The God Trick
The god trick is the rhetorical and epistemic move by which a particular perspective disguises itself as universal. It naturalizes the view of the dominant as the view of reality, conceals the specific conditions under which knowledge is produced, and delegitimizes perspectives that openly acknowledge their partiality. Haraway named it in her 1988 Situated Knowledges essay as the target against which her alternative account of stronger objectivity was developed. In the AI age, the god trick has acquired new technical form: the machine presents statistically aggregated, culturally specific outputs as neutral answers, and users receive them as though they came from nowhere in particular.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Haraway borrowed the phrase from nineteenth-century theological debates about divine omniscience. The God of classical theism was imagined as seeing all things from no particular place — a view unconditioned by body, history, or perspective. When Enlightenment science inherited this conception and applied it to the scientist, it produced what Haraway called the god