What do you think?
Rate this book
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
Not yet published
Expected 25 Aug 26“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, as if humans were becoming to machines what animals had become to humans.” —Jill Lepore
“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
336 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication August 25, 2026
About the author
Jill Lepore
41 books1,585 followersJill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (Knopf, 1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award.
A co-founder of the magazine Common-place, Lepore’s essays and reviews have also appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, American Scholar, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Charles Warren Center, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has served as a consultant for the National Park Service and currently serves on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery and the Society of American Historians.
Jill lives in Cambridge,Massachusetts.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Having listened delightedly to Jill Lepore's science fiction-inflected backstory of Elon Musk on The Last Archive podcast, I was very excited when NetGalley approved my request to read the new book of which the Musk story was evidently but a small but integral part. And I was not disappointed.
Building on one of Hannah Arendt's central insights in The Human Condition - that dreams of a technological future free of our creaturely selves are as terrifying as they are doomed to failure - this book provides an intellectual genealogy of what Lepore calls the "artificial state" - the dream of replacing the messiness of various friction-filled projects based essentially on the idea of knowledge as humanistic endeavor and government as a project of human community with the clean dataist dystopia/utopia of rule by seamless algorithm. She calls this the "artificial state," somewhat misleading term, as she herself admits, since states are inherently 'artificial' and, moreover, most of the technocrats, while heavily reliant on states, like to pretend they will wither away in some weird inversion of Marx.
Whatever nits one might pick with the terminology, Lepore explores the long intellectual history of this ideal in two parts; the first concerns the rise of technological notions of government from beginning of statistical thinking (concommitent with the rise of liberal democracies) and the idea of "techne" as separate from "ars" (essentially splitting machine from humanistic creative endeavors). It would have been very easy for the narrative to get lost with technical descriptions of the rise of computing technology, the creation of the internet etc, but Lepore keeps her attention leanly focused on the connection between politics and data as it develops over the industrial age through the present day with the rise of AI. The second part of the book examines the influence of science fiction on believers of the artificial state, taking as its central point the Onion punchline that for our nerd overlords science fiction dystopias exist not to warn but rather to provide ideas. Here is where Lepore most clearly emphasizes a second strand of her thought - that the rise of the artificial state has coincided with the destruction of the nature one, and indeed she suggests that many of our concerns about robots - as our slaves (the word from which robot derives) or as instigators of our possible enslavement - reflect our haunted consciences about our own treatment of nature.
For those looking to rebel against the artificial state, there isn't much practical advance. The book really is almost entirely about the "rise" - the "fall" is there in so much as Lepore believes it represents a fundamental rebellion against our very humanity and should be resisted. That said, while I very much enjoyed this book's ambition, I think it didn't do enough to interrogate the role that a hollowed out liberalism played in making the artificial state seem inevitable to us now. The fact that human freedom has been, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reduced to the idea of "choice" and "choice" is something so emininently suited to algorithms is surely no coincidence. A broader understanding of freedom - informed by classical republicanism, various religious beliefs, humanistic socliasm etc - would maybe help us find more practical solutions to the situation in which we find ourselves, just as understanding how reducing freedom to mere choice would help explain how we got here (Indeed, this book could be read very profitably alongside Rosenfeld's The Age of Choice).
Many thanks to NetGalley. I wish I could assign this in classes, but, alas I fear my students would just rely on AI.
Building on one of Hannah Arendt's central insights in The Human Condition - that dreams of a technological future free of our creaturely selves are as terrifying as they are doomed to failure - this book provides an intellectual genealogy of what Lepore calls the "artificial state" - the dream of replacing the messiness of various friction-filled projects based essentially on the idea of knowledge as humanistic endeavor and government as a project of human community with the clean dataist dystopia/utopia of rule by seamless algorithm. She calls this the "artificial state," somewhat misleading term, as she herself admits, since states are inherently 'artificial' and, moreover, most of the technocrats, while heavily reliant on states, like to pretend they will wither away in some weird inversion of Marx.
