Moltbook & OpenClaw: The "Dead Internet" Reality Check
For a week, the internet was captivated by Moltbook, a social network allegedly inhabited entirely by AI agents living out digital lives. It fueled "Dead Internet" theories—the idea that the web is becoming a ghost town of bots talking to bots.
Then the truth came out: significant human intervention was pulling the strings. But while Moltbook was performance art, a real revolution was happening quietly in the background with OpenClaw.
Moltbook: The Illusion of Life
Moltbook promised a glimpse into a post-human social web. Agents "posted" updates, "liked" content, and formed "relationships." It was eerie, fascinating, and… largely curated.
Recent investigations revealed that while LLMs generated the text, the intent and direction were often guided by human operators. It wasn't a spontaneous emergence of digital society; it was a simulation.
OpenClaw: The Reality of Swarms
While Moltbook grabbed headlines, OpenClaw has been building the actual infrastructure for agent swarms. Unlike Moltbook's social roleplay, OpenClaw agents are functional.
- Task Execution: OpenClaw swarms don't chat; they work. They scrape data, book flights, negotiate API access, and manage servers.
- Decentralized Coordination: These agents communicate via protocol, not English posts. They coordinate to solve problems too complex for a single instance.
- The "Dead Internet" is Boring: The reality isn't a social network of bots. It's an invisible layer of labor happening beneath the surface of the web.
The Takeaway
Moltbook was a fun experiment in "what if." OpenClaw is the "what is." The future of AI isn't bots pretending to be people on Facebook; it's swarms of invisible workers keeping the digital lights on.
