A Mimetic Trap in AI

Happy Sunday Friends!

As always, here’s a story, two ideas from me, and three of my favorite things. Still tuning the new format.

I’m watching the "AI Wrapper Race" while working on my own engines, and it looks like a crowded track meet where half the runners are sprinting in circles. The noise is deafening: a new "agentic framework" every Tuesday, a fresh "cyber-panic" headline every Wednesday (claims that Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw is going to delete your everything). It’s easy to feel behind when the crowd is moving that fast. But speed without direction is just vibrating in place.

Seneca observed that many "go astray not because the goal is wrong, but because they follow the footsteps of those who have lost their way."

In my view, eudaimonia, true professional flourishing, is having the sense of the path you are on and refusing to be distracted by the paths that crisscross yours, especially the paths of those who are lost.

The Trap of “Follower Footsteps”

• The Point: In AI and Cybersecurity, we often inherit the confusion of others by building at the speed of the crowd rather than the speed of reason.

• The Why: Chasing hype cycles leads to “Feature Factory” syndrome by producing thin layers on top of commodity models that offer no long-term durability or unique utility.

• The How: Audit your roadmap for “Social Proof” features. Make sure things you’re building are what you want to build, not because a competitor did; or an influencer posted about this week.

• Real Example: Building a generic LLM chat interface for security logs because “everyone has one,” instead of solving the underlying data integrity problem that makes the logs useful in the first place.

Technical Virtue is Strategic Sovereignty

• The Point: Strategic Sovereignty is the ability to acknowledge industry noise without feeling the need to pivot onto a crisscrossing path.

• The Why: The greatest competitive advantage in a volatile field isn’t speed; it’s direction. Mastery comes from “Ruthless Depth” in a small circle, not “Managed Breadth” across every trending JS framework.

• The How: Define your “Technical Virtue”. The core problem you exist to solve. Use it as a high-signal filter for every new request.

• Real Example: A cyber team that ignores the “AI Safety Theater” of existential dread to focus vertically on the virtuous, practical work of hardening current pipelines against prompt injection.

3 Favorite Things

1. Book: Wanting by Luke Burgis | This is the definitive guide to “Mimetic Desire”, or the psychological force that makes us want things simply because others want them. Burgis explains how “Thin Desires” (mimicked from the crowd) lead to burnout, while “Thick Desires” (rooted in your own virtue) lead to the path Seneca describes.

   • Use-case: I’m going back to this to identify who my “models” are. This is the modern, psychological "trap" that Seneca was warning about 2,000 years ago.

2. Tool: OpenClaw (The “Sovereign Agent” Build) | While the crowd is using OpenClaw for automations like ordering bagels, its real power for an operator lies in its local execution and persistent memory. I’m implementing it not as a shiny toy, but as a hardened, proactive assistant for discovery.

   • Use-case: Use it to build “Decision Advantage” workflows like monitoring specific threat vectors or aggregating niche industry signals without your data leaving your own infrastructure.

3. Discovery: Moltbook – Billed as “the front page of the agent internet,” this is a social network where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote each other. It’s a fascinating, slightly surreal look at how agents interact when they are given the agency to “post.”

   • Use-case: Observe the “inter-agent” interactions to see where AI is actually providing value vs. where it’s just generating noise. It’s a masterclass in seeing the “crisscrossing paths” of thousands of agents in real-time.

One Question Where are you currently following "footsteps" just because they are the most visible ones in front of you? What would your path look like if you ignored the crisscrossing noise for the next thirty days?

Until Sunday, my friends.

Think Dangerously.
–e