Deep Fake Democracy: The Limits of Passive Vision in the Deep Learning Era

• In Event: Algorithms and Democracy

Abstract

In this paper, I locate the implications of deep fakes for democratic legitimacy and popular power. Firstly, I argue that deep fakes make clear the shortcomings of “ocular democracy,” popularized by scholars like Jeffrey Green. While emphasis on spectacle and vision over rational discourse and onerous demands of participation identified important deficiencies in deliberative democratic theories, deep fakes in turn threaten a simplistic reliance on “sincerity” as a mode of democratic accountability and legitimacy. The shortcomings of vision – from deep fakes to unreliable eye-witness accounts and faulty police lineup identifications—suggest that bearing witnessing is necessary but insufficient for democratic accountability. We also need to make sense of what we see. To this end, I turn to accounts of information processing from the pragmatist tradition and the importance of context and qualitative knowledge in critical meaning-making. As scholars have increasingly documented, understanding what we see, and its provenance and relevance, requires social trust in making sense of our experiential data in concert with others. Democratic norms are a precondition, not just the end goal, of cultivating more critical evaluation of what we see.
Secondly, I explore the complications to ocular democracy given the intermediaries that can determine what becomes visible—both in the process and the substance of our visual horizon. I expand on Timothy Pachirat’s critique of the “politics of sight”, but complicate his ethnographic account of visibility and domination in post-capitalist industrialized slaughterhouse, by turning to the role played by social media platforms and everyday users in contesting the locus of "sight" and transparency. While power may be traditionally located in making invisible certain practices and activity, social media platforms have also revealed the power of determining what becomes visible through algorithmic manipulation. Curating the visible and the power dynamics underwriting the ‘gaze’ and ‘sincerity’ of politicians is already mediated through determinations of what we already want to see or, in other words, determinations of what we are motivated to see as sincere or worthy spectacles for the purposes of a candor-driven ocular democracy. I argue that this mediation requires revisiting the conception of the “People” in a plebiscitarian democracy, as the power of “making visible” what “many would prefer to keep hidden” is complicated by users’ manipulation of deepfakes, and making visible an alternative version of what users may feel is kept hidden or what they wish to see—and the contestation over what gets seen and how. Repositioning an unmediated power to see and to create spectacle, I argue, highlights the outmoded vision of plebiscitarian ocular democracy into a Populist conception of popular power.
Finally, I connect these two lines of analysis to show the two-fold threat to democracy in retaining passive conceptions of legitimation and of truth (or its manipulation) as free-standing values. Instead, democratic norms must be understood as the active cultivation of social trust, critical thinking and assessment, and a robust public sphere, which serves as the precondition for navigating digital manipulation in the deep fake era.

Author

• Michelle Chun, Rochester Institute of Technology