The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Lepore’s analysis of the modern tech elite’s political ambitions is grounded in the history of Technocracy Inc., a radical movement that emerged in the United States in the 1930s. In The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Lepore connects this movement to later efforts to apply technological systems to political governance. Led by Howard Scott during the Great Depression, Technocracy Inc. argued that both capitalism and representative democracy were obsolete. The movement proposed a radical alternative: a society run not by politicians but by engineers and scientists who would manage the economy and state based on data and scientific principles. Historian Kyunghwan Oh situates the movement within the political and economic uncertainty of the interwar period, explaining that it drew on scientific management and institutional economics to propose reorganizing society around greater productive efficiency and reduced waste (Oh, Kyunghwan. “A Non-Conforming Technocratic Dream: Howard Scott’s Technocracy Movement.” Management & Organizational History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2024, pp. 108-123).

Lepore argues that aspects of this vision have reappeared in contemporary technological approaches to governance. She details the movement’s plan for an “energy state” and a “Technate of America” (32), where members of the movement identified themselves by numbers and political decision-making would be replaced by technical administration.