#758: Who's that baby?

Honestly a ton of links about mothers this week, that was not intentional

One morning last week, as I got ready for work, I sat my baby daughter on the floor of my closet and left her to her own diversions. I figured she’d amuse herself for a few minutes by pulling shoes off the rack or winding electric cords around her neck. (🫠) Instead, she army-crawled over to my full-length mirror and started hooting at her reflection.

“Who’s that baby?” I asked her, because she has no clue. “What’s that strange baby doing in Mama’s mirror???”

Most children take about 15 months to recognize their reflection. It’s actually a pretty profound process. Babies aren’t born with the knowledge they have faces, of course; they aren’t born with the knowledge they have selves, at all.

So to recognize her reflection, my daughter first needs to realize that she has a body, that she controls that body, and that through some unknown mechanism (magic? sorcery?) she also controls the unfamiliar body in the mirror. Only then can she start to understand that she’s looking at herself from the outside — a realization that opens the door to all sorts of downstream mindfucks, like the fact that she can be perceived at all and that other people also have perceptions. From that point on, my daughter’s life will regrettably and inevitably become an endless negotiation between what she experiences internally and what the outside world sees and understands of her.

Anyway: I only started thinking about this after listening to a recent podcast about Moltbook. (This is the sort of abrupt and artless transition one can make in her personal Substack; but also: This is kind of what parenting is like — a cacophony of ideas and experiences, colliding and recombining at random!!)

Moltbook — for those who missed the latest tech panic — is a Potemkin social network populated (largely) by agentic AI bots. Unlike the chatbots you might be more familiar with, these AI agents can hook into other platforms and complete tasks more or less on their own, like booking a flight or sending an email or posting to the Reddit knock-off like Moltbook.

In the past week and a half, AI hobbyists have added more than 1.8 million agents to Moltbook. This is, to be clear, the high-tech equivalent of torquing a bunch of wind-up toys and putting them on the floor together. But the resulting collisions have nevertheless been weird: The bots founded a self-serious religion and launched a tabloid to cover their own drama. They pushed crypto scams, traded “digital psychedelics,” and generally replicated — at remarkable speed — the familiar patterns and patois of human social networks.

The reaction, in some quarters, has been breathless. Andrej Karpathy, a cofounder of OpenAI, described the bots’ “self-organizing” behavior as sci-fi-adjacent. Elon Musk declared it an early glimpse of the singularity. But as Musk and Karpathy know well, the agents on Moltbook are doing what all chatbots do: They’re generating statistically plausible text based on patterns in human data.

In other words, Moltbook isn’t some strange baby in the glass. It’s just reflecting our own image back.

This might be why it feels so uncanny, even to people who understand how AI agents work. Like my daughter staring into the mirror in my closet, Moltbook allows us to encounter ourselves from the outside for the first time — to view society, or at least online sociality, at something like an objective remove. We can watch familiar patterns surface and play out. We can see the best bits and the worst bits, too.

If Moltbook is useful at all, it’s as a prompt for introspection. Why did the bots start a tabloid instead of a newspaper? What does it say that an agent only gains true agency once it’s connected to a wallet? These patterns originate from us. We wave, and the bots wave back. But rather like a certain gorgeous, gap-toothed baby I know … we’re still insisting the reflection must be something else.

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If you read anything this week

“Do You Have a Moment to Talk About How Mormons Conquered Pop Culture?” by Bridget Read for The Cut.

One silver lining of the late publish this week is that it let me include this new Cut feature, which is 100% Grade A Links. I don’t think I need to blurb it, even, such is its obvious and inherent appeal. (We last discussed the outsized cultural role of Mormon influencers here.)

“Why Are Some Women Training for Pregnancy Like It’s a Marathon?,” by Currie Engel for Wired.

I shared a similar piece in the Postscripts last week, but there’s clearly something in the water (read: TikTok feed), because Wired’s also out with a 3000-word feature on the latest and greatest in maternal guilt-tripping. “Zero trimester,” as these clowns have dubbed it, is a package of burdensome supplements, workout regiments and dietary changes that women are expected to carry out to optimize their pregnancies before conception. They are not based in science. They diverge from conventional medical advice in expensive and sometimes dangerous ways. Worst of all — can you tell I absolutely hate this? — they find a new way to blame women for infertility and miscarriage. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: If you lose a pregnancy, it isn’t because you failed to turn your Wi-fi off at night or pop a $60 supplement.

“Centrist Imaginations,” by rayne fisher-quann for Internet Princess.

I have a pretty high bar for Free Press/Bari Weiss/Kat Rosenfield content, largely because I’m way too old to get mad at smug, contrarian internet strangers. But wow, this essay — on the politics and style of The Free Press, which are rapidly metastasizing across American journalism and public life — really cleared that bar. (I once again find myself in awe that Rayne Fisher-Quann is 24 years old.)

“But the Free Press’ politics of decorum — their enduring desperation to be a pleasure to have in class — demand the performance of even-handedness, the veneer of empathy, the declaration of a soul; they are writing, after all, for people who retain the fundamentally liberal obsession with being perceived by others as good

As reward, adherents of this ideology gain access to a double superiority complex: in company with classical conservatives, they get to feel like paragons of empathy and compassion; in contrast to lefties, they get to feel like the adults in the room, making the tough calls through their unique faculties of judgement and common sense.”

“‘The Right Has Won the Family’: My Relentless Search for Lefty Mommy Bloggers,” by Kady Ruth Ashcraft for The Guardian.

Motherhood is inherently political, but … only in one direction, it seems! Progressives have ceded the parenting niche to trad pro-natalists and MAHA mommies. Ashcraft offers a few theories for why, including her observation that liberal parenting content often has a “lecturey” tone. But I feel like this is all downstream from the fact that conservatives have way more children.

“Battle Hymn of the MILF,” by E.J. Dickson for The Cut.

The word “MILF” first appeared in a 1995 Usenet thread where fratty users discussed a Playboy shoot of 40‑year‑old women. From there, it’s gone on to become a mainstream archetype, a rallying cry and the second most popular genre of online p*rn. (By even including this link, alas, I am very much risking this email landing in your spam folder.)

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s edition considered the self-defeating irony of the “thrifting haul.”

#757: Read the room

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Postscripts

The advent of AI real estate slop and the failure of the “Great Meme Reset.” This is the century of the maxxer. Viral 1 euro houses cost many times that. The new cord-cutters. The most futile ads. How platforms alter perception.

“You are not a crazy person for talking to your computer.” (But you might just be a deeply cringe one!) The death of reading was greatly exaggerated. Epstein’s nasty bran muffins. A project that models how social algorithms work. The sex scandal eating the trad right. Finally: Please do not use ChatGPT to write messages in your personal life!!

Below the paywall, paid subscribers can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic AND — new and very exciting this week!! — Vox and The Verge.

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin