The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what I call the Artificial State. Yet little seems to me more inevitable than its eventual fall, the exhale that follows every inhale, the day that follows night, Icarus’s plunge to the ocean after flying too close to the sun.”

Lepore establishes her book’s central thesis by framing the Artificial State’s rise as a reckless historical transformation. The images of breathing and day following night make its eventual fall appear inevitable, while the Icarus allusion links technological ambition with overreach.

“The liberal nation-state requires the consent of the governed, the voice vote, quavering; the raised hand, sweating; the signature, wavering; the heart, pulsing. The Artificial State is government without consent, even government without humans.”

Lepore defines the core political threat of the Artificial State by contrasting it with the embodied nature of democratic consent. The “quavering” voice, “sweating” hand, and “pulsing” heart make democratic participation distinctly human, in contrast to “government without humans.” This contrast directly introduces the theme of The Threat of Algorithmic Rule to Democracy.

“For all of Musk’s supposed futurism, nearly everything he promised as he rose to prominence, wealth, and power came from Technocracy’s past, from a failed movement that advocated some of the most discredited ideas of the twentieth century.”

Lepore undercuts the idea of Musk as a futurist by tracing his ideas to the much older Technocracy movement. Her contrast between “futurism” and the “past” questions how new these supposedly futuristic ideas really are.