Much like the movie Surrogates starring Bruce Willis, Om Malik reflects on the idea of creating a digital version/twin of yourself to interact with your readers (or fans).
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.
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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.
While reading this post, I also learned about:
Bumper sticker wisdom
are short, punchy, and witty maxims, slogans, or philosophical snippets that are designed to fit on a car’s bumper sticker, but are oversimplified and miss the nuances of the argument.
Potemkin village
is a construction, literal or figurative, that provides a façade to a situation, to make people believe that the situation is better than it actually is.