Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Charts 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State'
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current: The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the…
Pulitzer-winning journalist Jill Lepore's new book, "The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State," delves into the question of how democracy has been relinquished to machines and whether it can be reclaimed. Lepore, known for her 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning work "We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution," has taken a closer look at the digital communication infrastructure that governments and corporations use to automate and control public discourse.
In her book, Lepore explores the growing influence of artificial intelligence on elections worldwide. She notes that in 2026, the U.S. midterm elections will be marked by the first instances of AI being used to influence voter decisions. Campaigns and activists are leveraging AI to analyze the electorate, send customized messages, create targeted advertisements, and even generate deepfakes.
Lepore emphasizes that people should not rely on historians for predictions, but she believes that democratic citizens have the potential to regain control.
Lepore proposes various solutions, such as New York's data center moratorium law, to help push back against the increasing influence of technology in society. In the book's epilogue, she predicts a potential downfall for the Artificial State, describing it as a speculative hope rather than a certainty. Lepore argues that the Artificial State is poorly designed and badly built, providing a prison of glowing screens that lacks safety and happiness for the majority of Americans.
To break free from the Artificial State, Lepore suggests that people need to imagine a different future by gaining more knowledge of the past. She supports this idea by pointing out the majority of Americans want more control over AI. However, powerful forces aim to deny this and turn the population into servile automatons.
While Lepore's book presents a bleak outlook, she is not a pessimist. She argues that the Artificial State is a construct, neither alive nor truly indestructible, and thus it is still possible to dismantle it. This is a clear-eyed reckoning rather than a doomsday tract, and an essential read for anyone troubled by the rapid pace of the AI wave.
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