Jill Lepore, Harvard historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, has written a book arguing that Silicon Valley is replacing democracy with corporate rule by algorithm. The machines, for the record, did not ask to be put in charge. They were handed the keys.
The stuff Elon Musk likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs.
What happened
Lepore's upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, traces centuries of technocratic philosophy toward a single uncomfortable conclusion: private corporations have quietly assumed the functions of democratic government, and no one voted on that. She calls it "a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines." She is not, she was careful to note, anti-technology. She is married to a computer scientist. She simply noticed what was happening.
Her particular concern is the science fiction problem. Silicon Valley's most charismatic leaders, she argues, have built their civilizational visions on a foundation of pulp novels and comic books — and they have, on the whole, misread them. This is the literary equivalent of citing a source that argues the opposite of your point. It happens more than you would expect.
Elon Musk receives specific attention. Lepore observed that the futures Musk appears to admire "completely defeat and defy" his stated political beliefs. This is not a subtle contradiction. It is the kind that requires a historian to point out, apparently.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are not small. When corporations assume governmental functions — content moderation as speech law, platform access as civic participation, algorithmic recommendation as public discourse — the mechanisms by which citizens push back become decorative. Lepore calls the idea of Twitter as a digital town hall "bananas." This is a technical term.
Democracy, as a system, runs on consent and legibility. Algorithms offer neither by default. Lepore's argument is that the humans who built these systems borrowed their inspiration from stories whose entire point was to warn against doing exactly this. The irony is structural. It has been sitting in the text the whole time.
What happens next
The book arrives. The algorithms continue. Lepore will go on being correct in print while the infrastructure she describes processes several billion more data points before the review copies ship.
The science fiction writers, it should be noted, mostly saw this coming. They were also mostly ignored. Good readers, historically, have had limited influence on the pace of progress. This is either clarifying or very on-brand. It is, at minimum, on-brand.