Equity · Friday, August 7, 2026
Historian Jill Lepore argues that large tech corporations are taking over the functions of liberal democratic states, which she views as a negative development. She traces the rise of this idea and its potential failure through science fiction in her new book, 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.' Lepore distinguishes this trend from technology itself, focusing on how private companies have assumed state-like roles without consent.
“Um, by the artificial state, I mean, um, a kind of state that is replacing the liberal democratic nation state. In the United States and around the world, and I think slowly.”
“My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state. Uh, no one consented to that.”
“You could take a Peter Thiel's idea that freedom and democracy are not compatible, that the era of the nation state, people who are looking forward to an era of statelessness.”