In the era of artificial intelligence, how can we tell we are being tricked? Indeed, is deception an anomaly or rather a defining force in contemporary media, culture, and politics? In Gray Media: A Psychopolitics of Deception, Lisa Blackman tracks deception as it emerges across AI and algorithmic systems, information warfare, and the psychological and emotional abuse of gaslighting. The approach is radically interdisciplinary, weaving together insights from cultural and media studies, affect studies, critical mental health and disability studies, speculative philosophy, and feminism and queer theory. The mixing of fields mirrors the unstable, shape-shifting nature of the deceptive phenomena the book investigates.
A central concept which links deception across the different areas is confabulation, a paradoxical form of reasoning, which blurs distinctions between the rational and irrational, legible vs. illegible, human vs. technical, intention vs. opportunity, emotional vs. reason, and moral vs. immoral. Linked to creativity and deception, Gray Media explores the longer histories of confabulating forms of reasoning and their tendencies towards cruelty, and dehumanization, shaping technologies of power, communication, and unfeeling within colonial and patriarchal rationalities. It offers new conceptual tools for understanding how contemporary subjects are shaped by – and navigate – the unstable conditions that are symptomatic of its operations, as well as opening to new forms of world-making and unlearning that are made possible, if (only) we can learn to feel differently.