Meta’s Moltbook gamble looks a lot like bubble behavior

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Meta, the company that changed its entire brand identity five years ago on the promise of a technology it turned out no one wanted, just spent an undisclosed sum to acquire Moltbook, a “social network” built for “AI agents.”

I’m quoting Moltbook there, but I’m also using quotes because it’s important to remember that artificial intelligence is just lines of code and therefore not capable of socializing. AI “agents” are just bots that can mimic human actions online, so perhaps the better descriptor of Moltbook is a “pseudo-performance of a social network”? If using Facebook is an online performance, Moltbook is an attempt at aggregating every social media user into a kind of meta-spectacle of socialization.

Whatever you want to call it, Moltbook is essentially a Reddit-like forum where bots are meant to “talk” to one another. And Meta’s decision to buy it is significant — not so much because of what it Moltbook is but because of what it represents: a speculative bet on a novel technology with no demonstrated utility for humans.

The project went viral last month for two major reasons:

Some people, apparently forgetting that AIs are designed to reflect the dystopian sci-fi and other texts they were trained on, were alarmed by how quickly the bots seemed to conspire against humans and form their own bot religion, dubbed Crustafarianism. (There’s a whole crustacean theme to Moltbook, which is built on an open-source software called OpenClaw, which used to be called “Clawd,” but that sounded too much like Anthropic’s “Claude.”)
Moltbook is a massive…

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