Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues in her forthcoming book that Silicon Valley has spent the last 20 to 25 years deliberately absorbing the functions of democratic government, a shift she calls the rise of the artificial state. Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the U.S. Constitution, made the case on an Equity podcast interview tied to the release of 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.' Her central claim: private corporations, not voters, are now setting the rules that used to belong to nation-states.
Lepore was careful to draw a line between the technology and the politics around it. 'I'm not anti-technologist,' she said, noting she is married to a computer scientist. Her objection is structural — a gradual transfer of authority from elected institutions to companies whose leaders, she argues, were not chosen to govern and answer to no electorate.
“My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state”— Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer
She dates the modern version of this idea to a single advertisement: Apple's January 1984 Super Bowl spot for the Macintosh, which cast IBM's mainframes as George Orwell's totalitarian state and the personal computer as the tool that would ensure '1984 would not be 1984.' Lepore reads that ad as clever marketing dressed up as political philosophy — a template Silicon Valley has been recycling ever since. The 1996 Telecommunications Act, she added, hardened the libertarian futurism of the 1990s into law, and has been difficult to revisit in the three decades since.
Key facts
- 01Lepore's new book, 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,' argues tech firms have spent the last 20-25 years deliberately usurping nation-state functions.
- 02She traces the modern origin to Apple's January 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad, which cast personal computing as an antidote to IBM-style totalitarianism.
- 03Anthropic hired a moral philosopher last year to help draft a constitution for its AI systems, one of Lepore's case studies.
- 04Sam Altman told Joe Rogan that 'an AI president would be a great idea,' which Lepore cites as evidence tech CEOs are adopting the trappings of the state.
- 05Lepore calls the framing of Twitter as a digital 'town hall,' formalized in its 2012 Politics and Elections Handbook, 'bananas.'
The through-line from 1984 to 2026, in Lepore's telling, runs through a series of moments in which tech companies quietly adopt the vocabulary and machinery of the state. In 2016, Facebook responded to critics by establishing what it called a Supreme Court. Last year, Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to help write a constitution for its AI systems. This year, Sam Altman went on Joe Rogan and floated the idea of an AI president.
Elon Musk gets particular attention. Lepore argues Musk's political self-image doesn't survive contact with the science fiction he actually reads. The pulp and comic-book futures he draws on, in her reading, describe outcomes his stated libertarianism would reject.
The Twitter case gets a similar rereading. When Jack Dorsey launched the service, Lepore said, it wasn't pitched as a tool to save democracy — it was a goof about tuna sandwiches. Politicians then figured out it amplified their reach, and Twitter began rebranding itself around that use case. By 2012 the company had published a Twitter Politics and Elections Handbook aimed at candidates, and framed the platform as a restoration of the New England town meeting.
Lepore's verdict on that framing is blunt: 'that's all just bananas.' The town-hall analogy, she argues, describes almost nothing that actually happens on the platform, and treating it as democratic infrastructure obscures how much editorial and structural power sits with one company.
“Oh, an AI president would be a great idea”— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Her broader worry is not any single product but the pattern. Facebook's Supreme Court, Anthropic's constitution, Altman's AI-president musing, Musk's political ambitions — Lepore reads these as tech leaders taking on the trappings of the nation-state without any of the accountability. She describes it as a cartoon version of the 1984 Macintosh ad taking itself seriously, backed by companies with far more resources than most governments.
Lepore acknowledges the alternative history is available. The 1990s debate over what the open internet should look like produced real forks in the road; the 1996 telecom law was one path among several. Her book is partly an argument that those choices are not settled and that the current structure is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
Skeptics of Lepore's thesis will note that she is a historian rather than a technologist, and that framing every corporate governance experiment — a content-moderation appeals board, a written model spec, a founder's podcast riff — as a step toward state capture flattens meaningful differences between them. Anthropic's constitution is a product document; Facebook's Oversight Board is a policy body; Altman's Rogan line was, on its face, a throwaway. Treating them as points on the same line requires an argumentative leap she is making deliberately, but which not every reader will follow.
For the AI industry, the more useful signal in Lepore's argument is that the political framing around frontier labs is hardening. When a Pulitzer-winning constitutional historian publishes a book cataloguing OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Musk-run firms as functional competitors to the state, that framing tends to migrate into congressional hearings, court filings, and antitrust theories within a year or two. Labs that have spent 2026 pitching themselves as good-faith partners to government should expect the reverse framing — government as the party being displaced — to shape the next round of AI legislation, no matter which party writes it.
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