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

0:00Hello and welcome to Equity Tech Hunts' podcast about the business of startups. I'm Anthony Ha. And this week I spoke to Jill Lepore, who is a historian at Harvard and a writer at The New Yorker. She has a new book coming out called The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. It's out on August 25th. And in it, she argues that corporations, especially big tech companies, have essentially taken over the functions of our liberal democracy, which she definitely sees as a bad thing. She also argues that a lot of this comes from a bad reading of science fiction. So we get into all of that. You are going to hear a little bit from her dogs in the background, which we've done our best to edit out.

0:33But I think we had a great conversation, so stick around.

0:39Jill, thank you for joining us. Sure. Thanks for having me. So you probably had to do this a lot already, but can you explain what you mean by the artificial state? Um, by the artificial state, I mean, um, a kind of state that is replacing the liberal democratic nation state in the United States and around the world. And I think slowly it's both a thing, a real thing, a construct, but it's also, um, an idea. And so in this book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, I, I traced the rise of the idea, um, that we should live under an artificial state or government by machines. And I also trace the notion that this is an inevitable failure, that the artificial state cannot survive.

1:29And I trace that idea through science fiction. Right. And you connect it to a lot of different, I mean, both science fiction and different kind of philosophies, including this kind of like technocratic philosophy that I think a lot of probably TechCrunch readers and equity listeners are familiar with, maybe, you know, even find appealing in some ways, this idea of how technology can make our lives better. Technology might improve some aspects of how we govern ourselves, while also, you know, I think recognizing that a lot of what you described as the artificial state is also pretty grim and dystopian.

1:59But you write about it as at one point you say the rise of the artificial state marks the end of centuries of democracy and equal rights. And it's a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines. So I think a pretty pretty negative view of it. Can you just say a little bit more about why you see it in such stark terms? Yeah, I do have a pretty negative view of it. And I think it's important to distinguish the artificial state from technology itself or modes of technology. Like I'm not an anti-technologist. I'm married to a computer scientist. I'm really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we're in the midst of right now.

2:34And that's not my beef, right? My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state. No one consented to that. This has been a kind of gradual, largely accidental transformation of how many nation states around the world work. It's happened first in the United States. I think often these innovations in bringing new technologies to the operations of government have been extremely well-intentioned. They originate with an interest in efficiency and speed and cheapness. And then I think only in the last 20, 25 years or so have these decisions been, I think, been purposeful and deliberate as a kind of usurpation of the role of the nation state.

3:30And that's not my speculation, right? You hear a lot of very prominent tech entrepreneurs talk about wanting to move beyond the era of the nation state. You could take a Peter Thiel's idea that freedom and democracy are not compatible, that the era of the state, people who are looking forward to an era of statelessness. I mean, even going back to the early discourse around the opening of the internet as a kind of post-state place. Think of a John Perry Barlow in the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace or the Magna Carta for the knowledge age. A lot of futurists in the 90s were libertarians, and they had a specific interest in using the advance of the internet and the successive innovations that followed as a means to eradicate the nation state.

4:20Well, it's interesting because, yeah, you talk about, on the one hand, the technologies themselves. And then you also, and then also the sort of philosophies behind them, the role the corporation has, has kind of increasingly played. And I'm curious to what extent we can separate them. Like, can we actually have a version of the internet and of social media that doesn't necessarily lead to, you know, this kind of future that it seems like we're hurtling towards? Absolutely. And we, we could have had, right. One of the, one of the things that I'm a historian. I'm not a tech writer. I'm not a tech journalist.

4:52I'm not a computer scientist. I'm a historian. And I'm chiefly a political historian, though I'm also a literary historian. And so one of the things that I'm really interested in unraveling for readers in this book is all the what-ifs, you know, all the other, all the alternatives, the paths along the road that were not taken and why. There was, of course, a really avid discussion in the 1990s about what the internet should look like when it was opened up. And, you know, we, what we ended up with, with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, I think a lot of people would say just was a mistake, not, not an act of sinister intent, right?