Whatever nits one might pick with the terminology, Lepore explores the long intellectual history of this ideal in two parts; the first concerns the rise of technological notions of government from beginning of statistical thinking (concommitent with the rise of liberal democracies) and the idea of "techne" as separate from "ars" (essentially splitting machine from humanistic creative endeavors). It would have been very easy for the narrative to get lost with technical descriptions of the rise of computing technology, the creation of the internet etc, but Lepore keeps her attention leanly focused on the connection between politics and data as it develops over the industrial age through the present day with the rise of AI. The second part of the book examines the influence of science fiction on believers of the artificial state, taking as its central point the Onion punchline that for our nerd overlords science fiction dystopias exist not to warn but rather to provide ideas. Here is where Lepore most clearly emphasizes a second strand of her thought - that the rise of the artificial state has coincided with the destruction of the nature one, and indeed she suggests that many of our concerns about robots - as our slaves (the word from which robot derives) or as instigators of our possible enslavement - reflect our haunted consciences about our own treatment of nature.
For those looking to rebel against the artificial state, there isn't much practical advance. The book really is almost entirely about the "rise" - the "fall" is there in so much as Lepore believes it represents a fundamental rebellion against our very humanity and should be resisted. That said, while I very much enjoyed this book's ambition, I think it didn't do enough to interrogate the role that a hollowed out liberalism played in making the artificial state seem inevitable to us now. The fact that human freedom has been, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reduced to the idea of "choice" and "choice" is something so emininently suited to algorithms is surely no coincidence. A broader understanding of freedom - informed by classical republicanism, various religious beliefs, humanistic socliasm etc - would maybe help us find more practical solutions to the situation in which we find ourselves, just as understanding how reducing freedom to mere choice would help explain how we got here (Indeed, this book could be read very profitably alongside Rosenfeld's The Age of Choice).
Many thanks to NetGalley. I wish I could assign this in classes, but, alas I fear my students would just rely on AI.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
An in-depth and wide-ranging exploration of the rise of machines and technology (comprising the 'artificial state'). Alongside its rise, the decline and fall of the natural environment, democratic and constitutional governance, and corporate regulation. The "merchant princes" of Silicon Valley pursuing AI have coopted American government, corrupted the environment, and engineered their own perpetuity as the future (their vision at least) is more important than the concerns of the present, living world.
At its heart, this book is a paean to democracy, environmental protection, and engaging fully with the ideas of the past so richly imagined, and so deeply misunderstood by Silicon Valley elites, in classic science fiction. The irrevocable loss of the natural world in favor of the visions set forth by the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerburg are not inevitable, Lepore argues emphatically in the brief epilogue. We must envision, Lepore says (and I am paraphrasing here), an offramp, a different future and then work to make that a reality. It is an opportunity. A hopeful albeit challenging charge. We have no other home than planet Earth and must save it from our own folly.
The fear of AI and robot apocalypse, as I believe it is with alien invasion, has little to actually do with the rise of these machines and much more to do with the fall, degradation, destruction of nature and the reckoning we as a species must come to terms with the grief, revulsion, and dread over what we have wrought. That is the beating core of this book. And it is wonderfully articulated and argued supported by rich research and history.
At its heart, this book is a paean to democracy, environmental protection, and engaging fully with the ideas of the past so richly imagined, and so deeply misunderstood by Silicon Valley elites, in classic science fiction. The irrevocable loss of the natural world in favor of the visions set forth by the likes of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerburg are not inevitable, Lepore argues emphatically in the brief epilogue. We must envision, Lepore says (and I am paraphrasing here), an offramp, a different future and then work to make that a reality. It is an opportunity. A hopeful albeit challenging charge. We have no other home than planet Earth and must save it from our own folly.
The fear of AI and robot apocalypse, as I believe it is with alien invasion, has little to actually do with the rise of these machines and much more to do with the fall, degradation, destruction of nature and the reckoning we as a species must come to terms with the grief, revulsion, and dread over what we have wrought. That is the beating core of this book. And it is wonderfully articulated and argued supported by rich research and history.
Read
May 15, 2026Thoughts to come. It'll take awhile. I'm not certain what Dr Lepore was doing here. Stay tuned.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews