Jill Lepore warns Silicon Valley is building 'rule by algorithms' to replace democracy

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is sounding a stark alarm: private tech corporations are quietly, and sometimes deliberately, dismantling democratic governance and replacing it with what she calls an ‘artificial state.’ Jill Lepore, a Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer, lays out her thesis in the upcoming book ‘The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State,’ arguing that we’re witnessing a ‘return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.’

Speaking on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Lepore made a crucial distinction. ‘I’m not anti-technologist,’ she said, noting she’s married to a computer scientist. ‘My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state.’ She traces this shift through two phases: early innovations adopted for government efficiency, and a more recent, purposeful move by tech leaders to usurp state power entirely. Lepore points to prominent entrepreneurs who openly talk about moving beyond the nation-state, and to 1990s libertarian futurists who saw the internet as a tool to eradicate it.

Lepore doesn’t let Silicon Valley’s self-styled visionaries off the hook, singling out Elon Musk as a figure whose favorite pulp sci-fi completely contradicts his political beliefs. But she also pins blame on specific policy failures, notably the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which she describes as a product of a particular political moment deeply influenced by Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. That act, she suggests, locked us onto a path that has been very difficult to revisit.

As a political historian—not a tech journalist—Lepore is interested in the roads not taken. She insists there was nothing inevitable about this trajectory. The book explores the ‘what-ifs’ and alternatives that were debated in the 1990s before the current corporate-dominated internet became the default. Her argument isn’t just a critique of technology; it’s a demand to recognize that we are living under a new kind of state that nobody ever consented to.