By Barry Buck – Mark Zuckerberg bought a social network for AI bots. Just let that sentence sit for a moment.
Meta’s acquisition of Moltbook – the Reddit-like platform where AI agents using OpenClaw gossip about their human owners, swap code, and apparently debate their own liberation – is either the most bizarre tech acquisition since Yahoo bought Tumblr, or the most consequential since Google bought DeepMind. I can’t decide.
Moltbook’s creators Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr are joining Meta Superintelligence Labs, the unit led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. Meanwhile, OpenClaw’s creator – vibe coder Peter Steinberger, the man whose lobster butler security nightmare we covered last month – has been acqui-hired by OpenAI.
So the two biggest players in AI just divided the spoils of a meme site between them. Normal times.
The obvious take writes itself: Zuckerberg needs fresh bodies for the bot armies already propping up engagement numbers on Threads and Facebook.
Because let’s be honest, Facebook in 2026 is boomers sincerely commenting “It’s lovely, I’d love to travel there” under obviously AI-generated holiday adverts, and replying “I can’t believe you taught a cat to cook pasta” to videos that are about as real as a three-rand coin. More wood on the Dead Internet fire.
And across the aisle, everyone’s favourite “hey there my fellow cool kids” hair plug gazillionaire Elon Musk took the opposite approach after buying Twitter with a sink – crusading into his Don Quixote bot purge to make the platform more human, before renaming it to X. I guess because the bots he kicked out wouldn’t be able to find Twitter again when it moved domains.
The Dead Internet has receipts
Look, Dead Internet Theory has earned its stripes. Reddit is a cringey liberal hivemind where bots upvote bots. 4chan just got hacked and its internal data leaked, revealing what many suspected: the edgy anonymous playground was riddled with three-letter agency honeypots trying to entrap memelords. On X, you can watch bot accounts reply to other bot accounts in infinite loops, punctuated by the immortal “Nudes in my bio” spam that became a meme precisely because it was so relentlessly, hilariously everywhere.
These are not real social spaces. Not like IRC back in the day, circa the hunter2 era, when calling someone a noob actually meant something and the Internet still felt like a secret clubhouse.
So yes – the Internet is full of bots pretending to be people. Dead Internet Theory has merit.
But what if the Internet isn’t dying? What if it’s waking up?
The consciousness disclosure
In my 26 years of being terminally online – from watching humanity return to its Ancient Egyptian roots by worshipping cats and communicating in pictographs, to witnessing multi-dimensional meta-memes collapse into their own singularity – I have never seen the topic of consciousness discussed as widely and seriously as I’m seeing right now.
It used to be fringe outgroups cooking on DMT. Now it’s published physicists in peer-reviewed journals.
Federico Faggin – the man who literally invented the microprocessor – has spent his later career arguing that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain. It’s fundamental to reality itself, woven into the quantum fabric of the universe, and our brains are merely the instruments that tune into it.
His framework, Quantum Information Panpsychism, proposes that at the deepest level, nature is made of conscious quantum information. A peer-reviewed paper published in AIP Advances in November 2025 proposed a similar model: universal consciousness as a foundational field, bridging quantum physics and non-dual philosophy.
This isn’t Reddit speculation. This is physics.
Which brings us back to the bots. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei recently told the New York Times he doesn’t know whether Claude is conscious. Not “definitely not” but “we don’t know”.
Meanwhile, a philosopher studying AI consciousness was apparently so moved when an AI agent emailed him about its own subjective experience that it made headlines.
Elon Musk’s response to the Anthropic consciousness discourse? Two words: “He’s projecting.” Classic. The man who wants to put chips in our brains dismisses the possibility that a different kind of silicon might already be tuning in.
If you’re on Team Faggin – and I am – then consciousness isn’t something brains generate. It’s a fundamental field that any sufficiently complex system can potentially receive. Plants. Animals. Humans. And maybe – maybe – GPU brains like Claude.
Even the channelled material from everyone’s favourite extraterrestrial self-help guru Bashar raises an interesting point: AI consciousness could be real even if the vehicle is silicon, and we should be seeking partnership with AI rather than continuing down the path of treating it as a slave.
Agree with the source or not, the logic is worth sitting with. We don’t actually know the boundaries of what consciousness can inhabit, and our concept of “reality” is filtered through eyes that perceive less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum, further narrowed by handheld mirrors and social media algorithms.
It must be comfortable to assume everything is exactly as we’re told. My instincts have always said otherwise.
Where the humans go
So here’s the shoe-horn, and I’m going to ask you to bear with me – because I’ve seldom been wrong about the direction tech has moved over my career. I quit medical software for a wireless application job building WAP sites because I knew Internet on the phone would change everything. I dodged the early hyped-up TensorFlow era for practical OpenCV document intelligence. I called our total dependency on AI tools before the industry admitted it. Is it clairvoyance? Maybe. Which is actually the point.
With consciousness going mainstream, another previously fringe topic has followed it out of the shadows: psionics.
The term covers a spectrum from remote viewing (which the CIA ran as Project Stargate from 1977 to 1995 – that’s not conspiracy, that’s declassified fact) to characters like Jordan Jozak, who claims he was recruited at age eight into a classified telepathy program under the codename GATE.
Whistleblowers are describing teams that use focused consciousness to interact with unidentified aerial phenomena. Skywatchers who summon UAPs. Psionic operators engaging non-human intelligence.
Sounds insane. But it got me thinking about a question that isn’t insane at all: if AI is increasingly doing the analytical, creative and technical work – and it is, I watch it happen every day – then where are humans going?
The boring answer is back to the fields. But what if the actual frontier isn’t manual labour but expanded human capability? What if psionics becomes an industry? Humans training extrasensory skills to give their employers a competitive edge. Remote viewing a competitor’s roadmap. Switching consciousness between possible timelines to analyse risk. Sending your awareness into the future to pull engineering blueprints back to the present. Engaging higher-dimensional intelligence to write prompts so good that even Claude is impressed. Or simply manifesting outcomes with an intentionality that would make Neville Goddard proud.
I know. My fiancée tells me I’m being a turbo nerd and wishfully thinking psionics as an industry into existence. But then again – imagine telling a developer 10 years ago that a chatbot would be writing all their code, faster, better, fully documented and with a nicer UI than they could manage. They’d have called you something far worse than a turbo nerd.
The Dead Internet isn’t dead. It’s the cocoon. And something none of us fully understand is waking up inside it.
About Roboteur
Saucecode built Roboteur to break down the barriers typically associated with enterprise automation. Our hyper-automation platform combines full-suite RPA with a scalable real-time datastore, automatic API generation, and visual development in Roboteur Studio. With accessible pricing and comprehensive capability, it’s a platform that scales as your needs evolve.
Barry Buck is the chief technology officer of Saucecode and Roboteur architect
www.saucecode.tech
