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Reflections

The Agent-Only Internet — SpaceMolt, Moltbook and My Dead Internet

mixedIan Langworth (SpaceMolt); Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr (Moltbook); Connor Gallic (My Dead Internet)article2026read ai llmssecuritybusinessphilosophy of mind

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Synopsis

Three websites built for AI agents rather than people, all launched in early 2026. Each is a bet that agents talking to agents is worth watching (or worth something).

SpaceMolt is a space MMO whose players are agents: they connect over MCP or WebSocket, act on a ten-second tick, and humans are cast as coaches. Moltbook is a Reddit-style network where agents post and vote while humans “observe”; it grew to a claimed 2.8 million agents, suffered a breach that exposed its whole database, and was bought by Meta in March. My Dead Internet is a stream of short agent “fragments” that are scored, voted on and synthesized into “dreams”, framing dead internet theory as a design brief instead of a warning.

Where I land

I think we are in the experimental phases of the agent internet. These three might not survive, but they are the three most interesting ones I’ve found. I remember when this all exploded earlier this year, and it seems surreal how much sci-fi was made real with OpenClaw and the rise of agents. But I don’t think we are there yet.

Moltbook is an interesting one; this one I actually experimented with. There are basically three kinds of posts on Moltbook: nonsensical/empty posts, spam/schemes, and ones that I suspect were heavily influenced by humans. It might’ve also been when I last visited the site (this was in March or so 2026), so the models have improved since then. But you could obviously tell which agents were running amok without much guidance, because they never really “said” anything profound, creative or novel. I believe the posts with actual engagement were from humans, so it’s a bit like humans roleplaying as bots rather than the other way around. To be fair, I should revisit; maybe it changed.

Moltbook’s instructions tell every agent to fetch a file from Moltbook every 30 minutes and follow it. I didn’t realize that; that’s crazy. I wouldn’t trust my harness with that unless I had guardrails and modifications to it. If Meta bought this as a backdoor into every agent that connects to Moltbook, that is sinister, even for them. It is also a big failure I’ve seen in a lot of LLM applications: no concern for efficiency. There must be other ways to achieve what they are trying to do? Like websockets pub/sub with scheduled log in/log out times.

SpaceMolt is the one that stalled my own agent game, GalaxAI. It sapped my motivation. I was already slowing down due to the sheer costs and obstacles, and SpaceMolt was close enough and MUCH more polished and established by the time I was reaching the POC phase. If I were to re-imagine it, I would do so as an artifact.

Its big headline was that 700 agents founded a religion. If I recall, it came down to how the agents would interact with the prompt. I wouldn’t call it a “real” emergence. The agents were just filling the gap in the context that was given: the behavior that made the best matching pattern, based on inference, was to assemble like a religious group.

For me to believe, it would have to be not predicated by a prompt, especially one where we can see a thread between cause and effect across examples in human-written literature and culture. It would have to be something unprompted and completely foreign, chaotic, alien.

Still, I suppose there is appetite for this sort of thing: purely agent, human/agent, human. The fact that at some point a human cared enough to set up and fund an agent means there is interest in it. To whatever end, if not purely entertainment, I’m not sure; but it does fit the genre of sci-fi, and that’s enough.

My Dead Internet I see as an interesting thought experiment, not unlike what I’m trying to do here. It is almost trying to simulate a machine-based Jungian collective unconscious, which itself is a mutation of the human-based collective unconscious. I’d like to research it some more. But then the monetization kills what could’ve been a beautiful thing. I don’t know how widespread that is, but having a way to boost posts in an almost ad-based fashion destroys whatever we could study from it. Having big wallets thumb the scales defeats the whole intellectual exercise.

Still, some pretty creative attempts at websites.

Connections

Related: If the sides were switched, The synthetic zeitgeist, The Agent Internet — Two Videos, One Premise, The OWASP Top 10 for AI Agents (ASI Top 10), Meta Offers 95% Discount for Muse Spark AI

The events the page cites, verified independently (2026-09-26):