5:29People are like, well, maybe we should do this. And actually these libertarians have a point. And, you know, there, there was a, but it was a product of a particular political moment, really was deeply influenced by Newt Gingrich and his contract with America. And it's been very difficult to revisit. But I think it's worth thinking about what were the alternatives that were in play at the time. And you could say the same thing about the personal computer, right? So to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, you know, I think the kind of moment you would first look to would be 1984, January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh with the sort of George Orwell 1984 moment.

6:23Apple was really big on the idea that mainframe computers represented totalitarianism. They were kind of trying to dismantle the giant gray IBM machines and representing them in that ad as a totalitarian state. And the lithe, beautiful, quick, adorable, personal Macintosh would be the axe that would destroy that machine and would usher in a new era in which 1984 would not be 1984, right? I think it's like the tagline or something close to that ad. And that just became like, that was clever advertising. I had a doubt that anybody at Apple really believed that personal computer was going to be an instrument of personal liberation.

7:13I mean, it was going to make possible a lot of cool things, right? Like, I remember when I got my first Macintosh. It certainly wasn't 1984. But it was, like, really cool. It was really fun. It was really exciting. I did a lot of things on it. It would never occur to me that it was improving my capacity for citizenship or my ability to function better in civil society. It was a cool tool. It did a lot of things. But that, if you kind of go like wind the reel forward in time down to 2026, you get to like stops along the way include, you know, the 2016 election when Facebook News and in response to its critics establishes a Supreme Court.

7:53You get to last year when Anthropic hired a moral philosopher to write a constitution. You get to recently when Sam Altman was on Joe Rogan and said, oh, an AI president would be a great idea. And so in some ways they're silly examples, but you see the ways in which these corporations, these tech companies from Silicon Valley, and especially their charismatic or not so charismatic leaders, are just taking on the trappings of the nation state, right? And the functions of democracy. Like, oh, well, we can do, we can, at scale, it'll be better. We'll have to be in a hyperscale democracy with our input.

8:34But, and they're not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it is, it's like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad, except that it takes itself so seriously. Right. And these companies have so much power. So that's, that's just maybe that example of like 1984 and the Macintosh down to 2026 and Anthropics Constitution. Like, that's a really important history. And I think American historians have not been particularly attentive to the history of technology and its relationship to our political order and to the functions of our democracy. But as a person who is an American political historian, I'm really interested in that.

9:19So this was an occasion to really closely inspect that. But that said, the book doesn't begin in 1984. I just think that's like a good example of our modern era and the way a kind of fun advertising campaign turns into a kind of delusional fantasy on the part of people like Sam Altman.

10:12No, I really liked this section about the 1984 ad. But you also then, I think there's a number of examples that you just cited. And also, like, you talk about kind of the promise of, like, the quote-unquote Twitter revolution and this idea that it would sort of bring democracy everywhere. And, you know, I can't help but let that color the way I look at when Sam Altman or some other AI CEO now says that AI is going to bring all these incredible gifts. And therefore, if you stand in the way, you're, you know, standing in the way of progress and the way of history and all these things. Because clearly technology does affect our lives.

10:45and in some ways makes our lives better. So to what extent should we just dismiss all these claims out of hand or are there ways that it might come true? Well, I mean, Twitter is actually a good example, right? Twitter didn't, when it was launched, when Jack Dorsey started it, like it didn't announce itself as we're going to save humanity. We're going to rescue human civilization from extinction. Like it was kind of a goof, right? Like, and I think people that used Twitter really early on and were like, you know what, it was actually really fun. It was like, I made a tuna fish sandwich today. What did you have for lunch?

11:17Like, it was like as if you had your own personal telegram. Did it, did it, did it. Like Twitter as a company did not launch itself on a stage saying we're going to we're here to save democracy. And really what happened was that politicians, elected officials began using Twitter in ways that enhanced their political power, that in ways that amplified their messages and ways that allowed them to reach a younger audience and ways that allowed them to have a kind of constant connection with an audience. And politicians and political campaigns really kind of convinced Twitter, at least in so far as I see it, I don't have like an inside account of the company, but somewhat begrudgingly, Twitter kind of came around to like, oh, well, Twitter's gotten so big and people, you know, post about politics so often about it that it's almost like Twitter is a town hall.

12:12And so by the time you go to, I think it's 2012, right? So several, many years into Twitter's fairly short history, as it would turn out, you know, they published this thing called the Twitter Politics and Elections Handbook, which is really a guide for political candidates and elected officials and how to most effectively use Twitter. And then they begin the kind of rollout of like, it's like a town hall in your pocket, and it's improving our democracies because we're restoring the New England, the defunct New England town meeting. And that's all just bananas. Like, objectively, nothing could be further from the truth.

12:50Like, at that time, one in five Americans had a Twitter account. Most people who had Twitter accounts had never used them. And, like, above 90 % of all tweets about politics were posted by fewer than 10 % of the people that did use Twitter all the time. Like, there was no way in which Twitter was a representation of the electorate. Twitter was a representation of the most extreme, politically active, hyper-partisan among Americans who were following politics really avidly. So, you know, looking at it now, we can see, well, then that's really just a distortion machine. And if politicians are using it to gauge the electorate, they're getting really bad information.

13:32Again, like you can say like Twitter was not trying to participate in the artificial state or undermine democracy. Twitter is trying to do business and get more users, you know, and sell more or whatever. But it had these unintended consequences that then kind of it sort of settles into and becomes comfortable with. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about the structure of the book and the fact that, like you said, it sort of starts with this kind of history, like history of technology, history of ideas. and the second half is about kind of science fiction and depictions of things like robotics.

14:03Can you say more just about kind of how that structure came to you and why you wanted to address things that way? Yeah, I became really interested on the one hand in how often science fiction stories predict the arrival of what I then came to call the artificial state. And so I really wanted to identify a literary tradition that I think of as the parable of the artificial state, right? in which machines get more and more sophisticated. They take over more and more of the functions of humans, including the functions of government. And eventually they come to rule the humans and then maybe they destroy all the humans because they don't really need them anymore.

14:40Maybe they just enslave them. Like it kind of depends. Are we in the Terminator or are we in Battlestar Galactica? Like it's like there's different versions. And these stories go way back. They go back to the 1850s and the 1860s. and, you know, the early decades of kind of rumination about the consequences of industrialism. I think a lot of people, I may say this is certainly true of my students, my undergraduates, really believe that technological change equals progress. And not only that, but the only kind of progress is technological change. That's a novelty in human history. That's an invention, intellectual invention of the 19th century.

15:19And it is partly because technological change was accelerating right at the time that Charles Darwin was devising and then publishing his theory of evolution, right? So there's a kind of weird marriage between evolution as a kind of, as progress and technological change as progress. And what drops out of that are all other earlier notions of progress, which chiefly involve moral progress. Like things are getting better because people are becoming better or things are getting better because people are more free, right? There are a lot of other ways we might think about progress, but what dominates today is this kind of 19th century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress.

16:02And therefore, all technological change is progress, as opposed to like, it's objectively, it's only progress if things are getting better. But in any event, that confluence in the 19th century of the idea of technological progress and the idea of evolution meant that people who were thinking And clearly we're like, well, if the machines keep getting better and faster and able to do more things, not just labor, but maybe talk or think or move around, like, what if they evolve to become better at everything than we are? Not just better at running a loom, not just faster at moving through time and space like a railroad car.

16:45and with that grew an incredible anxiety that found form in science fiction again and again and again and again and again. My favorite one of these stories was published in I think 1909 by E.M. Forster. Like right around when he was writing Room with a View. But he wrote this story called The Machine Stops which like could be subtitled The Room Without a View. And it's he imagines a future world, the near future in which everybody just lives in these rooms, these kind of little cells. They never see, you never see other people because everything you need comes right to your room. It's like DoorDash, like your food is delivered.

17:25You have like a screen where you can communicate with other people. All your needs are met. The thing that people fear most is the natural world. Like no one wants to be, ever see the sun. You know, it's a little like Matrix-y. and they all worship the machine that organizes their lives and brings to them in their little cubby-like rooms all the things that they need. And so the story is about humans have become essentially slaves of the machine, which is stronger, more powerful, and has more capacity than humans do, and humans have lost what capacity they had. And then the action of the climax of the story is when the machine stops.

18:06So I think, you know, like if readers were to go look at that story, it feels like it could be written today, except that it's it's less science fiction-y today than it is the kind of diary of a very unhappy YouTuber. Well, and then you connect that thread to some of the, you know, folks running companies and arguably running aspects of our government today, like Elon Musk. And I think essentially you suggest that they're in some ways are very bad science fiction readers, that they've read a lot of sort of warning stories or at least sort of ambivalent stories as if they're manuals for the future.

18:38and I bring this up partly because this is something I wrestle with as, you know, a reader of science fiction, someone who loves Isaac Asimov, for example, that I think it's true that like when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, yes, this story, you know, this story is a template for what I should do with my company. Like that's bonkers. But there is this sort of like also this kind of technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on. It's not something they're sort of making up out of whole cloth, right? Yeah, although weirdly, like that's Heinlein.

19:09That's not Asimov, right? Sure. That's not Douglas Adams. Like, sure, there is that thread in science fiction. But what they tend to, I mean, I don't know. I guess Bezos is a big Robert Heinlein fan. Like you could say, okay, that lines up well. Like they're reading it literally, but at least they're kind of getting the political message that you could find, any rational person could find within that literary work. Um, but, but what's funny about Musk is the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs. So I don't know. It's, it's like, it's, it's too hard not to bother to note that.

19:49Yeah. I mean, if anyone who reads Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and thinks that that is a pro-capitalist Mars novel, like that is, yeah, that's just totally bonkers. So, you know, despite, I think, some of the pessimism that you bring to this, you do say repeatedly that you don't think that the artificial state in its current form is already incomplete and it's doomed to failure. Why is it doomed to failure? Oh, I just think, you know, we kind of already see, and this is something that's foreseen in all the science fiction that I discuss. Is this great? It's not an Asimov story, but it's one of Asimov's famous stories from his boyhood about a future in which the foresters have defeated the wasters.

20:34But it's like, Asimov was a big environmentalist, and even as a younger man. But he read the story in the 1930s in like a Hugo Gernsbyck kind of knockoff science fiction magazine about using up the fossil fuels and the consequences of deforestation. And the war that the future humans had was between the wasters who just figured you could just use everything up and waste it and the foresters who really believed in, I don't know, we would call reforestation and rewilding. And that's generally the tension in these stories. It's between the artificial state and the natural world that to erect an artificial state and rule humans within it, you must alienate them from the natural world because you are destroying it.

21:19The artificial state will destroy the natural world and yet it needs the resources of the natural world to run. In some of these stories, we are very much in the kind of world we're now, oh, it'll be fine. We'll put the data centers in space. you know, don't worry, we'll keep the earth as a nature preserve and all the humans will leave, which was, you know, Jeff Bezos's high school graduation speech. So it is doomed in the sense that there is not a possibility that the natural world, a habitable planet, habitable for humans, can survive the full construction and reliance on the devices of the artificial state.

21:58So I mean, Like, that's how the science fiction works in any event. So, I mean, like you said, you're a historian, not a politician or, you know, a futurist. But do you think that then what the defeat of the artificial state looks like? Is it basically sort of just dismantling all these companies, tearing down the data centers? Or is there a future that's sort of more about kind of bringing it under control? Or is there really no bringing it under control? I mean, I don't have a playbook here, but except for the recommendation that we live in a democracy where decisions have to be made in consultation with the governed.

