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Tech Moguls Are Mistaking Science Fiction for a Political Plan

Jill Lepore traces the fantasies behind Silicon Valley’s plans for our future

In The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and Harvard law professor Jill Lepore writes about the ways technology companies have gradually moved to usurp the role of governments. At a book launch event in September, at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, journalist Michelle Shephard interviewed Lepore about some of the book’s highlights, including Silicon Valley’s connections to discredited twentieth-century movements, such as Benito Mussolini–era fascism, and science fiction’s influence on tech moguls. The following is a transcript of their conversation. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What prompted you to do this book?

My last book was a history of the United States Constitution, and I felt really passionate about writing that book and trying to reckon with what the founding of modern, liberal constitutional democracy really is, at a time when its precarity is increasingly obvious. This year is the 250th anniversary of the United States.
And so I wrote that book with the aim in mind of offering up a new history of how liberal democracies work, at least how ours has worked.

When it came time to write an epilogue, I wanted to cast forward. There’s a great deal of unease in the United States about our Constitution—is it in crisis, is it no longer legitimate, has it been so ignored and no longer upheld? I thought I would offer readers something about the path ahead. I ended up making more of a present-minded argument than I ordinarily would have, in which I suggest that, in my view, the premises of eighteenth-century constitutionalism can’t actually be stretched to really account for the things which we need to tend to in the actual world. The ways in which we need to address the rise of artificial intelligence lie beyond the worldview of the framers of eighteenth-century constitutions, and our constitution is beyond amendment right now.

That left me feeling dissatisfied. It was a kind of weird gesture, like, Hey, we’re all gonna die. This Constitution is not going to last. It isn’t really working anymore. The end!

It’s kind of a rip-off as the end of a book. So I thought maybe I should squarely tackle how it is that I think we got to the place we are now, wherein I think we are in the process of replacing government by consent with government by machine. And it hasn’t happened yet and can still be stopped.

There’s this really searing quote you have, where you say, “By the middle of the 2020s, vastly consequential decisions about the future of the Earth, and everyone and everything on it, were being made by a handful of men based on their colossal accumulation of wealth, their catastrophic misreading of history, literature, and philosophy, and their breathtaking contempt for ordinary people, living and dead.” How did we get to that point?

I do have to think of it as we’re in the reign of King Joffrey. I find these questions—How did we get here?—intellectually really exciting. It’s a complicated act to come to some discovery because, in the case of what I’m trying to talk about, the construction of an artificial state, a lot of the elements of the infrastructure of the artificial state, are entirely innocent. People ask, “Do you mean like the deep state? Is it a conspiracy?” I don’t mean that at all.
A lot of the automation of the functions of government is indeed for the purpose of counting people more efficiently for more accurate proportionate representation or for the more accurate provision of welfare benefits or veterans’ benefits.

As you point out, it all kind of started with census taking.

Yeah. A census, which is going to be always improved by new forms of technology, is a necessary precondition for democracy. You have to be able to count the people.

I was trying to separate the development of new tools for the purposes of the administration of democratically elected governments, and how different that is from corporations subsuming the functions of government themselves. And also, their chief executive officers coming to understand themselves as possessing power that is greater than that of any nation state. So when these tech moguls talk about their manifestos—there are different people, and they have different values, but they seem very comfortable identifying themselves as the people who hold the future of humanity in their hands. Their manifestos are about the future of civilization, the future of the human race. Whether on Tuesday, they’re going to eradicate poverty and hunger, we’re all gonna live in abundance of jobless joy, and then on Wednesday, we’re all gonna die—it’s the same story in a way, because it’s actually about their amassing of power. They are answerable to no one. Of the many “How did we get here?” answers I could give you, it is a consequence of the dysfunction of American politics, where corporations in the United States have more power than they have ever had in American history. 


We have not a single piece of meaningful legislation in the United States Congress about artificial intelligence. We have essentially nothing about social media. This is something that we’re now battling out in the courts. These are technologies invented in the United States, invented under terms that involve no government oversight whatsoever, and a concession to both the libertarian political philosophy and the amassing of corporate power. And then they’re exported to the rest of the world on those same terms, so that lawlessness is itself exported with them.

There’s nothing inherently anti-democratic about these tools any more than there’s something pro-democratic about them.........

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