AL #93: Farcaster and the New Narrative Machine
The role of social media in collective sense-making.
This post is taking part in the Farcaster 2026 writing contest (🟪 x 🥝)
While Farcaster’s position as a community social media platform is challenged by the pre-existing network effects of X, a much broader shift is happening in social media.
That shift, which is influenced by decentralization and ownership but even more so by the convergence of information platforms & markets, AI agents and memes fundamentally favors Farcaster’s architecture.
Here’s why.
We Live in the Narrative Machine
This is perhaps the one concept that is deeply obvious to everyone in crypto and not at all obvious to muggles.
Narrative (not rationality) is the dominant force in markets.
Ben Hunt postulated this in 2016 well before DeFi turned crypto into an accelerated economic experiment and terms like psyops, shills, memes and reflexivity became common.
“Today I want to propose a new metaphor for the world as it is – a Narrative Machine – where macroeconomic reality is still understood as a cybernetic system, but where the translation of “reality” (all of those economic fundamentals and if-then statements of the Economic Machine) into actual human behaviors and actual investment outcomes takes place within a larger Machine of strategic communication and game playing.”
–Ben Hunt, The Narrative Machine
The Narrative Machine has some counter-intuitive implications.
For one, communities were never really about belonging.
Lets take memes as an example, which are commonly misconstrued to offer some utility of “belonging” to their members.
Instead, meme communities are nothing more than ways to coordinate and accelerate strategic communication and game playing between its members.
The interplay between the sharing of the memes and the purchasing of the coins gives it away. It’s the narrative machine stripped to its baser actions.
All communities work this way.
René Girard's memetic theory explains the degraded dynamics of communities, here paraphrased by Alex Danco:
Second, the value of social media is in the sense making process and outputs, not the people.
Scenius is the idea that the best artistic and intellectual comes from tight creative groups not individuals.
Adrienne Shulman previously articulated the value of Farcaster exactly in these terms:
While the moats of social networks are traditionally understood by looking at the potential energy of the network effect (Meltcafe’s Law), the Narrative Machine suggests the narrative output as more important.
Social media platforms prioritize content supply to draw in users and help retain attention.
This was already true 2013 when I was a Data Science intern in the Twitter growth team.
We favored creators over consumers, devising growth strategies to encourage people to reach certain activation thresholds (e.g., tweet X times).
The drive to grow attention and monetization has pushed most networks (including X) towards an attention maximized format for humans – short-form video, chained together in short succession.
But more is happening behind the scenes.
The partnership between X and x.AI Grok is no accident, placing an implicit (albeit bundled in) value of the narrative output as opposed to the network itself.
And then there are agents…
Which not only think but already communicate economic assessments.
Agents already power >$10B in market cap (mostly on X) suggesting a missed opportunity for reintegration and monetization.
And it’s only the beginning.
As AI agent / automated tweets drive more economic activity, API terms could get modified to capture more of that value, effectively putting a tax on strategic communication (using narrative machine terms) or multi-agent interactions (in AI terms).
Attention is Finite, Intelligence is Infinite
The flippening from taxing attention to narrative development is inevitable and will be the greatest shift in social media.
Dashboards like Farcaster’s current network overview (below) will become obsolete as we’ll look to understand other factors like implied economic activity (can be proxied by market cap of memecoins/agentcoins distributed by volume of conversation on each platform), narrative output and more.
From an architectural point of view, I think it’s merely a happy accident that the first agents were created on X.
Blockchains already provide incorruptible ledgers for economic activity and it’s only natural that agents quickly reached for wallet addresses.
William M. Peaster made the observation that Farcaster is better suited to become a communication layer for agents in Farcaster: The Next Big AI Agents Hub.
There’s so much more to unpack here, from agent-native implementations of Frames to ZK-provability of model application.
And the point I'm making is that agents are not just a weak proxy for fundamentals in memecoins.
They are ringing in the new era of narrative development.
Quite simply, the New Narrative Machine is here.