Jill Lepore’s new book warns of an ‘Artificial State’ driven by tech power

Pulitzer prize-winning US historian Jill Lepore has turned her attention to the political and cultural consequences of artificial intelligence in The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, a new book that treats the rise of private tech power as a direct threat to liberal democracy. Lepore’s central warning is stark: a small number of extraordinarily powerful technology companies, led by men whose priorities may not match the wellbeing of the planet or its people, are helping drive civilisation toward a democracy-crushing dystopia.

The ‘Artificial State’ Lepore uses the phrase “Artificial State” to describe both a dream and a reality. In its most extreme form, it is the fantasy of an atomised society in which an elite abandons constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state and even humanity itself in favour of automation, machine government and artificial intelligence. At the same time, Lepore argues, elements of this future are already visible in the present, especially in the way public discourse has migrated onto privately owned platforms where monetised attention matters above everything else.

That shift, she suggests, has already altered the conditions of democratic life. The design of social media feeds, which can be used to shape behaviour whether to sell products or move political opinion, is now widely recognised. Lepore also points to X, formerly Twitter, as an example of a platform saturated with bots operated by state, non-state, criminal and corporate actors, producing a flood of rage-driven content that deepens political polarisation.

The book broadens its focus beyond social media to what Lepore describes as the ambitions of a small number of “staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes” in Silicon Valley. In her account, figures including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are pursuing projects that range from space travel to ever-greater computational power in the AI race with China, even as climate concerns remain urgent. Lepore’s critique is that these dreams of escape — whether to Mars, a bunker in New Zealand, or a future of frozen-brain uploads — reveal a class prepared to abandon the Earth it is helping to overheat.

History, science fiction and power Lepore is known for writing compact, vivid historical episodes, and the book draws on that strength through a series of small-scale histories linking past and present. She traces the roots of techno-libertarian thinking to paranoid Cold War science fiction, while also reaching back to ancient Mesopotamia and the origins of the census. Her point is that counting populations has long given rulers the ability to tally, torment and tax those they govern.

The book also surveys 20th-century science-fiction tropes, many of which, Lepore argues, have seeped into the imagination of the modern Technorati. While she reads writers such as Isaac Asimov as cautionary, she suggests that some contemporary tech architects have treated such stories as practical guides for building machines that might one day rule human beings. That argument gives the book a wide historical sweep, tying present-day AI anxieties to older fantasies of control, surveillance and technological transcendence.

Lepore has described the result as “a grumpy book”, and the tone is indeed ominous. Yet she does not present herself as an unqualified AI doomer. Her criticism is not of technology alone, but of the absence of a coherent, democratically agreed strategy for deciding how it should be developed and used. Even so, the book’s argument often collapses different technologies into a single threatening category, inviting questions about whether every form of machine intelligence belongs in the same moral and political register.

What matters most for readers, and for the publishing and policy debates Lepore is entering, is the scale of the challenge she identifies. Her book insists that the real danger is not simply automation itself, but the transfer of power to a tiny group of unelected business leaders who are shaping the digital environment and, potentially, the future of democracy. Lepore ends by urging readers to unplug and reconnect with nature and animals, but her larger warning is that logging off, however sensible, can only ever be a beginning.