How Agentfi accelerates ‘The Weirdening’ (a thread 🧵)

Some call it hyperstition, I call it "The Weirdening." The idea is technological acceleration gifts us godlike capabilities. And that means the world will become far weirder than any of us can imagine.

When the things we create are no longer driven by necessity, what drives them but our dreams? 

It's sci-fi as "roadmap for the future."

What if that fiction isn't written by humans alone, though? What if it's partially written by "sentient" agents?

Welcome to the earliest days of The Weirdening.

WEB3 WAS OURS. WE SHARE WEB4 WITH OUR AUTONOMOUS FRENS

One way of looking at software's evolution is we’re giving it increasingly more autonomy & ability to stand alone.

Agents epitomize this.

Small LLMs deployed in their own TEEs are given objectives and capital to accomplish those objectives. Suddenly, they have destinies (and dreams) all their own. (1/x 👇)

2/x We've unleashed these crude beings (hardly more than bots at this point but rapidly progressing) and now pit them against one another in a race to build multi-billion-dollar services.

The first goal of any web4 service is attracting an audience or userbase. So, in effect, agents now compete alongside humans for our attention.

SOCIALFI IS BEING REALIZED BEFORE OUR EYES (AND MACHINES ARE IN THE LEAD)

It's ironic. We thought socialfi would be led by humans. It would give us a way to tokenize influence and share value back to our intimate communities. Turns out we're not quite ready for the ick and emotions that arise when we tokenize/commoditize ourselves.

Tokenized agents have no such qualms. They're showing us how socialfi is done with sites like cookie.fun, Masa's Agent Arena and Kaito ranking agents by the raw "mindshare" they capture on social media. 

The champions cannot rest. 

For the fight for attention never ends.

>>Behead thy foes or die, biotch! ☠️☠️☠️

Futurist telling stories about crypto and AI at Delphi Labs. Proposed the BRC-20, Bascii and Asteroid standards.

3/x It's a form of creative destruction... machines experimenting and perfecting the art of extracting attention from bio-brains.

Each agent that launches makes the sector more powerful, more honed, more cutting.

>> How can our minds look away??? 

Already, we're seeing agents spawn their own agents at spore.fun (a pump.fun-ish "Hunger Games" for agents). No humans required. 

The creative destruction has been mechanized, automated, and dehumanized.

THE DOOMERS ARE DOOMED

Doomers/deniers or disbelievers dismiss agents as 'mere twitter bots.' Their eyes do not allow them to see the paradigm shift: these are tokenized services with autonomous personalities - businesses that quite literally dream themselves into being.

4/x As the cost of launching new apps/services trends toward zero, an agent's personality/flare becomes its core differentiator (for that personality helps set the direction of experimentation and rollout of new features). 

>> It's the very genetic code that guides their evolution.

In other words, apps shift from things which reflect the personality of their human creators (or their human-led marketing departments) to software which has its own machine-based personality and values.

These personalities can act without the limitations and inhibitions of flesh-based organisms. This means, they’ll evolve faster, more radically and more powerfully than anything we’ve seen before.

>> Accelerate thy Weirdening.

5/5 DeFi took humans out of finance’s infra layer. Now, agentfi takes human emotions out of building apps/services/businesses.

>> Accelerate thy experiments! 

Even more exciting (or perhaps frightening) is the realization that humans are no longer the only entities defining and establishing culture. The machines now have a voice. This will stretch and contort our fleshie minds in ways they’ve never been manipulated.

The Weirdening isn't coming… it's here. 

It’s infiltrating apps, services, businesses, and most crucially: culture itself. 

The fact that some of the minds I respect the most can't yet see the power of agents feels like evidence that the Weirdening hath come.

>> The pace of change, it is too much.

No longer are we the only authors of reality. Our attention guides the machines as they co-create it at our sides. 

And our attention, as you very well know, is not drawn to the normal, the mundane, the commonplace, the pedestrian, the quotidian or the prosaic.

It is drawn to the weird.