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Jms Dnns @jmsdnns.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

📚 The Rise And Fall Of The Artificial State, by Jill Lepore Lepore is a historian who has written some of my favorite books. I especially loved both We The People and These Truths The book is modeled after Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism, but for the context of modern technology

The front cover of a book which features a red background and a dark robot on the front. The text on top reads:

The Rise And Fall Of The Artificial State
Jill Lepore
Pulitzer Prize winning author of We The People

The table of contents

Part One: Government By Machine
1. The Book of Numbers
2. Technocracy Inc
3. Machines That Think
4. Computopia
5. AI.gov

Part Two: What Robots Want
7. La Bete-Machine
8. Darwin Among The Machines
9. Man And Nature
10. I, Robot
11. Murderbot

Epilogue: The Last Days of the Artificial State

- PREFACE -

What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears.... What I propose, there-fore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.
-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

Like, I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time, but I don't know because maybe we put them in space.
-Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAl, 2025

HIS BOOK IS 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. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what I call the Artificial State. Yet little seems to me more inevitable than its eventual fall, the exhale that follows every inhale, the day that follows night, Icarus's plunge to the ocean after flying too close to the sun.

The Artificial State is a fantasy about humans, machines, and the earth. This book is an archaeology of that fantasy. I was driven to write it by the same concerns that in the 1950s led the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt to consider how humanity had been altered by automation.! Arendt's best-known book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, appeared in 1951. It ends with Arendt expressing concern about how the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence.

AN URGENT ACCOUNT OF
HOW RULE BY MACHINE HAS
RAVAGED THE WORLD.
--
PRAISE FOR THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTIFICIAL STATE

"Who's going to determine the future: the tech billionaires or the rest of us? Jill Lepore argues that there's nothing inevitable about eliminating jobs, destroying ecosystems, and arming authoritarian regimes. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is at once dazzling in its range and totally on target."
-ELIZABETH KOLBERT, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Under a White Sky

"How lucky are we to be alive at the same time as Jill Lepore? Generations to come will marvel that anyone could think so clearly amid such chaos. At a moment when the Al takeover feels new and strange and inevitable, Lepore shows it to be anything but. She connects dots from different eras, different stories, different technologies, even different species. The result is a profound reframe of what we really mean by 'artificial.'"
-LATIF NASSER, co-host of Radiolab

"A person can't help but feel inspired by the riveting intelligence and joyful curiosity of Jill Lepore. Knowing that there is a mind like hers in the world is a hope-inducing thing."
-GEORGE SAUNDERS, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"There are times when a historian is absolutely necessary for understanding the future-this is one of those times, and Jill Lepore is the perfect person for the job. A fascinating, perceptive, and completely timely account of how we got to artificial intelligence and how we might get past it."
-BILL MCKIBBEN, author of Here Comes the Sun

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Jms Dnns @jmsdnns.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

This book is for anyone interested in a future full of wonderful technology that is NOT controlled by fascist buttheads Feudalism, fascism, and slavery once seemed inevitable, yet they were dismantled, and dismantling requires identifying the parts and tracing their sources; the book's purpose

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