Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore used a TechCrunch Equity podcast appearance to preview her upcoming book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," arguing that tech firms are assuming functions once held by democratic governments.
Lepore says Silicon Valley wraps products in quasi-political language—from Twitter’s old “town hall in your pocket” pitch to Anthropic’s Claude constitution—because leaders mistake technological progress for political progress.
A 1909 E.M. Forster story, “The Machine Stops,” serves as a key frame for her argument that today’s AI promises of more efficient, responsive government recycle an old fantasy rather than a new political model.
Lepore traces that pattern from Apple’s 1984 Macintosh ad to Sam Altman’s “AI president” comments and argues the resulting “artificial state” is ultimately unsustainable without stronger limits.