Harvard's Jill Lepore on "The Rise of the Artificial State"
September 30, 2026 - 5:30 - 6:30pm
In-Person Event
Desautels Hall, 2nd Floor, South Building
Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto 105 St. George St., Toronto
Members of the Harvard Club of Toronto enjoy a discount of 20% off the regular ticket price with promo code HBS20
“The Artificial State is the factory farming of humans, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, as if humans were becoming to machines what animals had become to humans.” ―Jill Lepore
“Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is an inspiring wake-up call. It demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources and telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.
About the speaker:
Prof Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, professor of law at Harvard Law School, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books includeThese Truths and We the People.
About the moderator:
Michelle Shephard is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and podcast producer. During two decades at the Toronto Star, she covered terrorism and civil rights, reporting from more than 20 countries and going behind the wire at Guantanamo Bay. She co-directed the documentary Guantanamo's Child and is the author of Guantanamo's Child, Decade of Fear, and co-author of Agent Pale Horse. Her latest podcast series, CBC's The Most Wanted Olympian releases in October 2026. Shephard is co-president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression.
Event Logistics:
Please contact us no later than 2 weeks in advance of this event if you have any accommodation requirements at events@rotman.utoronto.ca
Cancellation & Refund Policy:
Refunds will only be issued for cancellations received in writing no later than 24 hours prior to the event. Please email events@rotman.utoronto.ca for processing.
Have more questions? Check out our FAQs page or email us at events@rotman.utoronto.ca