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 displacing local news. In her view, these leaders often mistake technological advancement for political progress, all while outright declaring their intention to replace the nation-state.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Anthony Ha talks with Lepore about her book and why she thinks today’s AI leaders — who promise a future where AI makes government more efficient, more responsive, and maybe even unnecessary — are selling an old fantasy in new packaging.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

0:49 Defining the “artificial state”

2:17 Why corporations quietly took over state functions

4:43 Could the internet have gone another way?

9:01 From the 1984 Macintosh ad to Anthropic’s constitution

10:20 The Twitter “town hall” myth

13:36 Structuring the book: history meets science fiction

17:46 The Machine Stops, and other bad manuals for the future

19:16 Musk, Heinlein, and misreading sci-fi

19:41 Why Lepore thinks the artificial state is “doomed”

21:51 Data centers, local politics, and the death of local news

24:44 Revisiting disruptive innovation, ten years later

26:54 Outro