On the uncertain certain: The politics of deepfakes in the counterpoise of the unthought

For McLuhan, ‘all media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values’. Particularly in the wake of AI Chatbots, agents, avatars and simulations, surveillance capitalism, webscraping and strip-mining, conflict has erupted between scientific and non-scientific epistemologies and forms of truth – and ‘fact’ refracted as a slippery ellipses of attestation and testimony. When ‘authority’ is indeterminable; when we have no access to epistemic privilege to who or what is coding, coating, adjudicating; who has expertise when expertise is a discursive process – the question to be addressed is not how do we determine what is true, real, authentic or certain, but how do we collectively negotiate this ever-expanding digital plenitude, taking into account, á la Postman, ways each medium (or platform) ‘calls forth and amplifies certain cognitive, emotional, social, political, economic and aesthetic uses, responses and values’. Techno-aesthetically contextualized within Terry Moran’s ‘graphic revolution’, as read through my highly satiric 2017–23, Checking In ; this probe exposes how when we have no access to epistemic privilege, ‘reality’ becomes an unfixed re-mix; a nexus of excessive axes – enacting the Wittgensteinian axiom, that, ‘at the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded’.