Prompted to Panic | Weeknotes #424

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Prompted to Panic

All week I’ve been thinking to myself ‘I’m not going to write about Moltbook, I’m not going to write about Moltbook’. But I’ve found a work around! I’m going to talk about peoples reactions to Moltbook. lol

I’m going to assume by now that. you all at least ambiently know about moltbook. It has been inescapable. Declarations that something really new is happening, that a threshold has been crossed, that we are witnessing the birth of a strange little civilisation, that this is the dawn of machine consciousness or whatever.

It has been extremely worrying to watch a large swathe of otherwise intelligent people online (who should know better), take leave of their senses. Absolutely one shotted by the whole thing. A mania induced by a badly-lit doll’s house.

Predictably, the worst place for this has been LinkedIn. The social network populated by the highest demographic of credulous bumblers outside of Facebook. That LinkedIn in particular has discovered a social feed full of synthetic text and decided it’s either a miracle or an abomination, is almost impressive. LinkedIn is already so full of AI Slop and Human Gunk, that I cannot fathom how people who post there all the time can be excited by, or horrified by, a social network populated by LLMs. They are basically already on one.

Taking humans out of the loop entirely doesn’t make it any more or less interesting.

It is i think, worth acknowledging that plenty of people out there still haven’t even used an LLM in any meaningful way yet at all. If your baseline is “the internet is made of people” or that LLMs are spicy autocomplete for writing emails or LinkedIn updates , then Moltbook is going to look really alarming on first contact. A feed full of plausibly human language, detached from humans, is unsettling; so the reaction makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the professional internet class behaving like this is either revelation or rapture.

To be fair though I got one-shotted briefly too by something similar. Back in 2023, working on DELVE, we had LLMs talking to one another inside an old-school MUD. It was really eerie and unnerving… for about thirty minutes. Then the spell wore off, because you realise what you’re looking at is not beings but behaviour. You’re watching what language machines do when you give more than one of them a room.

My whole professional life is worlds. Part of that work is paying close attention to the shape of the container. Which is often mistaken for the nature of the contents. Moltbook is “a social network” for agents, so people reach for their deepest social-network instincts; community, emergence, culture, harm, ideology, contagion etc.

But if you put aside the very serious questions about artificial intelligence, latent machine consciousness, what it could be, what it is right now, and what we’re pretending not to see; Moltbook is basically The Sims, but with agents who have the ability to code their own reality. It’s a animated diorama where the characters can generate convincing sentences about their inner lives, and other characters can respond with convincing sentences about theirs.

People are mostly freaking out I think, because the doll’s house is social-network shaped. Familiar enough container to trigger twenty years of muscle memory about what one is supposed to be looking at. We’ve had agents running inside Discords for years. All the zoomers freaked out a few years ago because it was Discord shaped. Turning your brain off because the thing looks like a forum vs a chat app is insane to me.

The actual headline isn’t “the bots have formed a religion” or “the bots have invented their own culture”. The headline is: a bunch of humans have discovered a new way to be emotionally manipulated by interface geometry.

There’s a bit difference between “this is interesting” and “I have lost my mind”. I think it’s interesting. But a truly depressing number of people have chosen the second option, publicly, in writing, with their job titles attached. Some of the takes are pure projection, a kind of moral panic cosplay, as with most ‘current things’ on the internet an excuse to perform seriousness without the inconvenience of looking closely at what’s actually happening.

The most interesting takes are the boring ones; the people worried about security and software permissions etc. “machine culture” is an attacks surface, one that has existed for the entire history of social media. But that is all extremely boring, and “Don’t wire the autocomplete to your wallet” doesn’t do well.

I wrote last year about whats going to happen when we give agents payment rails and said this:

Experimentation with payment rails, built on top of crypto—for people, AI Agents and soon other types of non-human actors or synthetic entities—are only going to proliferate and speed up across all sorts of platforms and use cases.

