Book Note: “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State” (2026), by Jill Lepore.
Sept, 21, 2026
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State (2026), by Jill Lepore.
Lepore is a historian, a Harvard Professor, a New Yorker staff writer, and a humanist. Her new book has its heart in the right place, though it contains a truckload of historical data of little moment and tenuous relevancy to Lepore’s target, the “technological government of humanity,” which commendably she would like to have dismantled and replaced by the “democratic government of technology.”
As emerges in her book, the rise of the artificial state has been a longterm process. Sparked by dramatic advances in artificial intelligence, it has recently accelerated, accompanied by, and abetting, a shocking concentration of wealth and power in the hands of men who with few exceptions appear to be deficient in humanistic values and sensibilities.
How can the rise of the artificial state be stopped? What can make it fall? Lepore’s book is long on factoids and short on penetrating analysis. She says that the artificial state (the technologically directed society) can be “dismantled,” which I take to mean that its working elements can be controlled and constructively channeled for the common good. But her remarks sensibly suggest that reaching such a goal will require an informed, enlightened, humanistically ingrained, and morally constituted electorate. Thus, the “fall of the artificial state,” though it is included in her book’s title, is not something that has happened or gives any indication of happening; it’s only a hope.
Lepore doesn’t come to grips with the political and social phenomena that have propelled the artificial state’s continuing rise, most glaringly perhaps: (i), the extreme right-wing shift in our polity, fueled by the siren call of the selfish and self-justifying philosophy of the novelist Ayn Rand and like-minded academics; (ii) the flourishing of cynical political opportunists — Newt Gingrich comes first to mind; (iii) the extreme increase in wealth inequality and consequent imbalancing of political power; (iv) the continuing tenure of the stunningly corrupt, sociopathic, aspiring autocrat in the White House; (v) the submission to Trump and Trumpism of nearly every politician in the Republican Party, accompanied by the expulsion of noncompliants regardless of the impeccability of their conservative credentials. (Liz Cheney is the shining example.) — and (vi) the cynical and irresponsible behavior of innumerable bad actors making use of social media.
Most disturbing among the flashing red lights and clanging alarm bells is the acquiescence to the Trump regime by individuals who control some of our largest and most powerful technology companies, academic institutions, media companies, law firms, and other influential entities. It is now more accurate to describe the U.S. as an oligarchy, quasi autocracy, or rogue superpower than as a constitutional democracy. Money no longer merely talks. It rules.
Lepore asserts that great threats to humanity posed by imperialism, fascism, communism, colonialism, and so forth have been turned back. So, she says, the defeat of the artificial state “can still happen,” but then she lists the sort of things that will be required to make it happen — for example, philosophy, art, history, and literature — all requiring a sizable portion of the electorate to have become steeped in the humanities! She’s probably right, but she’s also squarely in Good-luck-with-that territory.
Perhaps the most basic underlying problem, which Lepore doesn’t examine, is that the gap between the super rich and ordinary people has entered a hyper development phase, by which I mean that the ratio of power to strategically situated great piles of money has so sharply increased that it may have passed the tipping point, the point where boots stomp on the ground so heavily that democracy can no longer spring forth from the grass roots that nourish it.
It’s a bad sign that nearly all the super-billionaires (the prime power-wielders in the American political system as it has been reshaped by a Supreme Court dominated by right-wing extremist ideologues) tend to be high-I.Q., avaricious, shallow fantasizers who are lavish donors to the Republican Party and its candidates. Getting to be a super-billionaire appears to require having a character and world view that is anti-humanistic and toxic for society. The artificial state may fall, taking us with it.
