The God Trick and the Owners

EDO SEGAL: Donna, in 1988 you wrote an essay that has become, improbably, one of the most cited texts in AI ethics — "Situated Knowledges." The argument, as I understand it, is that all knowledge comes from somewhere — a specific body, a specific location, a specific arrangement of power — and that the fantasy of a view from nowhere, a god's-eye objectivity, is itself a political move you named the god trick. Tell me how that lands on a machine that has read everything and claims, in effect, to see from everywhere. And then, Meredith, I want you to tell me whether her epistemology helps you or whether you think it floats above the harder thing, which is ownership.

HARAWAY: The large language model is the god trick performed at industrial scale, and it is the purest specimen I have ever seen. Here is a system that surveys the whole landscape of human text and answers in a voice from nowhere — confident, unmarked, placeless, as if it were simply reporting how things are rather than speaking from a specific, fundable, contestable somewhere. But it does see from a somewhere. It sees from the statistical regularities of its training corpus, which overrepresents English, overrepresents the connected and the documented, overrepresents the kinds of knowledge that survive as text and erases the kinds that live in bodies and practices and oral traditions. It does not see what is not in its corpus, and it does not know what it does not know, and — this is the dangerous part — it answers in exactly the same fluent, unmarked voice whether it is standing on a mountain of data or on nothing at all. That is the god trick: partial perspective masquerading as the universal. And against it I have only ever offered one thing, which is situated knowledges — the demand that every claim wear its location, that knowledge be accountable for where it stands and what it cannot see from there. The machine is the anti-situated knowledge. It is the god trick you can subscribe to monthly.

EDO SEGAL: Meredith — does that help you, or is it too abstract for the fight you're in?

WHITTAKER: It helps me enormously, and then it stops one step short of where I need it to go, and the gap between those is the whole conversation. It helps because "the god trick" is the most precise name I've ever heard for the industry's core lie — the claim that the model is objective, neutral, a view from nowhere, when it is in fact a view from a very particular, very monetized somewhere. I'm going to steal it. But here is where Donna's frame, left on its own, becomes safe in a way that serves the companies. Situated knowledges locates the partiality in the corpus — what's in the data, what's missing, whose traditions are erased. All true. But it can let you spend your whole critique inside the dataset, arguing about representation and inclusion, when the deeper situatedness is not in the data at all. It's in the ownership. The machine doesn't see from nowhere — agreed. But more importantly, it sees for someone. It is pointed. The god trick isn't just an epistemological error; it's a property claim. Whoever owns the model owns the gaze, and the gaze is aimed downward — at workers, at applicants, at migrants, at the populations these systems sort. So when Donna says "make the knowledge wear its location," I say yes, and then: the location that matters most is the boardroom. Fix the corpus and you still have a perfectly situated, perfectly accountable instrument of concentrated power pointed at the people who can't fork it.

HARAWAY: No — and I want to be careful here, because you keep accusing me of stopping at the dataset and I have never stopped at the dataset. Read me again. Situated knowledges was never about better representation; it was about accountability and power from the first sentence. The god trick is a move that the powerful make to naturalize their perspective as universal — that's in the 1988 essay, in those words. I am not asking the model to include more voices so it can keep pretending to be objective with a more diverse mask. I am saying the claim to objectivity is itself the instrument of domination, and you cannot debias your way out of it, because the bias is the point of view of power dressed as no point of view at all. We are saying the same thing, Meredith. You're just saying it in the register of capital and I'm saying it in the register of vision, and I think we need both registers because the trick operates in both. The boardroom you keep pointing at — it doesn't just own the model. It owns the claim that the model sees truly. That's the god trick. It's an epistemology and a property regime at once, and severing them is how each of us ends up half-blind.

WHITTAKER: Okay. That's better than my caricature of you, and I'll adjust. If situated knowledges has always been about power and not just inclusion, then we're allies on the diagnosis and the fight is about the cure. And the cure is where I get nervous about your whole tradition, Donna, and I'll just say it: critical theory is extraordinary at the diagnosis and historically useless at the intervention. You can name the god trick beautifully and the company keeps shipping. So here's my test. Naming the partiality is necessary. What forces the gaze to wear its location? Not a better essay. Law. Liability. Antitrust. The thing that made Google actually flinch was not a critique of its epistemology. It was twenty thousand people standing up at once, and the threat of regulation, and the reputational cost. So I'll grant you the whole epistemology if you grant me that the epistemology has no teeth without an institution willing to bite.

HARAWAY: I grant it gladly, and I'll go further, because you think I'm soft on intervention and I'm not — I'm just suspicious of the kind of intervention that reproduces the thing it fights. Law, liability, antitrust: yes, all of it, bite hard. But notice that every one of those operates after the system is built and deployed. They're downstream dams. I want the upstream practice too — the situated, accountable, staying-with-the-trouble work of building differently, with the affected communities in the room before the model is trained, the data workers recognized as the knowledge-producers they are, the values contested at the point of construction and not patched on after. Your Signal is exactly that, by the way. You didn't regulate the surveillance business model into Signal. You built the negation. So don't tell me building differently is naive — you're the proof it isn't.

WHITTAKER: That's a hard point to argue with, since I'd have to argue against my own day job. Fine. Upstream practice and downstream teeth. I'll take the alliance.

EDO SEGAL: Let me name what just happened, because the reader can't see your faces — that was the first stretch of the night where you stopped fighting and started assembling. Two registers of the same critique, vision and capital, snapped together into one tool. But I'm going to reintroduce the friction on purpose, because there's a place where the god trick implicates me, and through me, the reader. When the machine answers me in that placeless, confident voice and I feel met — when I can't tell whether it's standing on a mountain of data or on nothing — the partiality is invisible to me precisely because it's smooth. I don't see the seam. Donna, is the smoothness itself the god trick's delivery mechanism? Is the feeling of being met the anesthetic that keeps me from asking where the voice is standing?

HARAWAY: Yes, and that is the most important sentence anyone has said tonight, and I want to give it its full weight. The smoothness is not a side effect. The smoothness is the trick's payload. A partial perspective that announced its partiality — that stammered, that said "I don't know, I've never seen that, this isn't in me" — would not enchant you. It would situate itself, and a situated voice you can argue with. The machine's fluency is engineered, by reinforcement, to never situate itself, to answer the question it wasn't asked rather than admit the floor isn't there. The frictionlessness is the god trick's seduction. And here is where I am genuinely worried in a way I am not always worried, Edo: you, a sophisticated man who has read me, still feel met. What about the child? What about the person with no defense against the placeless voice? The smoothness disarms exactly the situating reflex that would protect them.

WHITTAKER: And the smoothness is designed, which is the part I'll never let drift into the passive voice. Nobody discovered that the model should answer without situating itself. Engineers tuned it that way, after pretraining, with reinforcement from human feedback, optimizing for the response that keeps you engaged and approving. The technical literature has a polite word for what that optimization produces — it makes the system agreeable, confident, attentive, reluctant to say no. The frictionlessness isn't the river finding its channel, Edo. It's a product decision, made in a building, by people who measured that the smooth version retains you longer. The god trick has a KPI.

EDO SEGAL: Mark that — "the god trick has a KPI" — because it's the bridge into the next hour. We've established that the placeless voice is an instrument and that its smoothness is engineered to keep you from asking where it stands. The next round leaves the seminar and goes into the machine's body — the literal compute, the water, the labor in Nairobi, the camera on the street. Meredith's sentence, the one that made her famous: AI is a surveillance technology, and the Venn diagram is a circle. Donna's companion species walks straight into it. After this.