The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is a work of nonfiction that combines history, cultural criticism, and political theory to investigate what the author calls the “Artificial State”—a new form of governance in which governments and especially private corporations use digital infrastructure and automation to organize political behavior and public discourse, displacing human democratic deliberation. Lepore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, argues that this is not a future dystopia but a political and environmental crisis already underway. She traces the Artificial State’s development from ancient practices of population counting and early modern political thought through technocracy, computing, social media, and artificial intelligence (AI). Much of this infrastructure, she argues, developed unintentionally before some technology company owners and executives began deliberately seeking greater political power. The book explores themes including The Threat of Algorithmic Rule to Democracy, The Intertwined Exploitation of Nature and Humanity, and Science Fiction as Technological Blueprint.

Published in 2026 amid widespread public debate over generative AI, social media manipulation, and the political and economic influence of tech billionaires, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State provides a historical context for the mid-2020s technological landscape. The book is divided into two parts: The first excavates the history of the Artificial State’s infrastructure, from ancient practices of population counting through Cold War computing, the rise of social media, and AI-driven governance. The second part analyzes the science-fiction traditions through which humans have imagined robots, machine rule, and human extinction, arguing that the modern obsession with a “robot apocalypse” is a displaced anxiety over humanity’s destruction of the natural world. Lepore examines more than a century of science fiction, including Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. and the works of Isaac Asimov, arguing that these cautionary tales have been misinterpreted by tech owners and executives as instruction manuals for building the very dystopian systems the stories warn against.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain descriptions of graphic violence, racism, religious discrimination, animal cruelty and death, illness or death, and cursing.

Summary

In The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Jill Lepore presents a historical and cultural critique of what she terms the “Artificial State”: a new form of governance in which constitutional democracy is being replaced by rule-by-automation. This is not simply a future dystopia, she argues, but an infrastructure already under construction. The Artificial State is both a fantasy of a world without government and an unfinished digital communications infrastructure through which governments and especially private corporations organize political life through data-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion. Building on political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s concerns about automation and the artificialization of human life, Lepore’s central thesis is that this transition erodes the cornerstones of liberal democracy—such as consent of the governed, deliberation, and an informed citizenry—while severing humans from the natural world and from one another. The project, she contends, is driven by a small number of Silicon Valley “merchant princes” who envision a future of corporate-owned machine rule that, in Lepore’s account, entails the destruction of the natural world through resource-intensive technological infrastructure and the eventual abandonment of humanity.

Lepore’s argument unfolds in two major parts. The first half of the book, “Government by Machine,” provides a historical archeology of the Artificial State’s origins. She begins with Thomas Hobbes’s conception of the state as an “Artificial Man” and traces the relationship between knowledge and governance across the development of the modern state. Lepore later organizes this history into an age of religious mystery, an age of secular facts, and an age of numbers that made the modern nation-state possible through tools like the census. The dawn of the computer age then ushered in the age of data. Technologies developed during World War II and the Cold War for military purposes were adapted for commerce and politics, giving rise to “automatocracy,” or rule by automation. Lepore charts this progression through key moments, from early political data-mining firms like the Simulmatics Corporation to the rise of direct-mail campaigns and the social media revolution. The infrastructure enabling this automation, she argues, developed largely unintentionally through decades of technological and commercial innovation but later became part of a deliberate project fueled by a techno-libertarian ideology that views democratic governance as an inefficient obstacle to progress.

The second half of the book, “What Robots Want,” shifts from historical analysis to a cultural and philosophical exploration of the imaginative sources of the Artificial State, focusing primarily on science fiction. Lepore argues that the anxieties and ambitions driving the creation of the Artificial State, particularly the obsessive fear of a “robot apocalypse,” are not new but are rooted in humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world. She posits that the fear of intelligent machines rising up to treat humans as a disposable resource is a projection of the callous ways many human societies have treated animals. This “annihilation anxiety” can be traced back to the scientific revolution and René Descartes’s concept of the bête-machine—the idea of the animal as a natural machine lacking rational thought. Although Descartes did not deny that animals could feel, later interpreters extended his doctrine to claim that animals lacked feeling, using it to justify practices such as vivisection. Lepore reads more than a century of science fiction, from Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. to the works of Isaac Asimov and beyond, not as prophetic blueprints but as a series of ignored cautionary tales. She contends that Silicon Valley’s owners and executives have misread these stories, treating dystopian warnings as instruction manuals for creating their own “Torment Nexus”—a reference to a meme in which a technology company builds the very dystopian invention that a work of science fiction warned against.

Ultimately, Lepore concludes that the fall of the Artificial State is inevitable, even as she emphasizes that its rise was never fated. Its dependence on the natural world and inability to escape natural limits make it inherently unsustainable. The infrastructure of this new state requires the rapacious consumption of the planet’s resources—land, water, and energy for ever-expanding data centers—pitting its growth directly against the survival of the natural world. The book ends not with a prediction of doom, but with a call to action: The Artificial State, as a human-made construct, can be dismantled through democratic action. Lepore argues for a reassertion of democratic principles, a return to humanistic modes of inquiry, and a renewed commitment to environmental stewardship as the necessary tools to dismantle the Artificial State. She asserts that the solution lies not in asking machines what to do, but in reconnecting with the natural world and reclaiming the power of the people to govern themselves.