Harvard Historian Jill Lepore Argues Tech Firms Are Replacing Government Functions

Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, and New Yorker staff writer, has a new book coming out called "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State." Her argument, laid out in an interview on TechCrunch's Equity podcast: private tech companies are increasingly doing the job government used to do, and almost nobody voted for that to happen.

Lepore calls this shift "a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines." She's not talking about a specific law or regulation. She's describing a slow, mostly unplanned transfer of authority from elected institutions to Silicon Valley boardrooms.

Her Argument, Stated Plainly

Lepore is careful to say she's not anti-technology. She told TechCrunch she's married to a computer scientist and finds the current wave of tech innovation genuinely exciting. Her issue isn't computers. It's governance.

"My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state," she said. "No one consented to that."

When a handful of companies control the infrastructure people use to communicate, bank, navigate, and increasingly interact with government services, those companies are making decisions that used to sit with elected officials or courts. Content moderation policies, algorithmic sorting of information, and AI systems used in hiring or lending all function like policy, even though no legislature wrote them and no voter can remove the people who did.

Where Lepore Points the Finger

Lepore singles out Elon Musk specifically, calling him one of Silicon Valley's "charismatic or not-so-charismatic leaders" pulling ideas from science fiction he apparently misread. Her sharpest line: "the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs."

She doesn't elaborate much on that claim in the excerpt available, and it reads more like a rhetorical jab than a fully argued case. Musk has built companies, in Tesla, SpaceX, X, and Neuralink, that operate with enormous influence over infrastructure, communication, and even government contracting through SpaceX's relationship with NASA and the Pentagon. Whether that makes him uniquely hypocritical compared to other tech executives running similarly powerful companies is a separate question Lepore doesn't fully answer here.

The Part Worth Pushing Back On

If the concern is genuinely about unelected corporate power replacing democratic functions, that concern applies just as much to Google's control over search and information flow, Amazon's dominance over logistics and cloud infrastructure that runs huge chunks of the federal government, Meta's moderation decisions affecting political speech, and Palantir's data contracts with federal agencies. Musk is an easy target because he's loud and politically active. But he's far from the only tech figure whose companies now perform quasi-governmental functions.

Lepore's framing, at least as presented in this interview, leans into a familiar media pattern of treating Musk as shorthand for tech overreach while giving less scrutiny to companies whose executives keep a lower public profile. The facts may not be wrong, but the focus is incomplete.

What's Actually Provable

The underlying claim, that tech companies now perform functions once reserved for government, is demonstrably true in specific cases. Payment processors and social platforms have de-platformed people and organizations with more practical consequence than most government sanctions. Algorithmic systems now influence bail decisions, insurance pricing, and job screening in ways courts and legislatures haven't fully caught up to regulating.

What's not proven is Lepore's broader claim that this amounts to "tyranny." That's a value judgment, not a factual finding. Reasonable people can look at the same facts, Silicon Valley companies wielding enormous unelected influence, and land on different conclusions about how dangerous that is versus how much of it is just modern infrastructure that happens to be privately owned.

What Happens Next

Lepore's book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," is set for release, tracing what she describes as centuries of technocratic philosophy through science fiction literature. Whether her argument holds up will depend on the specifics she lays out beyond the broad strokes given in the TechCrunch interview, including whatever detailed case she makes against Musk specifically and whether she applies the same scrutiny to the rest of the industry.

No legislation, court case, or federal investigation is tied to Lepore's thesis. The open question is whether Congress or regulators pick up the underlying issue she raises, unelected companies performing state-like functions, in any concrete policy form, or whether it stays a debate confined to books and podcasts.