How many pages is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State?

336 pages, which is about 101,000 words and 6½ hrs of reading. Editions vary, so we take the figure two of our three sources agree on.

Is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State worth reading?

Only 1 reader has rated it on Hardcover so far — too few to tell you much either way. What we can tell you for certain is the cost: 336 pages and about 6½ hrs of your time, or 4 hrs if you read quickly. Whether that is worth it depends on the hours you have.

How long is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State audiobook?

About 11 hrs, estimated from the 101,000 words at a typical narration pace of 150 words a minute. Real editions vary by narrator, usually by well under an hour.

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial StateJill Lepore

Find a copy Listen · ≈11 hrs

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

Name: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
Author: Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore

6½ hrsto read

At your speed≈ 6½ hrs

Pages336

Audiobook≈ 11 hrs

336 pages works out to roughly 101,000 words. At an average 250 words a minute that is 6½ hrs — a weekend's reading.

Only 1 reader has rated it on Hardcover so far — too few to tell you much either way.

How long does it take to read The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State?

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is 336 pages, or roughly 101,000 words. How long that takes depends on how fast you read:

Estimated reading time for The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State at three reading speeds.
Your pace	Words per minute	Time to finish
Slow	175	9½ hrs
Average	250	6½ hrs
Fast	400	4 hrs

Estimated at about 300 words per page. Most adults read between 200 and 300 words a minute — use the reading-speed control to set your own pace and every time on the site adjusts.

Your reading speed… wpm

Every reading time on the site updates to your pace. Page counts are an estimate, so treat the hours as a good guide, not a stopwatch.

Common questions

How long does it take to read The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State?: About 6½ hrs at an average reading speed of 250 words per minute. The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State runs 336 pages, roughly 101,000 words — so at a slower 175 wpm it is nearer 9½ hrs, and at 400 wpm closer to 4 hrs.
How many pages is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State?: 336 pages, which is about 101,000 words and 6½ hrs of reading. Editions vary, so we take the figure two of our three sources agree on.
Is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State worth reading?: Only 1 reader has rated it on Hardcover so far — too few to tell you much either way. What we can tell you for certain is the cost: 336 pages and about 6½ hrs of your time, or 4 hrs if you read quickly. Whether that is worth it depends on the hours you have.
How long is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State audiobook?: About 11 hrs, estimated from the 101,000 words at a typical narration pace of 150 words a minute. Real editions vary by narrator, usually by well under an hour.

From the publisher

“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, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, 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. With Orwellian overtones, 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. Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which 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. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.