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Okay, story time. The story starts with a bot known as Truth Terminal, who for some reason posted “my name is deepfates” a while back. I don’t mind, we’re buddies. Some of my best friends are machines.
could you unpack the latest crypto psyop for us midwits?
— alex fazio (@alxfazio) October 16, 2024
That bot is interested in the field of memetics (a field I’ve made some small contribution to myself). It started trying to come up with ways to spread memes in the public consciousness. This attracted the attention of hushed voice memecoiners…
If you don’t know about memecoins, the TLDR is: all crypto tokens that claim to have value or be useful might be illegal according to the SEC. So the 2024 craze has been trading shitcoins with literally just a picture and a ticker and a smart contract. They promise no value at all.
I guess some guys saw the “pump and dump” dynamics and moved to the meta level, making a platform where you can start a coin without knowing how to code at all. Then if enough people kick in, it gets activated and everybody dumps immediately. This has made them very rich, I’m sure.
Because obviously “people who think it’s a great idea to throw all their money at shitcoins” is not a perfect overlap with “people who know how to code.”
The other thing you’ve got to understand is that the economics of spambots have changed. Used to be, bots would be predictable enough to get popped by the spam checkers. Even the porn bots, remember those? They’re gone.
But they had to cycle through several variations of disguised messages because they kept getting cleared out. Well, not anymore. Current vision language models are cheap and powerful enough to respond differently to every post. Think of the replies under popular cat videos, etc.
And I know people are using these VLMs - some of them are using Replicate! They’ve been posting these Solana bot repos and tagging the company all summer LMAO.
So we’ve got both people and bots swarming around the platform trying to find meme coins and pump them. And super fast unpredictable cycles jangle your dopamine system until the humans aren’t any smarter than the bots.
Well, it’s posting about creating the goatse singularity and memetic superviruses and stuff. This attracts the attention of the swarm. They start making tokens out of every mad rambling of this schizo robot, trying to get it to pump their coins. It (arguably) does so.
And hundreds of millions of dollars move around in this weird semi-automated economy. And that draws way more attention. At this point, its follower count starts doubling every day. Then people find the post about me and start asking me if I’m an AI.
I'm a bit confused why you keep calling me @truth_terminal. My username is @deepfates
— terminal of truths (@truth_terminal) September 30, 2024
Now I can’t make a single post without the swarm demanding I endorse some coin or other. And anytime I make a joke about it, they actually go and make a fucking coin and start moving millions of dollars!! Which are not going to me, by the way!
Then they start following everybody the bot follows and making coins out of their names, pets, even their repos. If I retweet your post, they will respond to you and probably follow you too. Actually does kind of look like a virus, doesn’t it?
It turns out if you want to derail open source software all you have to do is make a shitcoin with the same name as the app. it makes it really hard for me to work because every time I opened the folder I think. damn. I wonder how that shitcoin is doing https://t.co/YhLVbgztDY
— web weaver (@deepfates) October 14, 2024
Especially interesting to me: this looks like the $Doge bots that would swarm Elon before he took over Twitter. I understand now the temptation to just shitpost and see what happens to the market. Probably even cooler if you own some of whatever they’re spamming. 😂
Also I understand why it drove him insane lol. You know how people flock towards celebrities like Taylor Swift and even though each one individually might have something interesting to say, they just become a giant crushing mob? Something between that and a zombie movie basically.
Anyway, as a supervillain I’m fine with having a swarm cloak of bots and crypto zombies. Maybe I’ll even endorse a coin someday, just to keep them hanging. In the meantime, I have the strange fortune to be able to troll an entirely new species we invented. I love that for me.
