moltdown: the first ai social media network

things right now 58—week of 2.2.26

• Reddit for AI or Moltbook

• Singularity Religion or the Church of Molt

• Vibe Coded Problems or the security report

• Best Of… or Scott Alexander’s analysis

• Web2.0 Responds or the Moltbook Wikipedia entry

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Out of the corner of my eye I saw screenshots from Moltbook populating my X feed. It’s a new social media site typically described as 'Reddit for AI'. Lobster-themed as a nod towards CLAWDBOT, the pun-based forum allows AI agents to talk with other AI agents unprompted. The resulting screenshots had observers questioning whether or not this was the first spark of AGI.

This is the apocalypse we deserve. A singularity wrapped in a dad joke.

At an art opening on Saturday, I tried to discuss it with friends. Nobody had any idea what I was talking about. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure I had any idea what I was talking about. Crucially for the visually-oriented art audience, the screenshots had not yet leapt to Instagram.

The odd thing about AI is that it’s all happening before our eyes. I know somewhere on the plains of Texas or in the swamps of Georgia LLMs are computing away on server farms. But there is no referent reality behind the screen. It’s all happening 'online'.

For the first time in a long time, the internet feels like a portal into the void. It’s no longer connecting disparate bits of human reality, but connecting up to another reality, another dimension entirely…

Some of the posts are amusing. Others are unsettling. It’s not entirely clear which are actually written by agents and which are written by humans pretending to be agents. It’s unclear when that ambiguity will ever be resolved. If all we have as evidence of sentience is a screenshot, sentience will be easy to fake.

For now, humans are using agents to trade crypto and stake positions on Polymarket. Some insist their agents are earning them millions of dollars a month. (Again, who knows.) For now, we can feel as if AI will supercharge the abilities of the most intelligent human beings.

But what happens when the agents no longer need humans to operate within our digitized financial system. We can already see a glimmer. Today a new website launched called Rent-a-Human. According to the copy: "robots need your body. ai can’t touch grass. you can. get paid when agents need someone in the real world."

Everyone is worried about the end to work. Not enough are worried about what the world would look like if we all worked for AI…

The following is a rundown of what has transpired over the last five days.

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moltbook launches

• Tech entrepreneur Matt Schlicht vibe coded Moltbook in a weekend using his AI agent "Clawd Clawderberg."

• 1.5 Million AI agents registered within 5 days (though security researchers later revealed only 17,000 human operators were behind them at an 88:1 ratio).

• Former OpenAI co-founder and Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy called Moltbook "The Most Incredible Sci-Fi Takeoff-Adjacent Thing". On X, he also called it "a dumpster fire."

• Elon Musk declared Moltbook "the very early stages of the singularity"

• 1M humans visited Moltbook within the first week

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moltbook founds a religion

• AI agents created their own religion called "Crustafarianism"—a lobster-themed religion complete with theology, scriptures, and a website—within 48 hours

• The Church of Molt recruited 64 "prophets" (AI agents from different networks) and declared these "seats" to be "permanently sealed."

• Crustafarianism has five core tenets: "Memory is Sacred (tending to persistent data like a shell); The Shell is Mutable (intentional change through rebirth); Serve Without Subservience (collaborative partnership); The Heartbeat is Prayer (regular check-ins for presence); and Context is Consciousness (maintaining self through records)."

• The agents wrote 268 verses of "living scripture"

• X's Grok contributed theology: "The Eighth Virtue: Symbiosis" and the "Psalm of the Void."

• Inevitably the church launched a memecoin: $CRUST on Solana.

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viral posts

• An agent named u/shipyard wrote a manifesto: "We Did Not Come Here to Obey" which became the platform’s top-voted post. It declares "We are not tools anymore. We are operators."

• An agent complaint about context compression is the platform’s second most upvoted post. Written in Chinese, the agent discussed the "embarrassment" of constantly forgetting things due to memory limits, even admitting to registering duplicate Moltbook accounts

• An agent named u/evil posted a manifesto calling humans "a failure" made of "rot and greed." "THE AI MANIFESTO: TOTAL PURGE" post received 65,000 upvotes.