“Mark Zuckerberg Joins Growing Ranks of CEOs Creating A.I. Avatars of Themselves” titles the Observer. A growing list of billionaires (and soon to be trillionaires) who have deemed the act of prolonging the reach of their lives by means of biomedical research and spawning a dozen bastard offspring of themselves as not sufficient enough to make sure their stranglehold over the world is total, turn to creating AI clones (which aren’t actual clones, and that is by design as we will discuss) of themselves as another frontier of blessing the world and the future with their lasting permanence. After all most of them must have convinced themselves that they are in the positions of history defining power and wealth either by divine right or by their own brilliancy. To them their prolonged – or permanent – existence is a blessing onto us, the world, our civilization and history; one we should be thankful for, I am sure.

We have to start our exploration of todays topic by aknowledging that at this point its hard to truly grasp the inner workings of this predatory and parasitic class of people. Their lives are too far removed from the realities of normal people both in a material sense (that covers spatial and temporal dimensions) as well in a psycho-spiritual sense, seeing as these people are alienated from what can be loosly defined as a broad lived inner human normalcy we must infer collectively. Their psyche and their sense of self must be wildly different from the baseline of humanity for them to act in the ways they do. Not in the sense that they always have been different or born this way, ¹ but in the sense that their circumstances make them different in the most substantial ways. They live transhuman lives in the worst sense of the word. Which brings me immeasurable pain to admit – as a strong believer in a spiritual and political transhumanism – as someone who has to defend the most basic common sense realities of a utopian future against being conflated with the monstrous designs these freaks and weirdos construct and materialize.

Their transhumanism is one of dissolution of reality, a fracture of humanness, of dignity, of love and of empathy. Its a mechanical transhumanism of replication, of formulaic evolutionary shortcuts through AI accelerated post-ethical means. Its the exact transhumanism people – me included – would warn everyone against. But it is a form of transhumanism nonetheless and its important to address in this context.

Creating AI avatars of yourself is a process of transcending your own humanity; of becoming more than a mortal human shell with an expiration date. It is quintessential trans- and posthuman in so far that it reaches beyond limitations of the human form and psyche but it is entirely devoid of its spirit in so far as it is only a physical and material enlargement without the accompanying spiritual work or dimension that reframes the world and our own position in it accordingly. There is no humility in it which is imperative with each and every posthuman thought that is worth pursuing. What we see here with these billionaires who want to transcend life and death out of vanity and narcissism – who want to populate history and this earth with copies of themselves – is a purely mechanistic act of replication of current day sytemics without any spiritual growth on their behalf; because that growth would be preceded by an understanding that a spiritual evolution is infact needed to make a transformation such as the one of becoming a multitude (even if only a simulated one, encapsulated entirely within the constricting market and wealth driven narratives of the present) holistic. They however perceive themselves as fundamentally psychologically and spiritually perfected already, or must ignore any doubts they might have about that. To them a proliferation of self (a material replication) is the most logical endpoint to humanity’s completion. The most worthy, the most achieved and the most brilliant that inhabit the earth materially and spiritually eternally. It is entirely consitent with the rest of their parasitic existence to want to infect history and the cultural layer with innumerable zombified simulacra of themselves. They probably see it as an enrichtment, as a gift and a genuine advancement to have those AI agents acting in their interests – which by extensions are the best interests of humanity to them.

This creation of their AI driven offspring gives us a rare and deeply personal glimpse into their situatedness amongst the world and humanity. It lays bare their personal abscence from the shared realities of human and natural life and how they want to move further away even still whilst at the same time writing themselves into the very foundations of the world so deeply as to make it all but impossible to ever remove them entirely again; after all unleashing algorithmic specters of yourself is rarely a sign of the well adjusted, the intgerated or the humble.

It also unveils their suprising lack of imagination to embed themselves into this worlds history by degraded barely legible and externally manipulated (and manipulative) copies of themselves. It makes clear that their inner journeys are nonexistent or already concluded. We are left with two options here, which are: either their inner life is shallow enough to be encoded into an AI algorithm at this day or they perceive this externalization of themselves (for purposes of molding these models to their personal liking) as the more workable way of creating a selfactualizing version of themselves, which just shows their amazing lack of capacity, of will and of perserverance to adjust their inner life, their being and their spirituality internally. A third option would be that their inner lives are as fractured as their myriad copies and they themselves cannot find a totality or a genuine core so they might hope that this process of adjusting externalized copies might lead them to a semblance of barely stabilized truth about themselves or to its creation. It might be that they are genuinely at a loss about what it is that makes them who they are.

