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?
The Efficiency Trap
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.
We’ve Been Here Before
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.
What We Lose When We “Win”
We’re entering an era where beauty, emotion, and even “relatability” can be algorithmically rendered on demand. But ask yourself:
Will the audience feel anything?
Will a pixel-perfect model with flawless symmetry ever replace the electric tension of a real person caught between poses?
What kind of stories will we be telling when all our characters are engineered to test well?
The issue isn’t the tech—it’s the taste. We aren’t replacing humans with AI. We’re replacing risk with control.
The Real Question
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.
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.
What the AI Sees That We Don’t
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:
1. Collapse the Old Global Order—Then Rebuild It Around the U.S.
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.
2. Weaponize Uncertainty
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.
3. Turn Economic Pain into Political Power
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.
4. Make the U.S. the Global Operating System
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.
Why Even Heard Island and McDonald Islands Matter
You might laugh at the idea of targeting some tiny islands. But the AI doesn’t laugh.
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?
So What’s the Endgame?
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.
Here’s the Part That Matters Most
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.
So What Do We Do?
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
There’s a quiet fear no one wants to admit out loud.
It shows up in side-eyes during team meetings, in late-night doomscrolling, in that subtle question echoing through our generation’s collective anxiety:
What’s the point? If artificial intelligence is going to write the next great novel, design the next viral campaign, launch the next billion-dollar business — faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you or I ever could — then why try? Why put in the hours, the sweat, the effort?
Why bother getting better?
It’s a question that haunts not just creatives or coders or marketers. It’s haunting humanity. The unsettling idea that maybe we’ve reached the edge of usefulness. That the race we’ve been running — to be better, smarter, more skilled — is about to be won by a machine that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t feel, doesn’t forget.
But here’s what we forget in return:
We don’t grow because the world demands it. We grow because something inside us refuses to stop.
AI might automate what we do. But it cannot automate why we do it.
The Fallacy of Replacement
Let’s be real. Yes, AI will disrupt industries. It already is. Whole workflows reduced to prompts. Creative outputs generated in seconds. Copy, code, concept — replicated, iterated, shipped. And it’s only just beginning.
But here’s a truth too many are missing:
Being better was never just about productivity.
You didn’t start painting to beat an algorithm. You didn’t learn to lead because you thought a robot couldn’t. You didn’t choose empathy, or poetry, or patience because it would get you ahead.
You chose those things because they made you more human.
Better was never the enemy of automation. Better was the quiet rebellion against stagnation. It’s what built pyramids, painted ceilings, fought injustice, and sent ships across oceans.
And now — we’re being called to define “better” again.
What AI Can’t Touch
Let’s get philosophical for a second.
AI can simulate kindness. It can write poetry about grief. It can mimic your voice, your humor, even your childhood trauma.
But it doesn’t know what any of it means.
It’s never held a dying parent’s hand. It’s never wept at the sound of a song you haven’t heard since you were twelve. It doesn’t get nervous before an interview. It doesn’t get butterflies before a kiss.
It doesn’t hope. It doesn’t dream. It doesn’t choose.
And therein lies the point. You do.
The Point of Getting Better
The point isn’t to compete with the machine. It’s to remember what the machine can never be.
Better isn’t about being faster. It’s about being braver. It’s about choosing excellence in a world that rewards convenience. It’s about creating not because we must — but because we can.
When we choose to become better — as professionals, as friends, as partners, as humans — we are declaring, in defiance and in hope:
“I still matter. My effort still matters. My growth still matters.”
History will remember those who embraced the tools, yes. But it will honor those who never lost their soul while using them.
One Last Thing
Progress will automate the world. But only purpose will save it.
So write the damn poem. Learn the new skill. Start the business. Show up, even when it’s hard. Love people when it’s inconvenient. Be better — not because the machine is watching…
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations. Scratch is designed, developed, and moderated by the Scratch Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Help the little ones to know how to code
On the morning of January 6, 2021, the world watched as a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. It was a moment of reckoning—chaos unleashed in the heart of the world’s most celebrated democracy.
Some called it a rebellion, others an insurrection. But to an ancient Greek historian named Polybius, it would have been something else entirely: inevitable.
