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Hello and welcome to Equity Tech Hunch's podcast about the business of startups. I'm Anthony Ha and this week I spoke to Jill Leapor 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, but I think we had a great conversation, so stick around.
Jill, thank you for joining us. Sure. Thanks for having me. Uh, 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 trace 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 the this is an inevitable failure that the artificial
state cannot survive and I trace that idea through science fiction right and you connected 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 techrunch 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 the what you describe as the artificial state is also pretty grim and dystopian. Um, but 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. Uh, so I think a 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. I that's not my beef, right? My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state. Uh no one
consented to that. Um 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 in the in with an interest in efficiency and speed and cheapness. Um 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 usurppation of the role of the nation state and that's not my speculation right you hear a lot of a lot of very prominent tech entrepreneurs talk about wanting to move beyond the era of the nation state um you know you
could take a Peter Teal's idea that freedom and democracy are not compatible that the era of this 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 poststate place think of a John Perry Barlo and the Declaration of Independence of Cyerspace or the Magna Carta for the knowledge age. A lot of futurists in the '9s 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. Well, it's interesting because you 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 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 hurdling towards. Absolutely. And we could have had, right? One of the things that I'm a historian. I'm I'm I'm not a tech writer. I'm not a tech journalist. Um 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 whatifs, you know, all the other all the alternatives, the paths along
the road that were not taken and why. Um 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 the 1996 telecommunications act. I think a lot of people would say just was a mistake not a act of sinister intent right people like well maybe we should do this and actually these libertarians have a point and you know there was a but it was a product of a particular political moment uh really was deeply influenced by N. Gingrich um and his contract with America and it's been very difficult to revisit um 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 you could 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 that Apple was really big on the idea that mainframe computers represented totalitarianism. They were kind of trying to dismantle the giant gray IBM machines as and representing them in that ad as a totalitarian state and the live beautiful quick adorable personal uh 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 is like the tagline or something close to it of that ad. Um, and that just became like that was clever advertising. I doubt that anybody at Apple really believed the personal computer was going to be an instrument of personal liberation. I mean, it was going to make possible a lot of cool things, right? Like I remember when I got my first Macintosh, 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. Um it was a cool tool. It did a
lot of things. Um, 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 it in response to its critics establishes a Supreme Court. You get to last year when Anthropic uh hired a moral philosopher to write a constitution. you get to recently when Sam Alman was on Joe Rogan and said, "Oh, an AI president would be a great idea." Um, and so they're just 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 a hypers scale democracy with our input. Um, and they're not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it is it's like a cartoon version of the 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 in 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. Um but as a person who is
an American political historian I'm really interested in that. Uh, so this was an occasion to really closely inspect that. But that said, the book doesn't, you know, 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 it into a kind of delusional fantasy on the part of people like Sam Alman. No, I really like the section about the 1984 ad. Also then I think like 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 it you know that can't I can't help but let that color the way I look at when Sam Alman 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 in the way of history and all these things because clearly technology does affect our lives and in 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's 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 had 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? Like, and it was like as if you had your own personal telegram. 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 in 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. And so by the time you get 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 roll out 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. Like 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 hyperartisan among Americans who were following politics really avidly. So, you know, looking at it now, we could see, well, then that's a that's really just a distortion machine. And if politicians are using it to gauge the electorate, they're getting really bad information. Again, like you can say like Twitter was not trying to participate in the artificial state or undermine democracy. Twitter's trying to do business and get more users, you know, and sell more 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. Um can 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 cuz they don't really need them anymore. Maybe they just enslave them. Like it kind of depends. Are we in the Terminator or are we in Battlestar Galactica? Like it's just it's like there's different versions. And these stories go way back. They go back to the 1850s and the 1860s um and you know the early decades of kind of rumination about the consequences of industrialism. I think a lot of people I mean I 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 and 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 techn 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. What
dominates today is this kind of 19th century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress and 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 clearly were 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 um at moving through time and space like
