When H&M announced they were launching AI-generated digital twins of 30 real models, the internet reacted the way it always does: with excitement, fear, applause, outrage—and confusion. Some hailed it as the future of inclusive fashion. Others saw it as another nail in the creative industry’s coffin.
But here’s a more uncomfortable thought:
What if digital twins aren’t the enemy? What if they’re just a mirror—reflecting how transactional, disposable, and hyper-efficient we’ve already become?
Let’s be clear: this move isn’t about diversity, representation, or creativity. It’s about control.
With digital twins, H&M doesn’t need to wait on a photographer’s schedule, pay for makeup artists, or accommodate the creative direction of anyone outside the algorithm. They own the pixels. The poses. The performance.
It’s not about replacing people.
It’s about owning them—forever.
Remember when stock photography disrupted ad agencies?
When influencers disrupted celebrity endorsements?
When AI writers started ghostwriting LinkedIn thought leadership posts?
We laughed. We adapted. We moved on.
But with each disruption, one thing quietly disappeared: friction.
And friction is where the magic used to live.
The messy, unpredictable, human stuff—eye contact between a model and a photographer, an improvisational gesture, a happy accident—these are the things that used to make a brand campaign breathe. Now? The air is synthetic. Clean. Perfectly optimized. And a little bit dead.
We’re entering an era where beauty, emotion, and even “relatability” can be algorithmically rendered on demand.
But ask yourself:
The issue isn’t the tech—it’s the taste.
We aren’t replacing humans with AI.
We’re replacing risk with control.
If brands start replacing real creativity with simulations of it, we should stop asking what AI can do, and start asking why we’re letting it do it.
Because in the end, the digital twin isn’t the threat. ( Here is a previous article of mine )
It’s the ghost of a creative industry that chose efficiency over soul.
Let’s not pretend this is just about trade.
The Trump administration announced sweeping new tariffs across the world. China, Canada, Mexico—even Norfolk Island is now on the list. Officially, it’s about protecting American workers and restoring “fairness.”
But here’s the question we all need to be asking:
What’s actually going on?
So let’s do something radical.
Let’s ask an AI what Trump’s real plan is.
Not the soundbites.
Not the spin.
But the strategy beneath the strategy.
And what it reveals isn’t just a trade war—it’s something far more calculated. Something designed by a machine that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t feel, and doesn’t care about who gets crushed—only that it wins.
When we feed the facts into a high-level geopolitical AI—tracking trade flows, power shifts, and political intent—it doesn’t talk about jobs.
It talks about leverage.
And it gives us a chilling breakdown of what these tariffs are actually designed to do:
Trump’s AI isn’t trying to fix the global economy.
It’s trying to replace it.
By disrupting supply chains, spooking markets, and destabilizing alliances, it forces countries and corporations to re-route their dependencies. To come home. Or at least, come closer.
It’s not “America First.”
It’s America as the Axis.
The AI knows this: stability favors cooperation.
But chaos makes people easier to control.
When nobody knows what the next tariff will hit—Canada? Mexico? A random island?—partners become cautious, fractured, reactive.
And in that confusion, America gains negotiating power.
Unpredictability becomes a tactic. Fear becomes currency.
Here’s the genius—and danger—of the play:
The tariffs may raise prices, cause shortages, even hurt businesses. But to the AI, that’s useful. It creates discontent, which can be redirected.
“Things are tough,” the narrative goes, “because other countries cheated us. We’re just fighting back.”
It’s the classic problem → blame → loyalty loop.
Pain becomes loyalty.
And loyalty becomes power.
This is where it gets futuristic.
The AI’s long game isn’t just about trade—it’s about infrastructure control.
Tariffs push foreign tech companies, manufacturers, and data firms to move inside U.S. borders to avoid penalties. Once inside? The U.S. controls the rules.
This isn’t just protectionism.
It’s data colonialism.
It’s economic gravity.
And it’s how you make yourself unignorable.
You might laugh at the idea of targeting some tiny islands. But the AI doesn’t laugh.
It targets Heard Island and McDonald Islands, to send a message:
No one is too small. No one is safe.
It’s not about economics.
It’s about psychological dominance.
If even such small islands gets hit, what’s to stop the AI from targeting your country, your sector, your company next?
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about 2025.
The AI is playing a 20-year game, maybe longer.
Its goal? To make the U.S. so central, so critical, that the rest of the world has no choice but to plug in—to US markets, US tech, US terms.
It’s not about isolation.
It’s about designing a future where the U.S. is the hub of everything—from supply chains to silicon to sovereignty itself.
The AI machine doesn’t care about working families.
It doesn’t care about climate, democracy, or diplomacy.
It only cares about winning.
And if we let it run unchecked—if we keep treating tariffs like a headline instead of a warning—then we’re not in a trade war.
We’re in an era shift.
Where human values are traded for machine logic.
And where short-term pain is used to lock in long-term dominance.
We pay attention, we come together!
We talk about what’s really happening—not just what’s trending.
And we remind ourselves: the future isn’t something we inherit.
It’s something we shape.
Even when the US machine thinks it has already won
(images via freepik.com)
