Lepore: Tech Execs Are Building an Artificial State
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- Jill Lepore argues in her upcoming book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State that private tech corporations are increasingly assuming state functions without public consent, marking a shift toward algorithmic rule she calls 'a return to tyranny.'
- Silicon Valley leaders, particularly Elon Musk, are accused by Lepore of basing their visions on misread pulp sci-fi and comic books — ideologies that contradict the very democratic values they claim to uphold.
- Apple's 1984 Macintosh ad, which positioned personal computing as a liberation from totalitarianism, is cited by Lepore as an early example of tech marketing evolving into a delusional fantasy of machine-led governance.
- Tech companies have taken on governmental trappings, such as Facebook creating a 'Supreme Court' for content moderation, Anthropic hiring a moral philosopher to draft an AI constitution, and Sam Altman suggesting an AI president could be viable.
- Twitter was never intended as a democratic tool but became framed as a 'digital town hall,' despite data showing fewer than 10% of users generating over 90% of political content, making it unrepresentative of the electorate.
Why it matters: Democratic legitimacy erodes when unelected tech executives assume state-like powers while justifying them through self-serving narratives. The concentration of governance functions in corporations like Apple, Facebook, and Anthropic — entities accountable to shareholders, not citizens — shifts power away from public institutions without electoral mandate or oversight.
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