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Is technology killing democracy and destroying communities?
Yes, argues acclaimed historian Jill Lepore in her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She writes that the artificial state is “the rule of humans by machines manufactured by corporations.” It is the fantasy of tech billionaires. And its goal is the end of liberal democracy.
The artificial state is a “replacement of the liberal nation state, a constitutional democracy in which we are governed by our own consent, with a government by machine, in which many of the functions of democratic governments are automated, in which humans are replaced by bots as the predominant participant in public life,” she told me.
When the titans of Silicon Valley sat behind President Donald Trump at his inauguration in January 2025, it marked “the coming out of the tech right,” said Lepore.
Lepore is one of the country’s most acclaimed historians. She is a professor of American history at Harvard University, a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the bestsellers “These Truths: A History of the United States,” which Time magazine named one of the top 10 nonfiction books of the 2010s, and “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in history. She hosts the podcast “The Last Archive.” She lives part-time in Brattleboro, which is where she spoke to me.
Lepore said that efforts by the Trump administration to sanitize American history are “a form of McCarthyism.”
She said that skewed versions of history have evolved that have deepened social divisions. These range from the “far-right version of American history in which everything is a march of freedom and progress and prosperity and America has never done anything wrong at home or abroad” to the “far-left account in which American history is a litany of atrocities, in which the United States has never done anything good at home or abroad.”
“There was nothing that recognized there was plenty of truth in both of those accounts, and there was also unbelievable distortion in those accounts.”
Lepore said history affirms that “the power of ordinary citizens working together has managed to defeat” forces like the artificial state and its techno-authoritarianism.
“But the idea that we can sit in our living rooms and browse the news on our smartphones and post a few thoughts on social media, and that constitutes meeting our obligations as citizens is a false one.”
