Harvard historian Jill Lepore argued in an interview highlighted on August 9, 2026, that private technology companies are increasingly assuming functions traditionally performed by democratic states. She calls the resulting structure an “artificial state,” distinguishing her criticism of corporate power from opposition to technology itself.
Lepore discussed the argument on TechCrunch’s *Equity* podcast ahead of her book *The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State*. Her historical account traces centuries of proposals for government by machines and the recurring idea that technological systems can replace political institutions. She also argues that such arrangements are ultimately unstable.
The concern is not simply that public agencies use new tools. Governments have long adopted technology to improve speed, lower cost and make administration more efficient. Lepore says the change becomes politically significant when private companies deliberately take over state-like roles and influential entrepreneurs advocate moving beyond the nation-state. Citizens did not collectively consent to that transfer of authority, she argues.
Her critique reaches the language Silicon Valley uses to describe platforms. Calling Twitter a digital town square, for example, treats a privately controlled service as though it were a civic institution with public obligations. A company determines the system’s rules, access and commercial priorities even when public debate occurs inside it. For Lepore, that gap between civic metaphor and corporate governance is central.
Science fiction supplies another strand of the argument. Lepore contends that some technology leaders, particularly Elon Musk, derive political ideas from selective readings of pulp fiction and comic books. She says the stories Musk favors can undermine rather than support his expressed beliefs. The interview positions this as literary and political criticism, not an empirical finding about a particular product.
Lepore describes herself as enthusiastic about intellectual and technological change and notes that she is married to a computer scientist. Her objection concerns institutional power: efficiency can obscure questions about who decides, who is accountable and whether equal rights survive rule by corporate systems and algorithms.
The interview also connected the thesis to Apple’s 1984 Macintosh advertisement and opposition to data-centre projects. Those examples place current disputes within a longer history of promises that machines will liberate people from bureaucracy or politics.
Lepore’s “artificial state” is an interpretive framework, not a report that democratic government has already been formally replaced. Its warning is that gradual delegation can become structural before the public recognizes it as a political choice. Her proposed historical lens asks people to evaluate digital systems not only by capability and convenience, but by consent, legitimacy and the concentration of governing power.
