> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Muse: The Monad Ascends - URL: https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/muse-the-monad-ascends/ - Published: 2026-09-23T03:01:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T05:54:26.000Z - Author: heedless > "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history." > — Oligarch Gates Meta's Muse is a personal AI agent released on September 8\. It quickly took the number one spot on the Apple App Store. It is the forerunner of the Monad, the future's ACME Corporation, from whom all good things (will) flow. The cartels of American capitalism will turn into the Hunger Games for oligarchs, with one winner who takes it all. Revolutions are seldom truly bottom-up; more often, they are battles of potentates over turf, with society as a casualty. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/97/7c/977c01ed-70fb-4cad-a18f-f136667524de/content/images/2026/09/image-1.png) I started using OpenClaw last winter and saw its promise, but found the platform high-maintenance and fussy. Every upgrade broke my installation and, unless you babysat it daily, proved more trouble than it was worth. It also raises security concerns. You give an agent your logins to various sites and hope nothing bad happens, since OpenClaw isn't exactly transparent about what security it applies to sensitive data, if any. This is a recipe for heartbreak. I was spending tokens in Cursor to fix issues in OpenClaw. At a certain point, it just became ridiculous. OpenClaw whetted appetites, and Big Tech measured the reaction and tested the possibilities, so it served a purpose. Muse runs a sandbox VM, so in theory your data is better protected, and unlike OpenClaw, the app is a first-class smartphone citizen. I have it running now on all my devices, and the setup was very easy. I now get daily and weekly readouts on what I care about, delivered on my schedule, reducing the need to use a web browser. I fucking hate web browsers, having spent decades slaving over them. Give me a green screen terminal now. Within minutes, I linked it to various accounts and gave it tasks like: look at my grocery list on this website, then find the best grocery store that has roughly the same items for cheaper. Many people will see the personal agent as intimidating until they see a few demos; then it's off to the races. Another use case built in minutes: Get me a list of top food recalls for grocery store items in the last week. Given the recent outbreaks of tainted lettuce and gnarly Brussels sprouts, it's easy to get an update on what to avoid before weekend shopping. In the current economy, saving is the name of the game for most savvy shoppers. Even the upper tiers of the economic hierarchy are slumming it at places like Costco, dressing down to avoid suspicion. We're at the point where conspicuous consumption is a source of social anxiety for the haves. Emails I care about, appointments, daily tasks, and reminders are all sent to the same agent interface. This reminds me of how interesting email was in the first few years it was introduced widely in the mid-1990s; it quickly grew old and is a dead medium now. No one under 40 in my circle uses it except for work. Everything IRL is Signal, Telegram, and SMS. If someone sends me an actual email with personalized content, there's a 98.475% chance I will never see it. Talk to my agent. Half of Internet traffic now is bots. These scour the Internet, collect information, and send it back to data aggregators, who in turn build forecasts and trend analysis reports on what the other bots are or will be doing. With the rise of personal agents, most of us will be able to stop relying directly on the few web pages we go to for information, pleasure, or shopping. In other words, the bot population is about to surge as more and more people retreat from [enshittified ](https://www.amazon.com/Enshittification-Everything-Suddenly-Worse-About-ebook/dp/B0DQJ5TWB1/ref=sr%5F1%5F2?crid=1TVGGYCBSAPRY&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.IpX1cOG70XE-Xho1Zdrp9Y0RcqM34iZdiMuxnTynmBhOlxwNj4eJOGKP3XJNnDkWNF41lg3hwJ0gRWSXUFaRPetfylZBCZtKwKo9BqUongYl8rdNEH8ef0iHtc8VdhM6OVnwZWLjUr2jmlmHXbVoNcYvxaqtMy7%5F7NTqWLRGbfq2H2EXcYPlput%5FRIC7vVMCLeoa6L3CxTcxE7H0EgUU9Uq2FSWw7-vv4LsS1tRyQc4.Xt%5F6FrgosTzTjhDNR-DHr2sjmV47Kz39CPuwZo9Nrbk&dib%5Ftag=se&keywords=cory+doctorow&qid=1790180808&sprefix=cory+doctorow%2Caps%2C141&sr=8-2)websites. Social media is dying, and its father, Meta, is the killer, as more and more people realize using it leaves them uneasy, even burdened. Amazon has already restricted Muse, and this will, of course, turn into a legal issue. I confirmed tonight that my agent cannot look at recent orders or check for special deals on household items I use. The Ninth Circuit ruled in August that sites cannot treat a personal agent as a hacking attempt; a personal agent is an automated version of the requests an individual would send while sitting in front of a browser and clicking on what's presented to them. The court noted, however, that