Deepfakes are a new form of synthetic media that broke upon the world in 2017. Bringing photoshopping to video, deepfakes replace people in existing videos with someone else’s likeness. Currently, most of their reach is limited to pornography and efforts at discreditation. However, deepfake technology has many epistemic promises and perils, which concern how we fare as knowers and knowns. This chapter seeks to help set an agenda around these matters to make sure that this technology can help realize epistemic rights and epistemic justice and unleash human creativity, rather than inflict epistemic wrongs of any sort. In any event, the relevant philosophical considerations are already in view, even though the technology itself is still very much evolving. This chapter puts to use the framework of epistemic actorhood from Chapter 5.

Foucault problematizes the relationship between knowledge and power in ways that more traditional epistemology has not, with power always already shaping what we consider knowledge. To capture the nexus between power and knowledge, he introduces the term “episteme.” The significance of an era’s episteme is easiest to see in terms of what it does to possibilities of self-knowledge. Therefore I pay special attention to this theme by way of introducing the theoretical depth of Foucault’s notion. I then develop Foucault’s ideas further, specifically for digital lifeworlds. With this vocabulary in place, I introduce the notion of “epistemic actorhood” that lets us capture the place of an individual in a given episteme. It is in terms of this place that we can turn to the notions of epistemic rights and epistemic justice. Epistemic actorhood comes with the four roles of individual epistemic subject, collective epistemic subject, individual epistemic object, and collective epistemic object. Using this vocabulary we can then also articulate the notions of an epistemic right and of epistemic justice and develop them in the context of digital lifeworlds. Digital lifeworlds engage individuals both as knowers and knowns in new ways. The framework introduced in this chapter captures this point.