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

Jill Lepore’s forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, lands like a hammer on the polite chatter that surrounds every product launch. She does not merely critique corporate rhetoric; she identifies a pattern in which platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and now Anthropic’s Claude begin to perform the functions of a democratic government — shaping public discourse, mediating information flows, and even drafting constitutional‑style charters for their algorithms. The language of “town hall in your pocket” or “AI president” is not metaphor. It is a claim of sovereignty.

The term “artificial state” captures a shift that has been decades in the making. Lepore draws a straight line from the 1984 Macintosh commercial, which promised a personal computer that would liberate the individual, to the present‑day manifestos that claim an AI can make government more efficient, more responsive, perhaps even unnecessary. Each iteration rebrands the same promise: technology as a substitute for politics. The continuity is striking. The same breathless optimism that once sold a beige box now sells a model trained on the entire internet.

Lepore’s historical lens lands on E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops.” In that tale a vast, self‑maintaining apparatus runs every aspect of daily life until it abruptly halts, leaving its dependents helpless. Lepore reads the story as a blueprint for the artificial state, and she notes it now reads like the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber — someone who has outsourced agency to a platform that can, at any moment, change the rules or shut down. The parallel is not accidental. Silicon Valley’s founders grew up on the same canon of speculative fiction, yet they treat the warnings as design specifications.

Why do the valley’s leaders read dystopia as a playbook? Because the narrative arc of most classic sci‑fi ends with a technocratic elite imposing order on chaos. The founders see themselves as that elite. They miss the moral core: the stories are about the fragility of systems that concentrate power in opaque code. When Sam Altman muses about an “AI president,” he echoes the same hubris that animated the protagonists of those novels — characters who believed they could engineer away politics. The result is a class of executives who mistake technological advancement for political progress.

Lepore argues the artificial state is fundamentally unsustainable. Its legitimacy rests on the illusion of neutrality, yet every algorithm encodes the biases of its creators and the commercial imperatives of its owners. When a platform decides what speech is amplified, it exercises a governmental power without the checks that constrain a legislature. The contradictions accumulate: transparency promises clash with trade‑secret protections; community standards clash with revenue‑driven engagement metrics. The structure cannot hold.

Reining in the artificial state will require more than antitrust fines or privacy regulations. It demands a political reclamation of the public sphere — laws that treat algorithmic governance as a public utility, institutions that audit code the way they audit budgets, and a cultural shift that refuses to crown engineers as unelected legislators. Lepore’s work is a reminder that the next “constitution” drafted in a boardroom is not a novelty; it is a recurrence of an old fantasy, and fantasies do not govern. People do.