Jill Lepore says 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 for the argument that private corporations have absorbed state functions without public consent, producing "rule by algorithms, corporations, machines." Her literary charge is specific: Forster's 1909 "The Machine Stops" and Heinlein's technocratic libertarianism were cautionary tales, and Silicon Valley read them as blueprints. On tech CEOs: "not people with a sophisticated political philosophy, but it's like a cartoon version of that 1984 Macintosh ad."