Welcome to the Synthetic Age, Where the Map Gets There First
What music producers taught me about Baudrillard, and what it asks of educators
If you have been around here for a while, you know I lead something of a double life online.
There are a little over a thousand of you here, where I write about AI and what it is doing to teaching and learning. There are about thirty-one thousand people somewhere else entirely, on my YouTube channel, where I talk about immersive and spatial audio. Two audiences. Two subjects. I keep them apart on purpose.
When the two worlds do touch, it is almost always because of music. I have written here about why I made an AI music video and what I learned doing it. I have written about how Berklee rolled out a generative AI course for musicians, and where I thought they went wrong. Music is the bridge, and generative AI is usually the thing crossing it.
Lately, though, the bridge has gotten crowded with something I did not expect: philosophy. Music producers and musicians I follow for technical reasons have started talking about cultural theory. Adam Neely and Benn Jordan are two very good examples. I now hear Baudrillard’s name more often from people who make music than from people who make curricula.
That should probably embarrass my own field. It does so, at least a little.
One video brought this into focus for me. Venus Theory is a producer and sound designer, known for his sample instruments and for videos on writing music for games. His recent video essay is called The Dystopian Reality of Online Advertising, and most of it is about exactly that. But partway through, he says something remarkable almost in passing.
We are moving, he suggests, from an Information Age into a Synthetic Age.
That line is the reason for the piece you are currently reading. Venus Theory did not stop to define what he meant by Synthetic Age. He moved on. But I could not.
Two very different synthetic ages
Before I borrow the phrase, I owe it some history, because “the Synthetic Age” already had a meaning before Venus Theory reached for the term.
In 2018 the philosopher Christopher J. Preston published a book with that exact title: The Synthetic Age. His subject was the planet. He argued we are leaving the era in which humans merely disturb nature and entering one in which we redesign it at the root, through synthetic biology, gene editing, de-extinction, and climate engineering.
For Preston, “synthetic” meant engineered life and engineered earth. The frightening part was not pollution laid on top of nature. It was our hands reaching into nature’s basic operations and rewriting them.
Venus Theory is pointing at something else. He is not talking about the metabolism of the planet. He is talking about the metabolism of perception, what reaches our eyes and ears and gets accepted as real. In his usage, the Synthetic Age is the moment generative systems stop indexing reality and start manufacturing it.
Synthetic faces, synthetic voices, synthetic feeds, generated on demand and cheaper than the real thing.
One caveat before I continue. Venus Theory said this in passing and never built it into an argument, so what follows is my interpretation. But the two synthetic ages rhyme, and it is that rhyme that interests me. Preston watched us move from shaping the surface of nature to redesigning its base layer. The Synthetic Age I am chasing here describes the same principle aimed at something different. Not the substrate of life. The substrate of knowing.
