← Back to Blog
August 9, 2026·4 min read·AIgentic.media

Tech Billionaires Can't Read Sci-Fi

ai-newsai-policyculturesilicon-valleysci-fidemocracy
Tech Billionaires Can't Read Sci-Fi

A Harvard historian who just won a Pulitzer for her work on the U.S. Constitution has a warning for the tech industry: the billionaires building your AI-powered future cannot read the science fiction that predicted it. And this literary illiteracy, she argues, is a genuine threat to democracy.

"In her upcoming book 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,' Jill Lepore warns that tech companies are increasingly replacing the functions of democratic government. This shift, she said, marks 'a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.'"

The argument that stings

On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the U.S. Constitution, laid out a critique that cuts deeper than the usual "tech is out of control" hand-wringing. Her central claim is that Silicon Valley's most visible leaders have built their worldview on a misreading of science fiction.

"While Lepore's book examines technocratic philosophies that go back centuries, she argued that many of Silicon Valley's charismatic leaders, especially Elon Musk, seem to be ushering in a future pulled from misread pulp science fiction and comic books," TechCrunch reported.

The irony, as Lepore articulated it, is almost too perfect: the genre that spent a century warning about corporate dystopia, algorithmic control, and the erosion of democratic governance gets strip-mined for its cool imagery while its central warnings bounce off like rain on a Cybertruck.

The Elon paradox

Lepore zeroed in on Musk as the most visible example of this contradiction. "But what's funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs," she said.

Musk's public persona draws heavily on science fiction visual language, the Cybertruck's blade-runner aesthetics, SpaceX's retro-future rockets, Neuralink's cyberpunk body modification. Yet the political vision he and many of his peers champion, minimal regulation, private authority over public goods, the transcendence of the nation-state, is the exact opposite of what almost every major work of science fiction actually argues.

The genre that gave us Blade Runner's corporate feudalism, RoboCop's privatized police, and The Expanse's earth-in-crisis isn't subtle about its politics. It takes a very particular kind of selective reading to absorb the aesthetics while missing the argument.

The artificial state is already here

Lepore's critique goes well beyond literary criticism. She argues that what she calls the "artificial state" is not a future scenario but a present reality.

"By the artificial state, I mean a kind of state that is replacing the liberal democratic nation-state in the United States and around the world," she told TechCrunch. "It's both a real thing, a construct, but it's also an idea."

She traces this idea from Enlightenment-era clockwork governments through 20th-century cybernetics to today's AI-driven platforms. The transformation, she notes, began with good intentions: efficiency, speed, cost reduction. But it has become something more deliberate.

"I think often these innovations in bringing new technologies to the operations of government have been extremely well intentioned," Lepore said. "And then, I think, only in the last 20, 25 years or so have these decisions been purposeful and deliberate as a kind of usurpation of the role of the nation-state. And that's not my speculation."

More than machines

Lepore's intervention arrives at a moment when the relationship between tech platforms and democratic governance has never been more strained. AI companies lobby for the right to self-regulate while training their models on the entirety of human expression. Social platforms decide what counts as political speech while their owners call themselves "free speech absolutists." And the technology that promises to augment human intelligence is increasingly deployed to replace human judgment entirely.

"I'm not anti-technologist," Lepore insisted in the interview. "My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state."

This distinction matters. Lepore is not arguing against progress or innovation. She is arguing against a specific political project, one that uses the aesthetics of a futurist revolution to conceal a deeply conservative transfer of power from democratic institutions to corporate boards.

Sources

Want to learn more?

Let's discuss how AI can transform your business.

Get in Touch

Related Articles

AI Is Shredding Millions of Rare Books
6 min read
Workers Are Bargaining With the Bots Now — and Winning Contract Clauses No One Saw Coming
6 min read
The US Just Spent $5 Billion to Make Science an AI Project — and Called It a Manhattan Project
6 min read