Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
Historian Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are replacing the functions of democratic government, marking a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, and machines. Lepore argues that this shift is a result of private corporations taking on the functions of the state without consent. She believes that the rise of the artificial state is a threat to democracy and equal rights, and that it is not a necessary consequence of technological advancements.
- ▪Jill Lepore's book 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' examines the development of technocratic philosophies that go back centuries.
- ▪Lepore argues that Silicon Valley's leaders, such as Elon Musk, are ushering in a future pulled from misread pulp science fiction and comic books.
- ▪The rise of the artificial state marks the end of centuries of democracy and equal rights, and is a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, and machines.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/historian-jill-lepore-says-the-tech-industry-is-led-by-bad-readers-who-are-undermining-democracy/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-09T15:00:47.810Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-09T15:00:47.810Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | iaqajGOBW071 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify In her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,” Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks “a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.” On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, I spoke to Lepore — a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the U.S. Constitution — about the development of what she described as “the idea that we should live under an artificial state or government by machines.” “I’m not anti-technologist,” Lepore insisted.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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