The Copy and the Guru – On my Om

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May 26, 2026

"CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI." Aaron Levie, CEO, Box

About two months into first encountering ChatGPT, I decided it was time to create a digital version of “me.” Not me, but all my writing and all the work I had done. My dream was that I would train the AI, and then readers could come and ask for my opinion on new tech, trends. Everything except the writing itself could be on demand, highly personalized. I would keep feeding it my opinions on new developments, interviews I would do, and essentially create an ongoing conversation with OmBot.

Good idea in theory, but I couldn’t make it work until the emergence of OpenClaw, when a friend helped set me up on a Mac Mini. It has become very well trained. We are using open source models from Kimi, Qwen, and OpenAI as a backup. It is pretty good. It can generate a facsimile of what I might write on a topic. What it has become, though, is something for me to bounce ideas off, my own ideas and thoughts from the past.

The more I use it, the more I realize it isn’t something I am ready to share with the wider world, or have represent me to others. It helps me find things from my archives and shows how my own thinking and writing have evolved. That is the true advantage of having a memetic memory that comes with artificial intelligence.

Which is why I dislike this whole trend of digital twins, that has become gospel in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how prominent names in the industry are creating digital twins, because they are just so busy and it is better for the rest of us to engage with a copy.

“I am accomplishing so much more that I couldn’t have accomplished before. It’s probably a 50% time savings on the weeks it’s deployed,” Reid Hoffman, in The Wall Street Journal.

While I was impressed by the fact that Reid’s avatar can speak 74 languages (he can speak one), rest of the piece left a poor taste in my mouth. I would much prefer two minutes with the actual Reid Hoffman than hours of engagement with Reid AI. In two minutes, we could end up in a conversation that goes somewhere neither of us expected. But this is not about one person. It is about the twin as a general condition.

The more I think about it, the more I realize this is the ultimate expression of what began in the social media era, when media manipulation became the primary currency instead of authenticity. We all created curated, and often false, lifestyles on Instagram.

Social media gave us tools to edit our lives into a highlight reel. Photos of coffee, food, selfies from places you couldn’t afford last year, some pithy comment. It was all one directional. A movie about me, by me, for me to broadcast and you to watch. This is what led to the rise of influencer culture, where anything and everything was for sale. The self first became a gallery, then a reel. It was all passive, beautiful, controlled and fake.

We shared bumper sticker wisdom on Twitter. LinkedIn became a public square to hawk faux expertise. This popsci compression of complex thinking into shareable nuggets, designed for distribution and optimized for engagement, was the next step in the self becoming a product.

The pseudo-conversation twin is the crescendo. The self’s full immersion into illusion is now interactive. It answers questions. It gives the impression of encounter, of dialogue, of relationship. But it is still the same curated self with a conversational interface bolted on. It is as authentic as a Potemkin village. And with every step we have moved further from the actual person. The twin is not a rehearsal. It is the first act of abstraction of ourselves. Reid AI can do the job from a bunker in New Zealand.

“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” Guy Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle. “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

The twin doesn’t just represent you. It restructures how others relate to you. The copy becomes the relationship. Send out the twin, and you have not freed yourself for deeper thinking. You have replaced the possibility of being surprised by another person with the certainty of your own archive.

None of this should really surprise us. As a society we have abstracted everything. Work itself is abstracted. We don’t make anything concrete around these parts. We find ways to make and remake money, which has itself been abstracted into the tap of a phone and a signature on a screen.

Look around and all you can see are gurus under their proverbial banyan trees, who make nothing but impart wisdom. They listen to the same podcast, and then regurgitate. They marvel at humanist manifestos. Some even read the Stoics. This is found wisdom, not earned wisdom. The twin...