THE STATE HAS NOT DISAPPEARED. ITS FUNCTIONS HAVE BEEN PRIVATISED

What if artificial intelligence is not replacing the state, but concealing who already governs?

Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is not principally a history of AI. It is a history of political substitution. Functions once associated with constitutional government—organising public discourse, representing populations, producing knowledge and shaping collective decisions—have migrated towards private technological systems. Citizens become data; deliberation becomes prediction; the public square becomes a commercial platform.

Lepore defines the Artificial State as a successor to the liberal nation-state: a political order in which multinational corporations increasingly perform public functions without acquiring public obligations. Information circulates through privately owned platforms designed not for democratic deliberation but for monetising attention and outrage. Bots, advertisers, political consultants and algorithmic systems occupy the space where citizens were supposed to meet one another.

The book’s great strength is historical depth. Lepore refuses the industry’s favourite fraud: presenting every technological development as unprecedented and therefore beyond political comparison. She follows quantification from ancient censuses through polling, computation, microtargeting and artificial intelligence. Counting populations once helped states tax, conscript and administer them. Contemporary systems go further: they continuously classify individuals, predict their behaviour and alter the environment in which their next action occurs.

Lepore also traces Silicon Valley’s political imagination to science fiction. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other technological rulers repeatedly treat cautionary stories about imperialism, automation and machine domination as engineering plans. Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams warned against concentrated power, predictive government and unregulated capitalism; their billionaire readers extracted fantasies of planetary management, technological transcendence and escape.

The Artificial State is more than a metaphor. It is simultaneously an ideology and an infrastructure. Its architects promise to save humanity through AI while consuming the energy, land, water and political authority required to build it. Their personal escape fantasies—Mars, bunkers, cryonic preservation or uploaded consciousness—reveal something less heroic: not the rescue of humanity, but preparation for abandoning most of it.

Yet Lepore’s concept is almost too accommodating. Census-taking, industrial robots, political bots, pharmaceutical machine learning, autonomous weapons and social-media feeds do not exercise the same form of power. Placing them under one category can obscure the mechanism that distinguishes assistance from domination. The question is not whether a technology is “artificial,” but whether it observes, predicts and modifies human behaviour without meaningful consent or democratic control. As one critical review notes, conceptual imprecision risks placing a domestic robot and an AI-guided weapon in the same political category.

The title presents another difficulty. Lepore convincingly describes the rise of the Artificial State; its fall remains mostly an ethical possibility. Her concluding invitation to unplug and reconnect with nature may protect fragments of individual life, but it cannot recover infrastructures already transferred to private power. A structural enclosure cannot be dismantled through personal withdrawal. Logging off does not abolish data centres, behavioural markets, military AI, automated administration or the privatisation of public discourse.

The analysis also stops just before the nervous system. Lepore shows how citizens are converted into data, but less fully how data return as individually timed interventions. The Artificial State does not merely know populations. It learns when each person is easiest to move, delivers a cue, measures the response and recalibrates. Its operational unit is not simply information but the closed loop between prediction and behaviour.

Lepore has nevertheless produced an essential historical diagnosis. The Artificial State is not government by intelligent machines. It is power exercised by corporations and elites, disguised as the neutral authority of machines. Its deepest political trick is mystification: human interests disappear behind technical necessity.

The book calls this “government without consent, even government without humans.” More precisely, it is government by humans who would rather not appear responsible. The machine does not abolish political power. It gives power an alibi.

Liviu Poenaru

Reference

Lepore, Jill. 2026. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. New York: Liveright Publishing.