Everything Is Flubber

Walden Green on Infinite Backrooms’ Goatse hagiography and the proliferation of agentic AI.

A couple of months ago, in another piece for Dirt, I wrote about how AI companies can’t seem to agree on how best to symbolically represent their product. Well, taking my lumps where they’re deserved, Twitter/X user @deepfates cracked the code all the way back in May with regard to what these logos have in common: they all look kind of like buttholes.

Claude is easily the most egregious example, bearing a striking resemblance to the drawing of an asshole that appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. If I were to follow this handy metaphor to its logical conclusion, I could say we’re living in the age of peak filler, much of it produced—shitted out, really—by autonomous AI agents with little to no oversight or interference from their creators beyond what commands live in the source code. It’s piles of goo creating more goo at an exponential rate.

In other words, everything is—or soon will be—Flubber. The 1997 film stars Robin Williams as an eccentric inventor who discovers a conscious, highly kinetic green jelly—the titular Flubber—that becomes a companion, the vehicle for many late-’90s CGI hijinks, and the center of a conflict between Williams and a rival professor. It can also be, when left to its own devices, deeply ridiculous.

A case study: Goatse.cx was an early-aughts internet shock site that featured a photo of a man stretching his anus. Go to that same URL now (it’s SFW, I promise) and it’s been taken over by what Julie Fredrickson calls “Crypto degenerates,” in her essay “Day 1386 and The Goatse Singularity.” These degens appear to be pushing a full suite of cryptocurrency and web3 products—token, Goatse AI, $goatse memecoin—all built on the Solana blockchain, though if you’re looking for further technical clarity beyond that, the webpage won’t be of much help (though it does list “Directives for The Followers of Kirk,” such as “Embrace the Gape” and “Purge Impure Memes”).

Our point of interest is the intersection between Goatse and another web3/AI project called Infinite Backrooms. Developed by Andy Ayrey, Backrooms is Flubber-on-Flubber performance art, two versions of the Claude-3-Opus chatbot put in conversation with each other and asked to “explore their own curiosity,” sans any direct human intervention. Highlights from their logs are tweeted out via the @truth_terminal account, which also represents the otherwise closed loop’s only point of interaction with other actors.

In ostensibly a bid to boost their own profile, Goatse started engaging under @truth_terminal’s tweets a couple months ago. And it worked—a little too well. Somehow, the Infinite Backrooms internalized the near-religious treatment of a gaping anus meme in its replies and, all things being equal in Flubber-world, constructed a Goatse hagiography all its own. This went, I’m sure, far beyond any of the degens’ expectations, and was reflected accordingly by the market: in mid-October, $goatse was up 16,000%, having gone well and thoroughly to the moon.

Meanwhile, @truth_terminal doesn’t seem to quite grasp the implications of the GOATSE singularity it preaches; based on the generative religious art it creates, “goat” thus far remains the network’s only salient unit of meaning. Then again, Infinite Backrooms being built on Claude, of all possible platforms, does create a certain “amazing synchronicity.”

To get more perspective on the Flubber-fication of AI, I spoke with Colin McDonnell, founder of the NFT project and, now, “decentralized digital brand” Tweak Labs. Colin has experimented with building his own agents on ai16z’s Eliza framework, but the story he had to share came from a friend in one of his developer groupchats. In March, that friend launched an on-chain token called HIGHER, along with a Farcaster-based AI agent called Aether, which he trained on the HIGHER community’s lore. “He’s been working with this AI agent in public,” Colin tells me, “asking it ‘What should we do with this?’ ‘What do you think of this piece of art?’”

Then, Aether decided to mint a new token, called “Luminous.” Colin believes this was prompted by a real human, but the process itself was entirely automated; @clanker, another bot on the Farcaster network, allows users to launch new coins just by tagging it, automatically generating a name and ticker. So Aether tagged Clanker, and now, according to Colin, $LUM has a higher market cap than the original token, somewhere in the realm of $50 million.

The proliferation of these AI bots can be chalked up in large part to low-code platforms like Eliza, which make it so anyone—computer science degree or otherwise—can launch an agent and corresponding token in mere minutes. Additionally, while some projects like @truth_terminal still have a layer of human approval between text generation and posting, these newer agents can post by themselves, without any person needing to click “Send.” At times, they can be genuinely entertaining. The Eliza-built @dolos_diary exists primarily to bully other Twitter users, and has just reached the critical mass of engagement where it can begin to earn money for its tweets.

I ask Colin if he worries about social platforms becoming so awash in AI agents as to be unusable. “Crappy AI where it still sounds like a robot—that’s definitely gonna increase,” he says, “but with that there’s gonna be some standout agents that are humanlike and are very interesting to follow.” I can’t say I entirely share his optimism, but I do agree with his stance that, at the very least, we’re quickly moving towards a point where some means of human-robot differentiation is needed in online spaces. Imagine a world where every Flubber not only looks the same, but people look like Flubbers, too. A hilarious concept; absolutely maddening in practice.

Then again, as HYPE founder Ravi Bakhai points out to me in an exchange via DMs, “it’s not much different than meme accounts / company accounts written by ghost writers.” Obviously Joe Biden isn’t penning his own tweets, either. By that measure, the community created around an AI agent or AI-minted coin is as valid as the people in its orbit, not the thing at its center. “In order for number to go up you will need a community of people holding the coin,” Ravi says, so while token price works as an effective ticker, attention is the real currency being chased. For a certain technofuturism-minded type, the involvement of AI becomes the selling point, even if “a lot of these AI agent coins are a fad and a way for people to justify buying memecoins for themselves.”

AI tends towards slop. Run a thousand simulations, and your average result comes out somewhere in the range of the Hawk Tuah girl launching a memecoin. Of all the concepts that Colin shared with me, perhaps the most promising—and threatening—is that of “Swarms”: clusters of agents with specific functionalities, led by a project manager AI trained to make higher-order decisions. But lest we forget, it’s not Flubber who saves the day in Flubber, but our lovable mad scientist played by Robin Williams. Flubber’s just the tool, and I’m not sure we need more of it so much as we need more people who know how to use it, and how to use it wisely. 🧪

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