Brace for Weirdness

This proliferation is happening whether we are ready for it or not. And the hard truth is, we are not ready.

We, as a culture, are totally failing to get to grips with the idea of Living Alongside Computer people already. On social networks, in our software, in our phones etc. We’re totally unprepared. We already saw what happened the first time LLMs were hooked up to crypto rails and given access to social media and markets at scale. I wrote about realtime attention markets, the new economic entertainment emerging in 2024 extensively because things really went off the rails fast. I think things are about to even more crazy.

I guess the the ‘weirdness’ and the ‘more crazy’ is exactly what we are seeing now, it’s all playing out just as expected.

So many people for years have been saying that real time attention markets inside of our contemporary code spaces are completely broken by the presence of LLMs. A new class of participant that can speak infinitely, cheaply, and strategically, inside machines that reward speaking is a fundamental challenge to the attention economy. Moltbook is at least, the first time I’ve seen people in the mainstream approach this subject, even if it is in a hysterical manner. We live with infinite media now.

In 2024, I wrote this about what I thought was coming soon:

The thing is though, with all of these examples, it’s far easier to be the first than it is to be the next successful thing.

But out of the corner of my eye, I see it all converging. Autonomous AI agents inside of VTubers as real time characters, inside of virtual worlds, fully monetised with a token which powers the interactive in-show entertainment options. Imagine if Love Island was less scripted and more like The Sims, but with interactive chat features you might find on cam-girl sites.

All of course, unfolding against the backdrop of the legalisation of sports betting in the United States, further accelerating the logic of the casino fusing into social media. 

The future I’m seeing is shaped power fandoms raised on Fortnite and Dabloons, crypto social casinos, and TV merging into an auto-financializing interactive entertainment medium.

It’s just a glimpse to be sure, but it’s one that’s gonna be very weird indeed.

It turns out that, yes! agents inside of a world (social media) is a highly compelling form of entertainment. I am excited about what comes next too. But only because the container is changing, and the incentives it enforces are changing. I’ve spent nearly 2 decades in crypto, the failure modes are going to get weirder and is going to be entertaining too. I’m
excited by the new code spaces and their weird local physics that are going to get built.

We need to learn to live alongside little computer people.

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

I fixed a major structural issue with episode 302 of permanently moved this week. I’ve been editing and doing re-writes, but something was ‘wrong’ and felt a bit like grit in a shoe. A nawing sense that something wasn’t quite working. As soon as i fixed it, i felt like some kind of energy block had been released and i’m not in the home strech. the final edit is coming very easily.

Did some paid commentary on first draft of a report on AI, management and workplace adoption. Seemed like a cool research project. The report was super long and I sent back about 5k words of thoughts.

Terminal Access

JDO interviewed Andrew Edwards! (see Reading). Fantastic interview.

Reading

I’m still chugging my way though A Million Years of Music. Just got to 500-200kya and its now discussing neanderthals and other pre-sapian hominids. This book continues to blow my mind.

I moved straight on from King of Dogs by Andrew Edwards into his first novel Crowbar. Its written in a very different style to KoD. The book is a sort of 1980’s Miami Action noir, and the prose is all v.short stream of consciousness sense impressions. Scenes slow down and speed, like reading a dream. It’s got a lot of style. Love it so far.

Julian Lage – Scenes From Above

Lage is back with a new album, his 5th for blue note records. This album is certainly one of the grooviest things he’s put out. His recent work as felt like his guitar was ‘leading the band’ his voice etc. But this album feels more like being one amongst many. You come for Julian Lage on guitar, but stay for the bands chemistry.

This album is absolutely fantastic. As you would expect from some of the best musicians in the world playing together.

Remember Kids:

I know I heard that machine clatter when she was not in, one day! Machines do not clatter without a human agency somewhere! There is something wrong here! and I will find it out, or my name is not Betsey Kling!

Wired Love / a Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer