Lecture 1 | Government by Machine

Jill Lepore’s 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values are an inquiry into what humans mean and intend—to think what we are doing—in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state for rule by automation and government by machine. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what Lepore calls the Artificial State. Yet little seems more inevitable than its eventual fall. These two lectures, richly illustrated with visual material, chronicle the rise of the Artificial State, attempt to reckon with what it has cost the natural world, and anticipate its fall.

The Artificial State is a digital communications infrastructure with which governments and private corporations organize and automate political and other public discourse by way of everything from direct mailing and robocalls to predictive algorithms, bots, social media campaigns, and artificial intelligence. It is the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely message-tested online engagement, drones in place of the demos. Where did it come from? And how did it happen? Lepore traces the long and mostly accidental history of the automation of the state.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.  A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, and winner of the PEN prize for the Art of the Essay, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) and The Deadline, a collection of essays (2023). Her latest book is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (September 2025).