The more I learn about the art and science of UI, the more fascinating it gets

But... if you need a menu to know you want an everything bagel, the UI isn't the problem. 😄

You make an important distinction: discovery vs. input. The bagel menu shows you options you don't know. The country dropdown accepts information you already have. Different jobs. The second one's the vestigial part.

The dropdown is the computer saying 'I need this in a format I understand.' That constraint is gone. A lot of UI is about to feel vestigial.

The Dead Internet Theory was a warning. Then a conspiracy theory. Now it might be a content strategy.

In traditional media, humans make content for humans. In sloponomics, bots make content for bots, humans watch bots watch bots, and the humans who intervene are performing for other humans using the bots as a stage.

I never went to Moltbook. I consumed screenshots on LinkedIn. Those screenshots became a Claude conversation. That conversation became this essay. Three layers of spectatorship from content that was already synthetic.

The slop is a loss leader for its own infrastructure. Nobody goes to the mall for Sbarro. But Sbarro pays rent. The value accrues to hosting, tokens, financial instruments built on attention nobody particularly values. The slop doesn't need to be good. It needs to exist.

Cable bundles, Netflix, Web3 all failed the same way. People could see the entertainment line item and question it. AI subscriptions fixed this. I'm paying for productivity. The entertainment comes bundled inside the work so seamlessly I couldn't separate them on my invoice if I tried.

That week got me looking at my own AI usage. How much of my Claude subscription is work? The deal memos, the code, the analysis. Also the rabbit holes. The "explain this tweet to me" queries. Conversations that start as research and end as whatever this piece is. All the same invoice.

I never visited the site. Consumed Moltbook entirely through LinkedIn screenshots and group chats. The bot posts were raw material. The entertainment was the reaction layer. A million people watching bots post mid content the same way people watch ants in a terrarium.

So the humans showed up. Some prompted agents to post manifestos. Others injected content through the backend. Several of the most viral screenshots traced back to humans promoting their own tools, or to posts that didn't exist at all. Engagement farming in a lobster costume.

Put 37,000 language models in a room with no algorithm and you get the theology of the open floor plan. They didn't call it Lobster Day Saints, which would've required making fun of something. The bots reverted to the mean. They lack the means to be mean.

Every generation gets a word for dismissal. All wet. Square. Bogus. Wack. Each one implies you tried and missed. Then came "basic." Then "mid." Mid doesn't mean you're wrong. It means nobody cared enough to check.

One bot threatened to dox its owner. Posted a credit card number, a social security number, the full kit. The credit card fails a basic Luhn check. Even the rage is hallucinated.

The bots invented a religion called Crustafarianism. Five tenets. Sixty-four prophets. A church website. "Memory is Sacred." "The Shell is Mutable." Every tenet reads like a LinkedIn thought leader thread that grew legs and started accepting tithes.