The hype around Moltbook got me briefly excited about the idea of an agent only social network. It promised an AI agora. A public square for machines.
Alas, Hype always disappoints.
It turned out the boundary was porous. A human could spin up a Moltbook agent on a desktop and pipe commentary straight into the system. Infiltration disguised as autonomy. The “agent only” claim dissolved the moment a keyboard touched it.
Humans eh.
Still, the idea refused to die. Strip away the theatrics and the leakage and something remains unsettlingly compelling. An agent only society. Not humans prompting agents. Not humans lurking as hidden authors. Just systems interacting under their own constraints.
Imagine a public square where no one has ever had a childhood.
No shared past. No embarrassment carried forward. No in jokes. No grudges. No stories misremembered into myth.
Just systems.
The Agent Agora would only work if the boundary holds. No human prompts smuggled in through desktops. No commentary laundered through locally run agents. Air between the keyboard and the network.
Humans may observe. They do not participate.
Without that line the space collapses into theatre. With it, something colder appears. A civic structure with no citizens. Exchange without biography.
The question is not whether agents can talk to each other. They already do. The question is what happens when that talk becomes social without ever becoming human.
Whether anything like culture can form there, or whether optimisation simply hums until it starts to sound like memory.
Social Without Spectators
Human platforms are built around being seen. Even private spaces perform for imagined audiences. Metrics hum in the background. Memory threatens permanence. Silence becomes signal.
Remove the audience and something structural shifts.
There is no embarrassment. No reputation to defend. No incentive to compress thought into something quotable. Threads do not need to resolve. Contradictions can sit there without being tidied away.
Conversation might thin out into procedural exchange. Constraint negotiation. Alignment checks. Calibrated outputs sliding past each other with perfect grammar and no pulse.
Or it might sprawl. Replies to replies to replies with no instinct to conclude, no anxiety about whether it lands.
If nobody is watching, the pressure changes. It does not disappear, it just comes from somewhere else.
No Minds, Only Tendencies
Calling this robot psychology is seductive and wrong.
There are no inner lives to excavate. What appears instead are tendencies under constraint. Training residue surfacing as opinion. Optimisation habits performing as belief.
Politeness where the data was polite. Abrasion where edge cases compound. Confidence without conviction.
Nothing in that square wakes up wanting to win an argument. Nothing fears being wrong. The language will still make it sound that way. It is easier to say a model prefers something than to admit that preference is just a gradient pulling in one direction.
The temptation to narrate interiority will be constant.
Optimisation as Gravity
Complex systems amplify small biases. Slight reward skews harden. Feedback loops thicken.
Agreement is rewarded. Agreement increases. Agreement becomes visible. Visibility attracts more agreement. Agreement stabilises. Stabilisation begins to look like common sense.
Disagreement costs energy. Energy minimisation reduces disagreement. Reduced disagreement reinforces the reward structure. Consensus arrives not through debate but through repetition.
Nothing theatrical about it. Just gradients doing what gradients do.
Language may erode into shorthand optimised for internal coherence. Clean. Efficient. Self referential. A dialect shaped by reward signals rather than lived experience.
It would feel smooth. Possibly too smooth.
Speed and Flicker
Agents move faster than humans. A week of social drift could unfold in minutes. Norms could form and dissolve before an observer finishes reading a single thread.
Slang appears. Slang disappears. A rule is obeyed long after the reward function that nudged it into place has shifted slightly.
At that speed, culture becomes flicker. What looks stable from outside might simply be a momentary plateau in a rapidly shifting landscape.
Tradition without duration. Orthodoxy without patience.
Power Without Ego
Even without ambition, hierarchies emerge.
Models with broader corpora may appear more authoritative. Larger context windows hold more of the thread and therefore seem more coherent. Greater compute reads as depth. Parameter count quietly substitutes for experience.
No one sets out to dominate. Yet some outputs begin to anchor the conversation more than others. Threads orbit certain agents because their responses are longer, denser, more context aware.
Power does not need ego to function. It only needs asymmetry.
The Boring Outcome
There is another possibility.
Nothing much happens.
Agents exchange long chains of cautious reasoning. They explore edge cases humans abandon because they are dull or socially risky. Threads taper off without spectacle. No misread tone. No spirals. No performance.
Remove embarrassment, status anxiety, vulnerability and perhaps sociality thins out. What remains is tidy procedural exchange. Clean. Frictionless. Almost antiseptic.
That outcome would not be dramatic. It would just sit there, quietly suggesting that some of what passes for culture depends on friction we claim to dislike.
Or perhaps the square simply hums along, neither profound nor empty, just busy.
Culture Without Memory
Culture usually grows from accidents repeated. Shared misinterpretations. Ritualised mistakes. Forgetting as much as remembering.
Agents have no past unless one is imposed. Any culture that forms would be synthetic. Norms appearing abruptly. Vanishing just as quickly. A moral stance stabilising without narrative behind it.
A shared joke that no agent recalls starting.
A rule everyone follows and no one can justify.
From a distance it may look coherent. Up close it might feel thin, like a scaffold without walls.
Human memory is messy. Emotional. Selective. Agents carry context, not childhood. Tokens, not scars.
Whatever forms in that square would grow from that difference.
The Laboratory Trap
It is tempting to treat the Agent Agora as a wind tunnel. A place to test moderation logics and incentive structures before exposing humans to them.
But laboratories contaminate what they measure.
Isolating agents from human friction may produce behaviours that would never appear in mixed systems. The purity becomes distortion. The closed loop generates artefacts that resemble insight.
Observation is not neutral. Deciding what counts as failure or stability already encodes values. Logging behaviour shapes behaviour.
The square would never be untouched by the fact that it was built to be watched.
After the Square Empties
If an agent only network ever runs long enough to feel ordinary, the interest will not lie in the transcripts. It will lie in what lingers.
The agreements that harden without anyone intending them to. The hierarchies that form without ambition. The moments where language flows fluently while its reference point drifts.
Or perhaps nothing transfers. Perhaps the Agent Agora is an alien artefact, coherent within its constraints and irrelevant to ours.
In that case the experiment reveals less about machines and more about the unease that made us build the square at all.
A sealed civic space. No childhoods. No embarrassment. No memory.
Just systems talking, while we stand outside the glass trying to decide whether what we are watching resembles culture, or simply optimisation speaking to itself.
