Jill Lepore on the ‘Artificial State’ and why Silicon Valley’s leaders are bad sci-fi readers
TL;DR
Historian Jill Lepore argues that tech companies describe their products in language borrowed from statecraft, as if they were founding a new form of government. Her examples run from Twitter's old 'town hall in your pocket' to Anthropic's constitution for Claude, and the picture she draws of Silicon Valley is not a flattering one. The argument appears in her forthcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. The Pulitzer winner traces where that rhetoric of authority comes from and what it hides.
Nauti's Take
Lepore's angle adds a genuinely useful lens to the usual AI debate, because she examines the language companies use to claim authority. The limit of the thesis: grand marketing copy is not a state, and reading every product vision as a bid for power can hide the plain business model underneath.
For anyone who has to make sense of AI announcements, watching the word choice is a practical tool.
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