Abstract

Drawing on Amnesty Norway’s use of generative artificial intelligence to illustrate tweets about human rights violations, the White Helmets’ creation of a viral mannequin challenge video, and Plan International’s fabrication of a child’s wedding blog, this talk explores digital fiction practices in civil truth-claims worlds.

Digital fiction exists only in a trialectic with digital fact and digital fakery: Digital fiction claims a proximal position to digital fact through its actors and intentions, but, because of its methodology of simulacrum, bridges civil truth-claims worlds with underworlds of digital fakery. This trialectic is not just an analytical phenomenon, but a dangerous one for civil truth-claims worlds. Digital fiction can make the civil truth-claims world turn on itself, violently censuring its errant members and, in so doing, reifying its methodology of facticity. This is what I call the epistemology backlash, a kind of boundary-work that excludes methodologies.

In working to mitigate digital fiction’s communication risk to civil truth-claims worlds, world members narrow the repertoire of human rights and humanitarian advocacy, edging out the genre of fiction that long has been used to mobilise hearts and minds. This is episuicide, a self-directed suppression of forms of knowledge. Episuicide is a response to an epistemology backlash, employed against heterodox epistemologies so that the orthodox epistemology can survive. I conclude by considering the implications of epistemology backlashes and episuicide for my discipline of sociology and for democractic politics.