21 August 2026
Historian Lepore warns private tech power threatens democracy itself
First reported
The Guardian ran this on , 2 days before the next source picked it up.
- Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore's new book argues that a small group of billionaires like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are pursuing a vision of society run by machines instead of democratic institutions.
- Lepore identifies two forms of this threat: a fantasy future of AI-ruled automation, and a present reality where social media platforms owned by companies manipulate public discourse through algorithmic feeds designed to polarize.
Reported by The New York Times, The Guardian