When Tech Firms Act Like Governments: Lepore and India's Answer
A new book from historian Jill Lepore says tech giants are turning into quasi-governments. India's state-built digital rails may be the clearest proof there is a better path.
The News
Jill Lepore, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist, has written a book arguing that the largest technology companies are quietly taking on the powers and language of government. Speaking on TechCrunch's Equity podcast on 7 August 2026, she previewed "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State", forthcoming from W.W. Norton, with a blunt claim: the industry keeps mistaking engineering progress for political legitimacy.
Her evidence is largely rhetorical. Twitter once billed itself as a "town hall in your pocket". Anthropic gave its Claude model a written "constitution". Sam Altman has publicly floated the idea of an AI president. Lepore treats these not as marketing flourishes but as a pattern, tracing a line from Apple's 1984 Macintosh advertisement to founders who, she argues, increasingly intend to displace the institutions of the nation-state.
To make the point she reaches back to E.M. Forster's 1909 story "The Machine Stops", which she calls a blueprint for the artificial state and, less kindly, likens to the diary of an unhappy YouTuber. Her verdict is that any polity run by algorithm is inherently unstable and bound to fail.
Why It Matters
The argument arrives just as the frontier labs have grown richer and, in some respects, more powerful than the states they sit beside. When a private firm writes what it calls a constitution for a chatbot, or when a founder muses about algorithmic leadership, the boundary between vendor and sovereign starts to blur. Lepore's contribution is to show that the impulse is old rather than new, the latest version of a century-long habit of wrapping commercial ambition in civic language.
There is a useful precedent. A decade ago, Facebook and Twitter were routinely described as the new public square, a framing that ended in bruising fights over moderation, elections and speech. The lesson then, as now, is that treating a company's product as public infrastructure invites public accountability the company is rarely built to bear.
Indian Angle
India is arguably the strongest living rebuttal to Lepore's thesis. Where Silicon Valley built private platforms that came to behave like quasi-states, India built public digital rails and left private firms to compete on top of them. Aadhaar, UPI and the broader India Stack are governed by public bodies such as UIDAI and NPCI, not by any single company's self-authored charter.
That design choice shapes the local startup economy. Razorpay, PhonePe and Open thrive precisely because identity and payments form a shared public utility rather than a private moat one incumbent can pull up behind it. The DPDP Act of 2023 and MeitY's broader stance pull in the opposite direction to the artificial state, placing data rights with citizens and regulators rather than the platform.
For home-grown AI builders such as Sarvam and Krutrim, the warning doubles as a pitch. Deploying on sovereign, publicly governed infrastructure is a credible selling point to enterprises, banks and government buyers wary of handing control to a foreign frontier lab.
FAQ
What is Jill Lepore's core argument?
That technology companies increasingly adopt the functions and vocabulary of government, mistaking product-building for statecraft. In her forthcoming book she calls the result the artificial state and argues it is unsustainable, echoing older warnings from science fiction that Silicon Valley leaders, in her view, have misread.
When was this discussed?
Lepore laid out the thesis on TechCrunch's Equity podcast on 7 August 2026, ahead of the book's release through W.W. Norton. The episode was hosted by Anthony Ha.
Why is this relevant to Indian readers?
India took a different path, building state-governed digital public infrastructure rather than ceding that role to private platforms. That makes the country a real-world test of whether public rails can outperform the artificial state model now dominant in the United States.
Where can I hear the original?
The full conversation is available on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, linked below.
This story was reported by TechCrunch. Read the full original coverage at TechCrunch.