The Artificial State is less a state than a dream of being without one, the dream of the severing of humans not only from the natural world but also from one another, every umbilical cord cut.
An extreme form of this dream is the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires who, seeking escape from the prison of their own bodies, intend to have their heads frozen when they die and, possibly, consciousnesses uploaded onto computers, an idea that, like much of what they want, comes from a story published nearly a century ago in a science fiction magazine for boys.
The dream of life in outer space, of immortal life, and of colonizing other planets all have a place in the dream of the Artificial State.
The thinking goes something like this: Democracy and the liberal nation-state have to be abolished to free corporations from the restraining force of any government so that they might marshal all the resources of this planet toward the accelerated development of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence possible, artificial intelligence that will at once make it possible to escape the prison of the earth and, perversely, make such an escape necessary.
