Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy
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. Instead, she said, “My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state.”
While Lepore’s book examines technocratic philosophies that go back centuries, she argued that many of Silicon Valley’s “charismatic or not-so-charismatic...
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