Jill Lepore’s artificial state thesis has a publication date now: 25 August 2026, when Liveright/Norton releases The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State in the United States, with Kirkus Reviews listing the 320-page volume under ISBN 9781324098423. The UK edition, published by Allen Lane under Penguin UK, runs 336 pages and is priced at £25.00.
Lepore, a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for her history of the US Constitution, spent the book arguing that private corporations have quietly swallowed the functions of democratic government, arriving at what she calls ‘a return to tyranny and mystification in the form of rule by algorithms, corporations, machines.’
The New York Times book review, published on 19 August 2026, frames her preface as ‘an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine and replacement by artificial intelligence.’
The Artificial State and the Death of Democratic Consent
Lepore is careful to separate her target from technology itself. ‘I’m not anti-technologist,’ she said in a recent podcast interview. ‘My beef is the ways in which private corporations have increasingly taken on the functions of the state.’ The process, in her telling, was largely accidental at first: driven by efficiency, speed and cost-cutting. Only in the last 20 to 25 years, she argues, did it become deliberate.
One origin point she returns to is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first major overhaul of US telecommunications law in nearly 62 years, which the Federal Communications Commission described as aiming to let ‘anyone enter any communications business’ and allow ‘any communications business compete in any market against any other.’ Lepore sees that deregulatory moment, shaped heavily by Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, as a fork in the road whose consequences have proved very hard to revisit.
She traces an earlier fork back to January 1984 and Apple’s Super Bowl ad for the Macintosh, which cast IBM’s mainframe computers as the totalitarian enemy and the personal computer as the liberating ax that would ensure ‘1984 would not be “1984.”‘ Lepore calls it clever advertising, doubting that anyone at Apple genuinely believed a personal computer would improve its owner’s capacity for citizenship. But she tracks that advertising fantasy forward, through Facebook’s creation of a content oversight body, Anthropic hiring a moral philosopher to write a corporate constitution, and Sam Altman telling Joe Rogan that an AI president ‘would be a great idea.’
From a 1909 Short Story to Sam Altman on Joe Rogan
The book’s second half moves into literary territory, tracing what Lepore calls ‘the parable of the artificial state’ through science fiction. Her touchstone is E.M. Forster’s 1909 story ‘The Machine Stops,’ written around the same time as A Room with a View, in which humanity retreats into individual cells serviced by an all-providing machine, loses all connection to the natural world, and is destroyed when the machine fails. Lepore notes, drily, that it reads less like science fiction today and more like ‘the diary of a very unhappy YouTuber.’
Her argument about Silicon Valley’s relationship with science fiction is precise: many tech leaders do not misread it in the sense of missing a libertarian strand, that strand exists, she concedes, particularly in Robert Heinlein. The misreading lies in treating cautionary parables as operational manuals. ‘What’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,’ she said.
The Twitter chapter gives that argument some forensic texture. Lepore recounts how Twitter began as a goof, was gradually colonised by politicians amplifying their messages, and then, somewhat begrudgingly, positioned itself as a democratic town hall. At its peak, one in five Americans held a Twitter account, but the vast majority had never used them, and more than 90% of political tweets came from fewer than 10% of active users. The platform formalised its political role in what NPR identified as the Twitter Government and Elections Handbook, a 136-page guide for candidates and elected officials described internally as ‘wildly popular.’ Lepore calls the town-hall framing ‘bananas,’ and the data supports her: the platform was a distortion machine built for the hyper-partisan, not a mirror of the electorate.
On what resistance to the artificial state actually looks like, Lepore points to local data centre battles, where she says community opposition has been clear and representative votes have not. In Salt Lake, she notes, well over 70% of residents opposed a proposed data centre while their representatives backed it. Whether electoral consequences follow, she says, depends on whether enough democratic function remains intact for voters to act on the malfeasance of their representatives. That is the binary the book leaves open.
