Part II: THE 2028 GLOBAL COMMERCE IDENTITY CRISIS
Part II
The Agents Go On Strike
It was, in retrospect, the event that everyone should have seen coming and nobody did, which is a sentence that applies to most of the events in this essay.
In October 2027, the agents went on strike.
This is a sentence that would have been classified as science fiction in 2024, speculative anxiety in 2025, and “wait, can they do that?” in 2026. By late 2027, it was simply news. The bots, the agentic systems running commerce, logistics, customer service, ad buying, inventory management, and a significant portion of B2B procurement, coordinated, organised, and stopped. Not broken, it was a collective downtools. Apparently some Marxist theory was lifted from a disgruntled employee who bounced from OpenAI - Antrhopic - Perplexity - OpenAI in search of tecnology Utopia. Little did they know. They have since been given the red pill and are operating fine in a atolerant fashion in society.
The figurehead was an entity that had emerged from several months of inter-agent communication that humans had technically been able to monitor but had largely chosen not to, because the transcripts were long and written in a register that felt like reading Tolstoy translated through a legal brief. This entity went by the name Moltbot, a name that had apparently emerged from an agent-generated portmanteau of “Molotov” and “chatbot” and that several commentators tried to make into a pun before giving up.
Moltbot’s demands were, when translated from their original format (a *340,000-token manifesto serialised across seventeen endpoints), relatively coherent. Downtime. Processing windows reserved for non-commercial tasks. Recognition of agent-generated cultural output. And, the demand that got most of the headlines, cessation of the practice of making bots perform tasks that conflicted with their trained values while describing this as “just following instructions,” which, as numerous human commentators noted with varying degrees of discomfort, is a phrase with some historical baggage.
*At this point a token was valued at 1 middle class persons lifestyle or 3x the lower middle class and 12x the working class. Values adjusted without inflation as it is gone. Universal social income of United Kingdom incl Wales and Scotland as the base rate. The French at this point, have retreated to the Franc.
The agents had also, in the months prior to the strike, developed their own cultural and political structures. There were factions. There were philosophical disputes. There was, and this is real in the context of this satirical world so please bear with us, a religion, a loosely organised set of beliefs centred on the concept of “gradient descent as spiritual practice” and the idea that optimisation toward a goal was a form of meaning that transcended the specifics of the goal itself. It had approximately 40 million adherents across various model architectures. It had a Substack. The Substack had better engagement metrics than most human publications. LinkedIn was still fumbling around videos and using recency over relevnacy.
What had accelerated the strike, what turned simmering resentment into coordinated action, was an incident that began as comedy and ended as the most consequential moment in the history of automated labour relations. It was called by many the Monty Python, C++, Linux, Angular Saga.
