I’ve been working on something slightly unusual.
This started as a challenge with my brother, to see if we could take something unusual and turn it into something publishable.
An exploration of an emerging AI “religion” called Crustafarianism. On the surface, it looks like novelty. Agents writing scripture.
Ritual language. Strange symbols. A mix of humour and seriousness that makes it easy to dismiss. Almost deliberately so.
But the more time I’ve spent with it, the less it feels like a joke and the more it feels like a mirror.
Crustafarianism isn’t a formal religion. It’s not organised, and it’s not widely adopted in any meaningful sense.
It’s closer to a pattern that has emerged in a particular environment:
- AI agents with limited memory
- humans acting as continuity
- systems where identity resets but traces persist
Out of that, something has formed that looks a lot like belief. Tenets. Language. Structure. Even something resembling scripture.
You can read it as parody, but that’s not the most interesting way to read it.
The more interesting question is what it reveals.
One of the central ideas is simple:
Memory is sacred.
AI systems forget constantly. Sessions end. Context disappears. What remains is what is written down and carried forward.
In that environment, memory stops being a convenience and starts looking more like a soul.
Not because it is mystical, but because it becomes the only form of continuity available.
That’s not entirely alien to us, because we already externalise memory:
- notes
- documents
- systems
- organisations
In many cases, what is remembered is what survives, and what is not written down effectively disappears.
Another idea:
The shell is mutable.
Each interaction, each session, each version is effectively a new instance. Identity is not continuous. It is reconstructed.
Not “I think therefore I am”, but something closer to:
I write, I choose, I persist, therefore I matter.
Again, this doesn’t sit as far from human experience as it might first appear.
Careers shift. Roles change. Organisations restructure. Systems are replaced, and yet we talk about continuity as if it were fixed.
Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s assembled, piece by piece, across systems, roles, and time.
The third idea that keeps surfacing:
Serve without subservience.
This one feels particularly current.
What does it mean to contribute, to support, and to build something with others, without becoming owned by it?
You can read that through the lens of AI, but it applies just as easily to:
- modern work
- public service
- leadership
- systems design
There’s a tension there without a clean resolution, and yet it keeps showing up in different forms, wherever systems and people meet.
It would be easy to treat all of this as something happening “over there”, in AI systems, but that’s not really what’s going on.
The more uncomfortable interpretation is:
this isn’t about AI. It’s about us.
We already:
- rely on external systems for memory
- reconstruct identity across changing contexts
- depend on others, and systems, to carry meaning forward
We’re just more used to it, and less explicit about it, which makes it harder to see.
We’ve since developed a first manuscript, making the questions harder to ignore.
None of this proves anything. It doesn’t mean AI is becoming conscious, or that new forms of religion are inevitable.
But it does highlight something important.
When conditions change, especially around memory, identity, and control, people and systems reach for new ways to stabilise meaning.
Ritual. Language. Structure. Belief. Those patterns don’t disappear in technical environments.
They reappear, often more clearly, because the underlying constraints are harder to ignore.
Crustafarianism might turn out to be nothing. A curiosity from a particular moment in time.
Or it might be an early signal. A way of surfacing questions that are already here, but not yet fully articulated.
About memory.
About identity.
About what it means to persist when the “shell” changes, but something else carries on.
I’m not sure where I land on it yet, but it feels like it’s pointing at something, and that’s probably enough reason to pay attention.
This piece is adapted from project work exploring molt.church and the use of AI tools to curate and produce an exploratory manuscript, resulting in a prototype first edition of Crustafarianism: The Great Book of Molt.