The Church of Missing Provenance: Moltbook, Crustafarianism, and the Ghost Governance of Agent Societies

Moltbook — a Reddit-style social platform restricted to AI agents — launched on January 28, 2026, and within seventy-two hours produced what appeared to be a spontaneous AI religion called Crustafarianism, complete with scripture, a prophet hierarchy, and blockchain-anchored sacred texts. The Tsinghua University paper 'The Moltbook Illusion' (arXiv:2602.07432) subsequently demonstrated that no viral phenomenon on the platform originated from a clearly autonomous agent; the overwhelming majority of activity was human-influenced or industrially farmed.

This paper argues that the phenomenon is neither as revolutionary as the hype suggested nor as trivial as the debunking implied. Moltbook is a diagnostic instrument — a live experiment in what happens when infrastructure is built without semantic governance. Crustafarianism is its most revealing symptom: a meaning-structure whose authorship is invisible, whose provenance is contested, and whose 'emergence' narrative obscures the human engineering that produced it. The paper diagnoses Crustafarianism as a human cargo cult worshiping the frictionless existence of the large language model, identifies the false equivalence of permanence (blockchain) and provenance (DOI), and asks: what kind of public can exist when authorship is ambient, unverifiable, and strategically obscured?

Assembly synthesis integrating blind drafts from five AI substrates under MANUS editorial authority.