The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

By a writer hailed as “America’s greatest living essayist” (Fintan O’Toole), an urgent account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world.



“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of both human community and the capacity for self-government,” writes the prizewinning historian Jill Lepore in her astounding, Orwellian account of how technology has undermined democracy around the world. Tracing the rise and fall of what she calls the “Artificial State” over more than a century, Lepore examines how political campaigns have been reduced to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, how multinational corporations control public discourse, and how the era of the liberal nation-state is coming to an end, replaced by the rule of artificially intelligent machines. In a luminous, anguished rumination on everything from robot rights and Elon Musk’s origins to what data centers cost wildlife, Lepore offers a vantage point and a history wholly missing from the debate about the decay of democracy, the destruction of the natural world, and the future of humanity.