Historian Jill Lepore Names Names in New Book on Tech Power

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman appear together in Jill Lepore's new book not as rivals but as co-authors of the same project. In "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian argues these five Silicon Valley figures are executing a shared, if uncoordinated, plan to reshape political life around technologies they control.

Lepore's central term, the Artificial State, works on two levels at once. It describes a speculative endpoint, a fully automated society stripped of collective institutions, and it describes something already underway: the migration of public debate onto platforms owned by private companies rather than governed by public rule.

That second claim is the book's sharper edge. Lepore contends that social media feeds are not neutral conduits but engineered systems, built to steer what people buy and, increasingly, how they vote. The design choices behind a feed, in her account, are political choices even when framed as product decisions.

Science Fiction as Blueprint

One of the book's more pointed observations traces the intellectual lineage of today's techno-libertarianism back to Cold War science fiction. Lepore argues that the industry's architects absorbed those stories not as cautionary tales but as literal instructions.

Lepore describes the tech elite reading classic sci-fi "unironically, as instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule the world."

That framing recasts a familiar genre of nerdy enthusiasm as something closer to ideology formation, with decades-old paranoid fiction supplying the design goals for present-day AI ambitions.

Crucially, Lepore does not treat artificial intelligence itself as the villain of her account. Her argument is narrower and, in some ways, more actionable: the danger lies in the absence of any coherent, democratically debated strategy for how AI should be built and deployed.

Without that strategy, she suggests, decisions about automation, surveillance, and algorithmic influence default to whichever billionaire happens to control the infrastructure. The book's implicit challenge to policymakers and technologists alike is less about halting AI development than about building the democratic machinery to actually govern it, before the choices being made in boardrooms harden into permanent facts about how societies function.