Like Trump Never Happened

AI Might Do For Writing, Art and Video What Synths Did For '80s Pop

“robot playing a piano, 3D render” created on Stable Diffusion

“Depeche Mode, Soft Cell and others all found fame and fortune by playing classically-structured pop songs with new-fangled instruments. But the technology was important. By obviating technique, it allowed a lot of non-musicians to enter the fray.”

-from the book Like Punk Never Happened by Dave Rimmer

The big news this past week was Elon Musk officially taking over Twitter. Seems like an odd time to talk about AI-infused synthetic media , no? I thought so at first and was tempted to scrap this to focus on a more seemingly relevant story idea in my notes. Truth is, Musk taking over Twitter is less a sign of a new era than the closing of the social media chapter. Twitter being full of racists and Nazis is certainly not a new phenomenon and Weird Right Twitter has not needed Musk to flourish. This is to say nothing about Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat bleeding revenue.

“In Silicon Valley, crypto and the metaverse are out. Generative A.I. is in.

That much became clear Monday night at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Stability AI, the start-up behind the popular Stable Diffusion image-generating algorithm, gave a party that felt a lot like a return to prepandemic exuberance.”

Generative art, in sharp contrast, is blowing past Web3, let alone social media. Many artists are understandably upset that AI will make them obsolete. And its not just artists. Writers are worried about this. As are musicians, movie studios, even influencers. Once again, I implore you to look to the past with me so we can see a reflection of the future on its surface.

Today’s “prog rock” is the overblown, overproduced Marvel Cinematic Universe. Today’s punk is the dissident art of downtown NY that never seems to get tired of pushing Millennial liberal buttons. Today’s synthpop is AI art. And despite a few edgelords here and there using Stable Diffusion to make offensive art, for the most part, AI art is being used strictly for apolitical fun.

The ‘70s gave us prog rock. Whether it was good or bad was irrelevant; it was very hard to make. The synthesizers and studios used to make these albums had expensive equipment. The implication inadvertently being that starting a rock band was a rich kid’s game. In the UK (where much prog came from) punk was a direct response to this. Not only did you not need the right equipment, you did not even need talent. All you needed was attitude. As technology got better, synthesizers became cheaper, becoming less of a specialty market for musicians and more of a growing consumer market. With drum machines, sequencers and arpeggiators built into the synths now, the amateurs in Depeche Mode and Soft Cell also did not need expensive equipment. But the sound was not one of rage, destruction and rebellion. It was ethereal and futuristic. As synthpop evolved, it became New Romantic and then New Pop. And when New Pop came, it was like punk had never happened.

Now this isn’t a one-to-one analogy to today’s media landscape of course but now’s a good time to connect some dots. Today’s “prog rock” is the overblown, overproduced Marvel Cinematic Universe. Today’s punk is the dissident art of downtown NY that never seems to get tired of pushing Millennial liberal buttons. Today’s synthpop of course is AI art. And despite a few edgelords here and there using Stable Diffusion to make offensive art, for the most part, AI art is being used strictly for apolitical fun. In order to limit offensive art, words like “Trump”are automatically blocked from queries. Even if you type in something unambiguously inoffensive like “black lives matter” you get something too poorly drawn to represent black people properly but too nonsensical for right-wingers to use to mock the movement with.

See?

In this sense, we are headed towards a Synthetic Pop Culture moment where it seems like Trump never happened. A movement that TikTok (arguably the MTV of synthetic media) is only furthering with its emphasis on AI greenscreens (and its relative lack of interest in Dimes Square).

So that’s it right? Synthetic art and entertainment created by and for the masses. Cheap fast out of control. That’s how it seemed in the ‘80s with New Pop. It was impossible to imagine a future without synthesizers. And it wasn’t just fey British upstarts. Aging boomer icons like Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac were using them as crutches. In hindsight, we now see that synthesizers were not the sound of music for the foreseeable future; they were the sound of the ‘80s. What we forget about creativity is that, unlike most endeavors, there is not a direct correlation between technological progress and creative progress. From the birth of the Industrial Age, poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley railed against technology. In the ‘80s, while synthesizers were in the limelight, indie rockers mined the sounds and instruments of the past for gold. By the ‘90s, grunge took over and overproduced ‘80s pop lost its cool. Even when the synth-infused dance music returned in the ‘00s, it was understood to be a look at the past (ironically like the ‘80s rockers mined the sounds of the past). Hipsters also fetishized relatively obsolete tech like vinyl, helping save it from the digital onslaught.

Nowadays, synthesizers have become like ham radios for hobbyists to toy around with. And it sure seems like the web may face a ‘90s-style reckoning sooner than expected. Sam Kriss expects the Internet itself to lose its status as the hub of all culture, politics and media. Ted Gioia is less extreme, but he foresees a future that is less manic and clickable, but rather slower and more engaged.

Substack is taking off because audiences are hungry for something more than clickable diversion in 10-second installments.

Hunger is the right word—because the best analogy here is food. There’s a tremendous interest in gourmet and artisan food right now, but I’m old enough to remember a different day. In my youth, the trendy thing was to embrace tech-driven simplifications in food—at first it was canned food, and then branched out into frozen foods, microwave meals, fast-prep (just add water!) food, and processed products of all sorts.

All those tech-driven foods are still around, but they don’t tempt consumers the way they once did. Instead, the fastest growing categories in the food business are built on an entirely different vocabulary: gourmet, artisan, healthy, organic, nutritious, sustainable, local, homemade.

This was certainly the sort of thinking that led to the decline of synthpop. Though there are beautiful, notable exceptions, most synthpop became manic, cheap, jittery. Perhaps this is why Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was such a huge song this past summer. Its pace perfectly matches the ADD-scrolling of TikTok. So fear not, robophobes. Before you know it, real paint and human words will come roaring back into the limelight.

And this time no one will forget that punk happened.