22:38And these decisions are not popular. Our elected officials who, and you see this in all the little data center crises, town to town, county to county, state to state, which are partly a consequence of the decline of local newspapers and the destruction of journalism, but that has been one of the many consequences of social media. and in the case of Zuckerberg, I think a somewhat intentional consequence. Facebook News knew what it was doing with the news feed. But so what you see is a lot of people show up at these town meetings and say, like, what are we, like, we don't even have housing. We don't have health care.

23:17We don't have jobs. Who said we're building this data center? Like, I need to know a lot more about it. I need to know what its energy costs are going to be. Tell me about the water consumption. Are there going to be jobs? Are the jobs going to be long lasting? Are they just going to be for six months? What's going to happen to the egrets that live in this area? Whatever it is that people want to know. And you see people are generally shocked to hear that this thing is kind of like a done deal or nearly a done deal. And that's because they don't have a source of local news. So people don't even know what's going on.

23:51And I think when people kind of do know what's going on, the data center stuff is a way for people to stop and say, hey, like, wait a minute. Like, maybe this is great. I don't know. Maybe this would be great for my community. I'm really excited about it. I support it. I vote for it. I'll revote, you know, I'll return you to office if you support it. But that's not what's happening. More and more you see people are like, we're, you know, like in the Salt Lake example where, you know, I think upwards, well over 70 % of the people really were opposed to this data center and their representatives supported it.

24:29That's not representing the people. Like, I think there are political costs and we'll begin to see those at elections. Or maybe we won't. Like enough of democratic functioning has to be intact for people to actually be able to respond to malfeasance on the part of their representatives. Well, I think we're pretty much out of time, but I did want to ask one other thing, which, as I understand it, it sounds like part of where you're thinking about this kind of started was with this great piece you wrote more than a decade ago for The New Yorker about Clayton Christensen and kind of critiquing his idea of, you know, the innovator's dilemma and, you know, disruptive innovation, which, like it or not, is very closely associated with the new people.

25:05TechCrunch because we have a big conference called Disrupted. It's a thing that I think uncritically we've celebrated in the past, maybe more critically now. But I'm curious, 10 years on, how do you feel about that idea of disruptive innovation? Yeah, I stand by everything in that piece. I reread it last summer when I was working on this book. I mean, what I would say in here is trying to be a peaceable human being. I think it really is a problem that historians have not engaged with these ideas. One of the reasons I wrote that that article about disruptive innovation, which was not an idea of a mind, it was an assignment.

25:38I mean, I guess I could have turned it down, was because I just felt like, wow, here's a, disruptive innovation is a theory of history, right? It's a theory of historical change. And it's based on evidence from the archives. And I just thought like, it makes, as a historian, like it makes no sense. This use of evidence is completely unacceptable by any proper understanding of historical method. Its argument is in conversation with no meaningful understanding of how change happens. So I went and redid the research and it just did not stand up at all. And I felt like I had to write it. And I wish that I felt like there were more engagement in the years since of academic historians thinking through the nature of change, which are questions that are, I think, are genuinely and authentically interest people who were involved in developing new technologies, people really want to think, like, what is this?

26:34What am I doing? What is this? What are going to be the consequences? Is there anything I could learn from history? What happened when the automobile replaced the horse? Like, what happened to the law? How did we end up with driver's licenses? How did we end up with traffic law? We didn't have traffic rules before the automobile. We didn't have certain kinds of insurance systems. We didn't have driver's tests. Like, how did those things emerge? How did those guardrails on a technology that was tremendously exciting improved people's lives in many, many ways, utterly changed the landscape, revolutionized tort law.

27:05Like, maybe I should think about that. Maybe there's something that I could learn from history. Like, I just wish that historians were more in conversation with technologists over these years and with entrepreneurs. And not just because we can stand around and say, oh, you know, I have a lecture to offer you on history, but I think there's a real conversation to be had. So, all of which is just to say, thanks for having me on. It's been really fun talking to you, Anthony. Thank you so much for joining us. The book, again, is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. It'll be out very soon. You should check it out.

27:34And of course, you can always follow us at EquityPod on XNThreads. Thanks so much.