More than 2,000 years ago, Polybius introduced a concept that few remember today, but whose relevance has never been greater: Anakyklosis—the Cycle of Political Evolution. It’s the idea that all governments, no matter how just or noble, are doomed to fall into predictable patterns of corruption, decay, and rebirth. It’s a cycle we have seen time and again, from the fall of Rome to the rise of authoritarian populism in the 21st century.
And if history tells us anything, it’s that the cycle is turning once more in 2025.
The Cycle of Power: From Democracy to Mob Rule
Polybius laid out the six stages of government like a tragic script, one that civilizations unknowingly follow, again and again:
Ochlokratia (Mob Rule – Corrupt)– Democracy descends into chaos, manipulated by demagogues and misinformation, leading to collapse and the rise of a new monarchy.
Sound familiar? It should. Because right now, the world’s great democracies are teetering on the edge of ochlokratia—mob rule. The signs are all around us in 2025 and maybe earlier than that!
America, Rome, and the Dangers of Late-Stage Democracy
A democratic system once admired, where power was shared among elected officials.
A growing divide between the elite and the working class, fueling discontent.
The rise of populist leaders who promised to “fix the system” while eroding its foundations.
Political violence becoming normalized, as factions turned to force instead of debate.
By the time Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE, Rome had already crossed a point of no return. Democracy had rotted from within, paving the way for empire.
Now, look around in 2025. The warning signs are eerily similar:
Rising wealth inequality—a handful of billionaires hold more wealth than entire nations, with AI-driven economies exacerbating disparities.
Populist strongmen winning elections by exploiting public disillusionment, now amplified by deepfake propaganda and AI-manipulated media.
A disinformation crisis, where truth is drowned in a sea of conspiracy theories, with major news organizations struggling to compete with viral AI-generated misinformation.
Governments increasingly paralyzed by polarization, unable to solve real problems, as social unrest escalates globally.
The rise of authoritarian tendencies, with leaders undermining democratic institutions under the guise of “protecting the people,” now armed with digital surveillance and AI-powered state control.
Like Rome before it, modern democracy is not dying from external threats. It is crumbling from within—now at an accelerated pace thanks to technology.
The Digital Age and the Acceleration of Ochlokratia
Polybius never could have predicted social media, but if he had, he would have seen it as the ultimate accelerator of political decay.
In 2025, the situation has worsened. AI-driven content manipulation, hyper-personalized propaganda, and algorithm-driven outrage cycles have turned democracy into a battleground of perception over reality. Deepfake videos, voice clones, and AI-generated political figures blur the line between truth and fiction. The digital public square, once seen as a beacon of democratic engagement, has become an ecosystem of rage-fueled disinformation, rewarding extremism over nuance, engagement over truth.
And so we find ourselves in the final stage of democracy—the moment where people, manipulated by demagogues, AI-driven propaganda, and digital algorithms, turn against the very system meant to protect them.
Can We Break the Cycle?
If the ancient Greeks were right, the natural next step is a return to authoritarian rule—a strongman rising from the ashes, promising to “fix” the broken system, but at the cost of freedom.
But history is not destiny. The cycle is a warning, not a prophecy.
Democracies do not fail overnight. They erode, piece by piece, as citizens grow complacent, as leaders exploit fear, as institutions weaken under the weight of corruption. And yet, history has also shown that the fate of a nation is not written in stone—it is written by those who refuse to let history repeat itself.
The solution does not lie in nostalgia for the past, but in rebuilding trust, strengthening institutions, and restoring civic engagement. It lies in resisting the allure of simple answers to complex problems. It lies in demanding accountability from leaders, media, and ourselves.
In 2025, it also means tackling the AI-driven erosion of democracy, ensuring that technology serves the people rather than manipulates them. We must regulate AI in politics, educate citizens on digital literacy, and push for transparent governance in an age where deception has never been easier.
Polybius gave us the diagnosis. The question now is: Will we choose a different ending?
We stand at a crossroads, just as Rome did, just as every great civilization has before us.
The forces of history are powerful, but they are not absolute.
As Martin Luther King, Jr1., once said, “The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it does not bend on its own.” We, the people, must be the ones to bend it.
Because democracy is not a given. It is a choice. And that choice is ours to make—before history that always tends to repeat itself makes it for us.
