The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

As the book’s author and narrator, historian Jill Lepore investigates the origins of the “Artificial State”—her term for a system in which digital technologies increasingly automate political behavior and public discourse. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s call “to think what we are doing” (xiii), she examines the growing reliance on automated systems for decisions once made through human judgment. Her method combines historical excavation with literary criticism, tracing the ideological roots of the Artificial State from 17th-century philosophy and 1930s technocracy to the science fiction of the Cold War. Lepore argues that many ideas promoted as technological innovations have histories that their present-day advocates overlook.

Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State grew out of her 2026 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Yale University and also draws on lectures, teaching, journalism, and radio work concerning technology, politics, evidence, and law. Her previous books include These Truths: A History of the United States, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, and The Secret History of Wonder Woman.