a railroad car. Um and with that grew an incredible anxiety that found form in science fiction um again and again. My favorite one of these stories uh is was published I think 1909 by Ian Forester like right around when he was writing Room with a View. Um, but he wrote this story called The Machine Stops, which like could be subtitled The Room Without a View. And it's it's he imagines a future world, a 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 Door Dash. Like your food is delivered. You 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 matrixy. Um, and they're they all worship the machine that organizes their lives and brings to them in their little like 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 [clears throat] capacity than humans do. and humans lose have lost what capacity they had and then this the action of the climax of the story is when the machine stops. So I think it 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 fictiony 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 they're 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. And I bring this up partly because this is something I wrestle with as you know a reader of science fiction, someone who loves Isaac Azimma, for example, that I think it's true that like when Musk
or Alman 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 that they're sort of making up out of whole cloth, right? Yeah. Although weirdly like that's Heinline, that's not Azimoff, right? That's that's not Douglas Adams. Like sure, there is that thread in science fiction. Um, but what they tend to I mean I don't know. I guess Bezos is a
big Robert Heinline fan. Like that you could say, okay, that lines up well. Like they're literally they're reading it literally, but at least they're kind of getting the political message that's that you could find any rational person could find within that literary work. Um, 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. Yeah. I mean, if anyone who reads Kim Stanley Robbins's Mars trilogy and thinks that is a pro- capitalist Mars like novel, like that is Yeah. That's just totally bonkers. Um, 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. Um, why is it doomed to failure? Oh, I just think it, you know, we kind of already see and this is for this is something that's foreseen all the science fiction that I discussed. Is this great? It's not an Azimov story, but it's one of Azimov's famous stories from his boyhood about a future in which the foresters have defeated the wasters. But it's like Azimov was a big environmentalist and even as a younger man, but he read the story in
the 1930s in like a Hugo Gernick kind of knockoff science fiction magazine about using up of 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 rewing. 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. The artificial state will destroy the natural world. And yet it needs the na the resources of the natural world to run. In some of these
stories, we are very much in the kind of world where 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. Um, so it is doomed in the sense that there is not a possibility that the natural world um a habitable planet habitable for humans can survive the full construction and reliance on the devices of the artificial state. So I mean like that's how the science fiction works in any event. So I mean like you said you're a historian um not a politician or you know a futurist but I do you think that then what the defeat of the artificial state looks
like? Is it basically sort of just the 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 and these decisions are not popular are 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. um 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. Um Facebook News knew what it was doing with the news feed. But so you what you see is a lot of people show up at these like town meetings and say like what are we like we don't even have housing? We don't have health care. We 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 they going to be jobs? Are the jobs going to be long-lasting or are they just going to be for six months? Like what's going to happen, you know, to the egrets that live in this area? Whatever it is that
people want to know and they gen 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. And 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 I 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. I'll, 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 like where 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 that'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 dem democratic functioning has to be intact for people to actually be able to respond to malfeasants on the part of their repres 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 your thinking in 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 uh you know disruptive innovation which uh like it or not is very closely associated with techrunch because we have a tech you know big conference called disrupt. It's a thing that, you know, I think uncritically we've celebrated in the past, maybe more critically now, but I'm curious, you know, 10 years on. How do you feel about that idea of disruptive innovation? Yeah, I stand by everything in that piece. Um, 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 article about disruptive innovation, which was not an idea of a mine, it was an assignment. I mean, I guess I could have turned it down. Um, 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 is based on evidence from the archives and I just thought like it makes as a historic like it makes no sense. This use of evidence is completely unacceptable by any proper understanding of historical method. its argument has is in conversation with no meaningful understanding of how change happens. Um, 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 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 are involved in developing new technologies. People really want to think like what is this what am I doing? What is this what are going to be the consequence? 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. What? 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 guard rails on a technology that was tremendously exciting, improved people's lives in many, many ways, utterly changed the landscape, revolutionized tort law. Like, maybe I should think about that. Maybe there's something that I could learn from his 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 which all of which is just to say thanks for having me on. It's
been really fun talking to you Anthony. No thank you so much for joining us. Uh the book again is the rise and fall of the artificial state. It'll be out very soon. You should check it out and of course you can always follow us at EquityPod on X and threads. Thanks so much. Equity is hosted by Techrunch senior reporters and produced by Terresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