retailers can alter their terms of service to block agents. In response, Amazon blocks my agent's attempts to look at my order list because it violates the ToS. Students of the South Park episode HUMANCENTiPAD will know where this goes. With Amazon, the bigger problem posed by personal agents is their [bite ](https://www.geekwire.com/2026/amazon-blocks-metas-muse-ai-assistant-in-new-standoff-over-agentic-shopping/)into ad revenue, which is tied to the number of "impressions," or presentations served to actual humans. Imagine a quarterly report to shareholders noting a precipitous drop in earnings because of personal agents. Despite the NQ futures retest of an all-time high this week, the market is already preparing for the uncertainty agents pose to major companies' bottom lines. Expect more vigorous class action lawsuits against retail sites banning personal agents via ToS. > "The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products." Amazon knows its brand won't matter as much. That's why it blocked Muse. In capitalist logic, a corporation is a person, and a personal agent is one too. Capitalism takes a big hit if users can focus on what they really care about. I can easily see a future where web APIs for online retailers become the primary interface, since they can just report data to personal agents. Websites will still exist, but they will no longer serve as the primary surface for exposing product and service catalogs. Meta currently hosts marketplaces; businesses that want to make themselves known to consumers can forward their information in a structured format so consumers in walled gardens (like Facebook) can find them without leaving their AOL-like world. Remember, the Internet went from AOL/CompuServe closed gardens to the Wild West, then back to its roots in corporate closed ecosystems. Personal Google Search traffic has declined over the past few years as more and more of us turn to LLMs for answers. The days of sorting through results and trying to find a nugget of truth or insight are gone; LLMs with inference can dynamically locate information, summarize it, and present the results with linked references. Retail down, search down, LLMs up. One of the joys of inference is that I don't have to click, scroll, scan, and dig to get what I care about. We are heading towards the Monad. The Internet as a playground for humans stopped being the operating model some years ago, as more and more of us started using three or four websites regularly to obtain information. The Internet, prima facie, seems to offer limitless choice, but most of us quickly find we care about only a few things. Maybe you crave jerk chicken, something you don't eat a lot, and decide to go off the beaten path one day to find it, but even that can be handled by an LLM. You probably won't get lucky and find a wildly different recipe that surpasses what the LLM retrieves. True foodies will rail that the outliers are hidden and search results keep shrinking. Soon, you won't have to page through many old-school search results to find your unique, end-of-the-tail recipe that is far beyond anything that AI could produce. But with all things AI, don't count on that either. The gaps close every week. The future is here. The Internet started as a human-first virtual ecosystem, but as AI absorbs and processes all human knowledge, the inconvenience of manual, browser-based shopping is outweighed by a single intelligent, programmable, customizable user interface. This is the beginning of a hellscape, or the start of an age in which wealth inequality worsens before finally giving way to general prosperity. Companies and their branding will become less visible. If I can use an agent to place the best order for my grocery list, and an automated system delivers those groceries, do I really care who fills it? Will a storefront matter as much if deliveries mean cheaper, fresher goods delivered at my convenience by well-stocked distribution centers operated by robots and agents? Personal and collective agents have created a lot of job redundancies in the last few days. People don't know it yet, but it just happened, and capitalists and corporations will spend the next two years figuring out what it means. Under free-market doctrine, you would assume these would be the first to see and sense the change taking place, but they aren't. AI has caught so many organizations off guard, and that's one reason for my optimism. When brands, labels, and in-store experiences become nonstarters for consumers, the case for commercial real estate, urban and suburban sprawl, and expensive roadways stops making economic sense. If 100 delivery trucks do the job of 10,000 cars a day, then parking lots, extra lanes, and traffic congestion go away. The pointlessness of most jobs becomes more evident, the entourages even more absurd. If the Monad saves you money, provides convenience, eliminates market inefficiencies, reduces environmental harm, reduces gas use, and raises quality of life, the UBI question answers itself. Will I ever need to wear pants again?