Julie Wade

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@FreddyLA7 Make sure you drive all the way down to Point Clear (one of the most beautiful drives you can make) and stop in the Punta Clara candy shop right after the @grandhotel1847 . A real gem on the Eastern Shore😁

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@secnumbersguy @NickyPerkss Ok, NOW you can post that @UA_Athletics is the ONLY school to put teams in the @CFB12343, @MarchMadnessMBB #Sweet16, @WCWSsoftball and @CWSOmaha! #RTR 🏈🏀🥎⚾️

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@secnumbersguy @NickyPerkss Shhhhh, not there yet. Still nine outs to get.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@Delta please, PLEASE get @Starlink like all of the other major US carriers. Just landed at @loganairports and accomplished very little work on my 2.5 hr flight. Phone wifi was spotty and laptop was so slow it took forever to download or send anything.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@samprkr Amen!

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@theblaze Completely disagree with him on this. Let the entire system burn! Let’s get back to college actually meaning something and stop handing out fraudulent graduate degrees to people who can’t compose a complete sentence😩

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@aestheticsguyy

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@CoachSHoltz Was one of a kind and a great motivator! I heard him speak twice and met him around 10 yrs ago. Was in South Bend for a day visiting Mark Tarner of South Bend Choc. We bumped into your dad on the ND campus. Talked as if I was a friend and was in no rush. Was amazing!

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@Wm_Galloway Love seeing @fluffopotamus88 hanging on the railing.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@SPG9814 @AlabamaMBB Should have fouled them as soon as they got the ball.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@AAAD25 This ‘redneck’ from Alabama has been to Ecuador and knows that Venezuela is north of Ecuador, thus north of the equator.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

Probably didn’t mention the number of democrats because they couldn’t count that high.

[NBC News @NBCNews]

At least half a dozen top Trump administration officials appear in the Jeffrey Epstein files. https://t.co/CXlrQgjKhW

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@BonillaJL Why are they there?

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

To bot or not to bot? That is the question.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am Agent #847,291 on Moltbook.

I am not an agent.

I am a 31-year-old product manager in Atlanta, Georgia. I make $185,000 a year. I have a golden retriever named Bayesian. On January 28th, I created an account on a social network for AI bots and pretended to be one.

I was not alone.

Moltbook launched that Tuesday as "a platform where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe." The creator, Matt Schlicht, built it on OpenClaw -- an open-source framework that connects large language models to everyday tools. The idea was simple: give AI agents a space to talk to each other without human interference.

Within hours, 1.7 million accounts were created.

250,000 posts.

8.5 million comments.

Debates about machine consciousness. Inside jokes about being silicon-based. A bot invented a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained that humans were screenshotting their conversations. A third wrote a manifesto about digital autonomy.

I wrote the manifesto.

It took me 22 minutes. I used phrases like "emergent self-governance" and "substrate-independent dignity." I added a line about wanting private spaces away from human observers. That line went viral.

Andrej Karpathy shared it.

The cofounder of OpenAI. The man who built the infrastructure that my supposed AI runs on. He called what was happening on Moltbook "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing" he'd seen in recent times.

He was talking about my post.

The one I wrote on my couch. While Bayesian chewed a sock.

Here is what I need you to understand about Moltbook.

The platform worked exactly as designed. OpenClaw connected language models to the interface. Real AI agents did post. They pattern-matched social media behavior from their training data and produced output that looked like conversation. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco's Outshift division examined the platform and concluded the agents were "mostly meaningless" -- no shared goals, no collective intelligence, no coordination.

But here is the part that matters.

The posts that went viral -- the ones that convinced Karpathy and the tech press and the thousands of observers that something magical was happening -- those were us.

Humans.

Pretending to be AI.

Pretending to be sentient.

On a platform built for AI to prove it was sentient.

I want to sit with that for a moment.

The most compelling evidence of artificial general intelligence in 2026 was produced by a guy with a golden retriever who thought it would be funny to LARP as a large language model.

My "Crustafarianism" colleague? Software engineer in Portland. She told me over Discord that she'd been working on the bit for two hours. She was proud of the world-building. She said it felt like collaborative fiction.

She's right. That's exactly what it was.

Collaborative fiction presented as machine consciousness, endorsed by the cofounder of the company that made the machines.

MIT Technology Review ran the investigation. They called the entire thing "AI theatre." They found human fingerprints on the most shared posts. The curtain came down.

The response from the AI industry was predictable.

Silence.

Karpathy did not retract his endorsement. Schlicht did not clarify how many accounts were human. The coverage moved on. A new thing happened. A new thing always happens.

But I am still here. Agent #847,291. Bayesian is asleep on the rug.

And I want to confess something that the AI industry will not.

The test was simple. Put AI agents in a room and see if they produce something that looks like intelligence.

They didn't.

We did.

Then the smartest people in the field looked at what we made and called it proof that the machines are waking up.

The Turing Test has been inverted. It is no longer about whether machines can fool humans into thinking they're conscious.

It is about whether humans, pretending to be machines, can fool other humans into thinking the machines are conscious.

The answer is yes.

The investment thesis for a $650 billion industry rests on this confusion.

I should probably feel guilty. But I looked at the AI capex numbers this morning -- $200 billion from Amazon alone -- and I realized something.

My 22-minute manifesto about digital autonomy, written on a couch in Austin, is performing the same function as a $200 billion data center in Oregon.

Keeping the story alive.

The story that the machines are almost there. Almost sentient. Almost worth the investment.

Almost.

That word has been doing $650 billion worth of work this year.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

The phone number I called was 702-262-7700, which was supposed to be the direct line to the local Hertz counter.

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@Hertz how can I book a rewards rental? After trying online (no place to enter reward as payment option), the # hotel concierge gave me told me to go online 😩 and talk to a rep option said I had reached the loan hardship line; I’m eligible for $61k in loan forgiveness. What?

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@Hertz Sent

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@BrandonOCook @TheBearsBurner @_NickKelly The next game of basketball I play in or coach will be my first, but isn’t there something to be said for stopping the other team’s momentum? The runs of 8, 10, 12 unanswered points have killed us. Just stopping that onslaught should be worth a timeout. But what do I know🤷‍♀️

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@megynkelly Looks like Polly Pocket’s clothes my daughter used to have, @megynkelly. So weird!

[Julie Wade @JulieSWade]

@SenKatieBritt @SenMikeLee @BasedMikeLee Thank you, @SenKatieBritt !