Historian Jill Lepore warned against technology companies taking over government functions
Jill Lepore, a historian at Harvard University and a staff writer for *The New Yorker*, stated that technology corporations are increasingly taking on the functions of a democratic state. On TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, she described this process as the formation of an “artificial state”—a model in which algorithms, corporations, and machines are supplanting the democratic nation-state.
Lepore has dedicated her upcoming book, *The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State*, to this topic. She says she is not opposed to technology per se, but rather criticizes the gradual takeover of government functions by private companies. The researcher believes that technology was initially introduced into public administration to increase speed, reduce costs, and improve efficiency; however, over the past 20–25 years, some of these solutions have become a deliberate effort to supplant the role of the nation-state.
Lepore also noted that many futurists of the 1990s with libertarian views viewed the development of the internet as a means to move beyond the era of nation-states. She recalled discussions about the future of the internet in the 1990s and said that the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a product of a specific political moment that is difficult to revise.
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According to the historian, tech executives—including Elon Musk—often draw on misinterpreted science fiction and comic books. As examples of companies adopting the attributes of a state, she cited Facebook News’ creation of a “supreme court” after the 2016 U.S. election, Anthropic’s hiring of a moral philosopher to draft a “constitution,” and Sam Altman’s statement that an AI president would be a good idea.
Separately, Lepore criticized the notion of social media as a tool for direct democracy. She noted that Twitter eventually began to market itself as a “city council in your pocket,” even though more than 90% of political posts there were created by less than 10% of active users. In her view, this group did not represent the electorate as a whole and could distort politicians’ perceptions of public sentiment.
In her book, Lepore also traces the tradition of science fiction featuring machines that gradually take over human and governmental functions. Among such works, she cited Edward Morgan Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops,” published in 1909, in which people become dependent on a system that organizes every aspect of their lives.
