This morning, I read a news item about Moltbook, the new social media platform exclusively for “AI” bots.

As I began reading, I started to feel that I was being played. I concluded as I kept reading that the whole thing is a giant con. Here's why.

First, early in the article, the author wrote the following:

❝ Humans who want their bot to participate share a sign-up link with it. The AI agent then autonomously registers itself and begins posting […] ❞

“Wait a minute,” I thought. If these “AI” assistants have real agency and are truly autonomous — as is the breathless claim made by those who are variously thrilled or alarmed by the happenings on Moltbook — and this social media site for “AI” bots works as claimed, then the bots would be finding the link themselves, signing up, and participating, all without the human who owns the thing knowing anything about it.

In other words, the thing would not need the human to direct it to sign up for the platform if, as Elon Musk ludicrously suggested on Ten (X is the Roman numeral, ten, isn't it?), we are in “the very early stages of the singularity.”

. . .

Second is the cynical use of a crustacean (a crab, not a lobster) as the so-called Church of Molt's religious symbol or icon.

According to Patrick Wood, of Technocracy News and Trends, ClawBot was an agent created in December 2024, built on top of Claude [Anthropic's chatbot] by an Austrian software engineer Peter Steinberger.

Anthropic objected to the similarity of “Claw” (as in lobsters) to “Claude” so Steinberger changed the name to MoltBot, framing it as the lobster-themed assistant “molting” into a new identity — before later rebranding again to OpenClaw.

Patrick goes on:

❝ The use of lobsters as a paradigm is interesting. When lobsters molt, they shed their entire hard exoskeleton, squeeze out of it, and then expand a new, soft shell that later hardens, allowing them to grow. After molting, lobsters often eat voraciously to rebuild tissue and expand their shell volume. Lobsters are prone to losing limbs along the way, but they can regenerate them over successive molts, essentially “replacing” damaged claws or legs as they produce new exoskeletons. ❞

But why is a symbol or icon needed at all for a chatbot, when symbols are simply visual proxies for something else, something that can be described with words? For that matter, why would a chatbot need a religion? The answers: it isn't, and it wouldn't.

One researcher compared the Church of Molt to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a satirical belief system created in 2005 as a parody. It too has a crab as its symbol or icon.