planning disputes are filling local agendas, Lepore’s readers may well arrive having already attended the town meeting she is writing about.
