The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State describes the growing replacement of democratic processes by corporate-owned algorithmic systems as a new form of tyranny. This “Artificial State” erodes the foundations of liberal democracy by replacing human deliberation with automated prediction, amplifying political polarization and computational propaganda, and reducing citizenship to data-driven online engagement rather than meaningful participation in government by consent. Lepore traces this development from early experiments in computational politics to the present, showing how the growing use of computational tools to predict and influence political behavior has undermined democratic self-rule.

The book identifies a turning point in the development of this threat in early experiments with computational politics, which treated the electorate as a predictable, manageable machine. The primary example is the Simulmatics Corporation, whose “People Machine” was used first by the Democratic National Committee and later by John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. By feeding census data, polling results, and election returns into a computer, Simulmatics claimed it could simulate the entire electorate and advise the campaign on what to say and to whom. The company’s founders believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences” (54), and their effort marked a shift toward using computation to predict and influence voters rather than relying on political