It is odd to think how, as recently as 15 years ago, criticism of Silicon Valley’s products and services was considered provocative and heterodox. A new genre known as “tech-lash” literature emerged in the wake of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget (2010) and Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion (2011). After hopeful grassroots movements that had been aided by social media – the Arab Spring, the Indignados, Occupy – fizzled out, a more menacing image of digital politics was formed in 2016 after it emerged that Facebook data had been used by the Vote Leave and Donald Trump campaigns to target voters in Britain and the US, respectively.
Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018) added weight and detailed empirical analysis to a general sense that the technologies that had once promised liberation and community were now being used to manipulate their users. Today, non-fiction sections of bookshops are littered with laments for the new dark age that is corrupting our attention, destroying our mental health and harming children. In the public imagination, Silicon Valley has lost the last vestiges of bottom-up political ideology, and is now associated with the likes of Palantir, which puts artificial intelligence in the service of the Trump war machine and the violent assertion of “Western” supremacy.
After these grim developments, Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State deepens the pessimism further. She paints a nightmarish picture of how democracy – specifically in the US – has been corrupted by forces of automation, surveillance and control. Do not be mistaken by the second half of the title: while she tells us that this technological takeover is “doomed”, the book offers few clues as to how or why its “fall” will occur, save for the fact that the “artificial state” is still not a fait accompli and that its architects aren’t half as smart as they would like to think.
The occasion for this fresh contribution to the “tech-lash” genre is the sudden acceleration in the development of artificial intelligence, after the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. The alliance between the second Trump administration and billionaire surveillance capitalists raises the stakes further, producing centres of power without any humanist imagination or respect for the natural world. Planetary boundaries are ignored by Elon Musk and his ilk, who believe that civilisation can simply move to another planet if necessary. A fetishisation of the “artificial” is of a piece with disdain for nature and our dependence on it.
AI threatens to remove human beings from some of the essential functions of liberal democracy, by empowering a small oligarchical elite and reducing the rest of us to data points. The noble democratic and republican ideals on which the US was built are being threatened by an emerging political entity that Lepore names the “Artificial State”, within which:
Nearly every element of public and democratic life – civil society, representative government, an informed citizenry, equality of rights, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and faith in elections – is vulnerable to subversion through the reduction of politics to the digital manipulation of attention-mining algorithms, the trussing of government by corporate-owned digital architecture, the diminishment of citizenship to minutely tested online engagement.
We are now at the point where government can proceed without the consent of the governed; indeed, it can proceed without human agency altogether.
This is a depressing prognosis, though not an altogether novel one. Pessimism of such intensity has echoes in the writing of mid-20th-century European exiles: Lepore appeals to the inheritance of Hannah Arendt, but one might equally think of Frankfurt School émigrés such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. I confess I was not always entirely sure what the “Artificial State” is, or what qualifies it as distinctively “artificial” (Lepore admits that “all states are artifices”).
That conceptual weakness becomes, if anything, more acute due to the book’s extraordinary historical range, which is its real distinction. Lepore is a staff writer at the New Yorker and also a professor of American history at Harvard. And while her pessimism is provoked by the current crisis of US democracy and the rise of a tech oligarchy, her book looks back – often a long way back – for an origin story of today’s nightmare.
Glimmers of post-humanism can be found in the work of Descartes in the 17th century, for whom physiology could be understood along mechanical lines. Efforts to govern society through data collection emerge during the Enlightenment, and then become increasingly mechanised with technical advances in the late 19th century. A self-styled “Technocracy” movement took off in the early 1930s, promising a superior form of government to democracy. The historical details are intriguing and rich, even while they serve to blur the distinction between today’s “artificial state” and modern government in general.
There are, however, some origins that count more than others. Lepore dedicates particular attention to the US in the 1950s, when “the building of the infrastructure of the Artificial State began, with the construction of machines that could count better, faster, and more accurately than humans by orders of magnitude”. The birth of the digital computer during this period, built with the aid of information theory, cybernetics and Cold War investment, represents a turning point in Lepore’s narrative.
It was also during the 1950s – specifically via a 1955 edition of a science-fiction magazine – that a distinctive field of “artificial intelligence” was born. The term helped to delineate a research agenda, based upon the notion that human thought could be replicated mechanically, and then massively accelerated and multiplied, with the aid of Pentagon spending. Arendt identified the launch of Sputnik in 1957 as a fatal moment, in which the commitment to a shared human “world” was abandoned in favour of a technocratic view from above. Lepore views the birth of artificial intelligence as a component of the same process of dehumanisation and de-democratisation.
And yet fictional visions of automated humanity pre-dated its applied technological pursuit. Science fiction plays an integral part in Lepore’s narrative, with HG Wells and Isaac Asimov offering prescient portrayals of robotics and technocratic power. Their visions should have been read as warnings, seeing as they extrapolated from the spread of machines and government by data in the 1920s and 1930s. So imaginatively depleted are today’s tech oligarchs that several of them have spoken passionately of particular sci-fi and fantasy novels (as Musk has of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), whose underlying political message is diametrically opposed to the technological agendas those oligarchs are pursuing. Raking through early fictional visions of mechanical dystopias, Lepore shows convincingly how literature is a better guide to politics and power than the technocrats’ mathematical models.
Lepore’s feverish appetite for historical and cultural material drives the book along, into surprising and occasionally revelatory quarters. She weaves between history of technology, literary and cultural history, and damning denunciations of the Silicon Valley overlords. But the speed with which she moves from topic to topic frequently feels out of control. Every example offers a possible tangent; every tangent then becomes its own argument. If there was a point at the beginning of a given chapter, it has invariably been lost by the end. The main thread left linking each bit together is a lamentation that men such as Musk are in charge, and that the great tradition of American democracy is being trampled on.
Lepore’s depth of feeling is clearly authentic. The sincerity of her rage and despair seems beyond question, as does her belief in what American democracy might once have offered. Indeed, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State might be best read as performative in nature, more an exhibition of what the humanities can still offer, and the dire consequences of shutting these insights out of politics. At a time when the humanistic study of languages, literature and history is under intense pressure, Lepore’s howl of refusal to accept the fate that engineers have ordained for her intellectual craft still has a stirring dignity about it.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
Jill Lepore
Allen Lane, 336pp, £25
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[Further reading: Claudia Rankine’s new visions]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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