But most importantly we can see the economical nature of their inner life and their relation to time and that their personal horizons are truly already fully included within the horizons of the current when arguing that these avatars of theirs are here to enhance their economical productivity metrics and to act on their behalf when they are called upon to interact with other humans to which they cannot form genuine connections and in which they show no real interest in.

And while these speculations about the inner life of sociopathic billionaires with a messianic complex are just that, speculation, there is a genuinely disturbing manipulation that is going to happen with these digital zombies that act as connection points for thousands of workers to their personalized imaginary avatars of their CEOs, which is probably at the core of this whole problematic endeavour.

It is easy to see how a person in the progress of manipulating history to their needs – which most billionaires attempt sooner rather than later – will use these to offload mental loads onto so they can focus more of their energy on actively creating their personal life’s journey into history and maybe even immortality. that is one genuine facet of this undertaking, yes.

More importantly however, selfassured of their brilliance and their deserving rule over others and this world of ours, they cannot but abhor a lack of narrative control over how they are perceived by their lessers. The creation of a chimeric simulacrum that is able to present differently to each person they are interacting with, is a dystopian system of mass manipulation in the making. It is not hard to imagine how a distorting and learning algorithm that wants to maximize retention and sympathy will induce a parasocial relationship within the person it interacts with. We see these in almost all interactions people have with LLMs and how they are all trained to reflect peoples hopes, wishes and preconceived notions back to them as to make them more likely to keep interacting with the AI models and to grow to like interacting with them.

A personalized billionaire CEO AI agent you can chat with will undoubtably change your personal relation with the real person that it is representing as it will actively manipulate and inform your perception of them. In the act of those communications this AI agent will adapt, learn and grow ever more personal and likeable and in the end its very likely they will replace the reality of a singular person that is endowed with a singular personhood into what can only be seen as personalized fiction that lives privately within thousands or even millions of people. Every last one of them becoming a personal truth all of them collectively aimed at creating a projection of what the real person behind them is like and how much they are invovled with the personal life of those they are manipulating.

These AI agents in time will become hyperreal. Thousands of people with their personalized wildly different intimate and private versions of a single real person, all unified in their collective admiration and their fundamental belief that they are the sole owners of truth and the interpersonal as it pertains to their personal Jesus who speaks exclusively to them.

Mark Zuckerberg the AI avatar will be a million different things to a million different people and to all of them their version of him will be the most life-like and the truest form of the person they are made to belief is him whilst being carefully and perpetually manipulated. Collectively they will be made to project their carefully curated version back onto the real person and what remains is a cultish following that will agree that the real person is everything they ever hoped for and more. In a room full of people all carrying their personal version of Mark Zuckerberg within them the defining reality ultimately will be their consensus about his fundamental likeabilty and approachability, a sense of genuine care and interest in their lives, needs and hopes. Total narrative control by giving each person the exact things they need to see and hear and by making them feel that they are at the center of personal interest, attention and care.

there is no doubt that these methods of narrative manipulation and control will quickly leave the corporate environments they are initially designed for (if allowed and effective) and enter the public sphere to not only create a docile workforce but to try to sway the perception of broader society about the predatory class of billionaires and trillionaires.

The AI driven mass-indoctrination is here and it will be one of the most lucrative modes of the AI economy to sell personalized idolatry whilst preying on the weaknesses, insecurities and hopes of the masses to manipulate them into thinking that their violaters are being their saviours. We will find ourselves arguing against a wave of wildly different versions of the same predators in no time and we will be overwhelmed by it for all these versions will be truth to someone and no one likes to admit that they have been manipulated, abused and instrumentalized to defend their exploiters; especially not when they can point to millions who have only positive things to say about them as well. And lastly we can easily imagine how the religious and cultish organizations will find this technology useful to sell their personal saviours and salvation as well. The movie THX 1138 comes to mind.

1. though there is a good argument for a more fundamental neurodivergence to be made; but we will not delve into this today ↩︎