Artificial Intelligence, Platform Capitalist Power, and the Impact of the Crisis of Truth on Ethnography

This article reviews recent debates on the contemporary crisis of truth and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled platforms and constructions, including social media, deepfakes, and new algorithmic governance settings. The latter are often seen as essential in producing the former, though the wider implications of both on ethnography have been scarcely explored. Anthropologists have criticized technosolutionist AI assumptions of control but also creatively combined AI and ethnographic forms of knowledge production. Neither, however, has led to a renewed appreciation of truth, among other reasons due to the dominance of new materialist, ontological, and related theoretical strands. In contrast, the article makes the case for a planetary ethnography centered around the relations among ethnography, (post-)truth, and AI-enabled platform capitalist power. This argument may help not only to productively understand the contemporary crisis of truth, but also to renew an anthropological politics around speaking truth to power in the context of escalating planetary crises.