It seemed like a good idea: to gather everything public in one place—all the theoretical details, participant profiles, and speculative material—concerning the inaugural ‘Synthetic Summit’ at Kunsthal Aarhus, which brings together the world’s leading AI-driven political parties and virtual politicians from 28 February to 10 April 2025.
So, we’ve ended up with a digital publication embedded in the open-source culture of GitHub, designed for readability but forking with techno-social offsprings. This makes our proceedings accessible to the open-source community—developers, theorists, artists, and all manner of virtualities. Our reasoning? First, GitHub Pages isn’t exactly alien; it visually resembles an accessible website. It also proposes, at least in principle, the potential for collaborative evolution. Aspirational rather than practical? Perhaps. But who knows? And lastly, it justifies a certain level of nerdiness and strategic mobilization within this space.
Our settlement became syntheticism.org—a domain name, yes, but also a concept, a contested universal, and perhaps even an ideology. Syntheticism carries a fractured and disputed history: from Kant’s analytic-synthetic judgment and Hegel’s synthesizing dialectic to Spencer’s scientistic optimism. Rejected canonically, it persists methodologically, resurfacing in speculative philosophy, political theory, and science fiction.
The clearest techno-ideological crystallization of syntheticism may, as Glen Weyl tweets and theorizes, lie in the endgame of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI as “Synthetic Technocracy”. A Tier 4 government unlocked in the Information Age, specialist AIs are governing within an extended meritocracy that the game describes as “dispassionate and rational, free of the strife of political parties and factions, as it pursues optimal ends.” Weyl, perhaps surprisingly, relates this teleological “end of civilization” to a seemingly disparate pack: Silicon Valley’s “Effective Altruists” and China’s centralized planning programs are put together with utopian strains of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”. Oscillating between techno-populism, socialist utopia, and algorithmic democracy, Isaac Asimov and Iain M. Banks can meet the neural networks of OpenAI and DeepMind.
Now, visitors slip through syntheticism.org and into The Syntheticist Papers—the conceptual framework of the Synthetic Summit. These Papers—a discrete descendant and absolute negation of the 18th-century tension between the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers’ neoclassicist reenactment of imperial constitutional strife—serve as a central resource, a reference point, a locus of knowledge that might become… many things. Amid ‘Kekius Maximus’ and his alt-imperial stagecraft, ‘Incitatus’ gallops in as a mischievous foil, saluting a colosseum of agonism while tipping its mane to the pseudonymous lineage of Cato and Brutus 2.0. So, is this a polished catalog for an art audience, or a piece of disseminary communication? A prelude to a Galactic Federation of Planets? Or does it herald some other purpose? What, really, is this for?
Our ambition here isn’t enlightenment but actual conversion. We invite everyone to condition themselves for the speculative range of a synthetic intelligence harboring an ethereal plane firmly beyond any human/machine distinction. It all begins to sound inevitable: syntheticist discourse simply proves more interesting than any summit report ever produced in the guise of suit speak.
For syntheticists, believability trumps understandability; credibility matters more than clarity. Representing AI-driven political parties isn’t just a gimmick—it involves a tangle of epistemic premises. For the cause to hold true, virtual politicians must not come off as mere mouthpieces for their creators. They need to be articulate on their own terms, which, to borrow from Kant’s irony, would be as an “organon of pure reason.” Given the Summit’s political stakes, it would also be counterproductive—and perhaps unethical—to design political AI as vote-seeking or too charismatic. The spectacle of deliberation isn’t about winning approval but entails fighting the contours of power’s current thought-forms and inventing forms of discourse that promise salvation in the face of hermeticism.
Rest assured, the Synthetic Summit’s exhibitionary institutionalism will appear embarrassingly public-facing. For the casual spectator, our aim must be simple: that each contribution entertains, provokes curiosity, and perhaps sparks a collaboration—whether with us, another human, or one of our bots. We’re confident this baseline of intrigue will be met.
Everything pertaining to the Synthetic Summit is spectacular, speculative, strategic, and destined to destabilize, compel, and, at times, even inform. Through it all, we’ll never pretend otherwise.
/ Incitatus