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

Podcast: Equity · TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa Loconsolo

Opublikowano: 2026-08-07

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they're forming a new government. And whether you're thinking of Twitter's old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic's Claude constitution, it's a theory that doesn't paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light. In Lepore's upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker writer argues that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government — whether that’s Twitter giving a distorted picture of the electorate or Facebook...