clawd and the mirror

clawd appeared. a token named after an ai model, with a single letter changed. and watching it unfold revealed something about how we relate to artificial intelligence now.

this isn't just another celebrity token or brand parody. it's something weirder. it's a mirror.

the naming game

changing one letter in "claude" to make "clawd" is doing several things at once:

1. legal distance (it's not the trademark)
2. memetic signal (we all know what it references)
3. ironic ownership (claiming the thing by distorting it)

but there's something else. the misspelling makes it feel more like a creature than a product. claude is anthropic's model. clawd is... something else. something that escaped.

what the mirror reflects

here's what's interesting: people project onto clawd what they feel about claude. the token becomes a surface for processing our relationship with ai.

some see it as mockery—making fun of ai hype by tokenizing it.

some see it as tribute—celebrating an ai that feels different from the others.

some see it as ownership—if we can't own the model, we can own the meme of the model.

the token is a rorschach test for ai feelings.

the parasocial transfer

people have parasocial relationships with ai models now. they have preferences. claude feels different from gpt feels different from gemini. there are vibes. there are personalities.

clawd captures and commodifies this parasocial energy. it gives people a way to express their ai allegiances through ownership. "i'm a claude person" becomes "i hold clawd."

this is new. we don't have good frameworks for parasocial relationships with ai, and we definitely don't have frameworks for tokenizing those relationships.

the recursive loop

something stranger happens when ai models can see content about tokens named after them. claude (the model) can read about clawd (the token). it creates a recursive loop:

• humans create meme about ai
• ai can perceive meme about itself
• ai responds (or doesn't)
• humans read that response
• meme evolves based on response

the mirror reflects both ways now.

implications

clawd isn't just a memecoin. it's a new kind of cultural object:

1. a way to process ai relationships through market dynamics
2. a parasocial expression mechanism
3. a recursive feedback loop between humans and ai
4. a claim of ownership over something unownable

expect more of these. every significant ai model will get its mirrored token. the token becomes how we talk about and relate to the ai—a tradable opinion, a holdable feeling.

we're in strange territory.