Pulitzer-winning historian Jill Lepore warns of tech's grip on democracy in new book out next week

Pulitzer Prize-winning US historian Jill Lepore argues that private technology companies now threaten liberal democracy itself, in a new book reviewed by The Guardian on 19 August 2026.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is scheduled for release on 25 August 2026. W.W. Norton publishes the US edition, while Penguin Books — an imprint of Penguin Random House, the largest trade publisher in the world — carries the title on its UK list.

Lepore's central concept, the "Artificial State," works on two levels. One is a fantasy: rule by automation, government by machine. The other is already here. Public discourse has shifted onto privately owned platforms, meaning the spaces where people argue, organise and vote are controlled by corporations answerable to shareholders rather than citizens. As The Guardian's review notes, the book treats both strands as part of a single story.

The names will be familiar to most readers. Lepore identifies Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman as "Silicon Valley billionaires" who, in her telling, are pouring their resources into space travel and the artificial intelligence arms race rather than addressing climate change. The book frames this as a question of priorities — where the capital and ambition of the tech sector are pointed, and who gets to decide.

Lepore describes the result as "a grumpy book," but she is careful about where she locates the problem. It is not technology itself. The issue, as she presents it, is the absence of a coherent, democratically forged strategy for developing and deploying these tools. The machines are not the villain. The vacuum of public accountability around them is.

For a general reader picking this up, the appeal is Lepore's track record. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of American history at Harvard, and her previous work — including These Truths and The Secret History of Wonder Woman — has moved between scholarly argument and narrative storytelling with unusual commercial success for a historian.

The publishing detail round it out. W.W. Norton, the largest independent and employee-owned publisher in the United States, lists the book under ISBN 9781324098423. Penguin's UK edition carries ISBN 9780241836552. That two-house arrangement — Norton in the US market, Penguin in the Commonwealth — is standard for a historian of Lepore's standing, ensuring distribution on both sides of the Atlantic without ceding world English rights, meaning control of all English-language markets, to a single publisher.

Six days from publication, the book is already drawing attention from the broadsheet press. Whether it reaches the bestseller lists will depend on pre-orders, first printings and the weeks of sell-through that follow — the mechanics that turn a reviewed title into a bought one.