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Jill Lepore's 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State': Tech Leaders Are 'Bad Readers' Who Turned Sci-Fi Warnings Into Product Roadmaps
The Harvard historian's TechCrunch interview drew 274 points and 230 comments on August 9 for the argument that private corporations have absorbed the functions of the state without public consent, producing 'rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.' Her literary charge is specific: E.M. Forster's 1909 'The Machine Stops' and Heinlein's technocratic libertarianism were cautionary tales, and Silicon Valley read them as blueprints. On tech CEOs she is blunt — 'they're not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it's like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad' — and on Musk, 'the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.'
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