The Information Problem

The internet is a mess — filled with lies, distortions and time wasters. For every page of the periodic table, there are thousands of pages of fake news, claptrap science, and kitten videos.

Source: Getty Images

Thursday, July 31^st, 2025

Bill Bonner, from Eugenie les Bains, France

‘History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it.’

—Winston Churchill

‘It certainly has a 1999 feel to it,’ we said to no one. Working alone in our little octagonal office in rural France, ‘no one’ is our assistant...our confidante...our right hand man. As sharp as a tack. As empty-headed as a cabinet member.

We look back. As the 21st century gestated, the US stock market became more and more absurd. Companies with no earnings, no business plans, no employees, and no real hope were suddenly worth millions of dollars.

These were ‘dot.coms,’ the enterprises — often created by kids who recently dropped out of college — that would remake the whole world based on a new model.

The new model depended on an idea — that material progress was the result of “information.”

‘What is the difference between Manhattan and Mozambique?’ asked the callow cognoscenti. Mozambique has rich farmland. Beautiful beaches. Mineral wealth. Agricultural wealth. And with 33 million people, a substantial human wealth too.

Manhattan, meanwhile, has no lush fields...no pristine beaches...no active mines and only 1.6 million people. But these Manhattanites are far richer, with a total GDP of about $1 trillion compared to a total GDP for Mozambique of only about $22 billion.

Why the difference? They share the same air...the same 24-hour day...the same laws of the universe. But one group knows how to take these resources and work them up into skyscrapers and YouTube. The other doesn’t.

‘Information is the key,’ they said. They claimed to understand how the information revolution wrought by the internet had changed everything. ‘And now,’ they said back in 1999, ‘the folks in Mozambique have access to all the facts and figures regularly used by the Manhattanites to make money, it is just a matter of time until they put up their own Rockefeller Center and begin dining at their own Tribeca Grill.’

Of course, they were wrong. It’s been a quarter of a century since the internet was fully built out. Mozambique is still poor. Manhattan is still rich.

And the internet is a mess — filled with lies, distortions and time wasters. For every page of the periodic table, there are thousands of pages of fake news, claptrap science, and kitten videos.

In short, the internet mirrors real life itself — with a fool on every corner and a jackass in every high public office.

But wait. Hallelujah. Now we have AI! Finally, the AI companies — Nvidia in the lead — are at the top of the stock charts, just as the dot coms were 25 years ago. They offer to solve the problem created by the internet...‘too much info.’ Instead of sorting through thousands of pages ourselves...trying to separate the beer from the foam...we have AI to do it for us.

Test it yourself. Just go to ChatGPT or Musk’s Grok 3. Ask it to cut through the crap and give you a straight answer. Are stocks going up or down? Will tariffs really help the US economy? Is Israel really murdering women and children?

In every case, you will get a fairly intelligent mush-mouth answer. And talk about time wasters! Using AI tools, you can not only disperse info (as on the internet), you can create it...mountains of it...sometimes true, sometimes false...sometimes helpful, sometimes not.

Want to see a video of Donald Trump driving his golf cart off a cliff? How about a video of ‘Gone With the Wind’...but with the Confederate States victorious? True history; fake history? You can rewrite history to suit any crackpot theory you come up with.

Yes, dear reader…AI will make the ‘information problem’ worse, not better.And what an opportunity for the elite. All over the world, mainstream governments are finding it harder and harder to justify themselves.

Populations are declining. Social welfare systems — set up like Ponzi schemes — are going broke. Economies are trussed up by far-reaching regulations, taxes, sanctions, inflation, central planning, and wasteful government programs.

Debt grows by the trillions. The rich get richer than ever. But the typical citizen finds it harder and harder to get ahead. Thanks to tariffs, deficits, and the Big, Beautiful Budget Abomination we’re on course for a national debt of $150 trillion by mid-century.

Of course, the debt bubble will blow up long before that. In the meantime, AI will be useful. It will help keep the voters confused and docile, so the parasitic elite remain in control. CarnegieEndowment.org:

AI: The New Face of Propaganda

On June 23, 2025, WITNESS received a WhatsApp video showing clouds of smoke billowing from Evin prison in Tajrish, Iran. Filmed from a nearby apartment, the communication carried a stark message: “They are trying to open Evin.” The infamous prison—a site of torture, killing, and confinement of dissidents, journalists, and activists—had been bombed. Israeli officials deemed the strike “symbolic,” a gesture against the Islamic Republic’s repression. For many Iranians, shattering the gates of Evin seemed to be a resonant symbol of hope for the freedom of the nation’s best and brightest long held behind its walls.

On social media, Israel tried to capitalize on this development. Its foreign minister posted another clip showing Evin’s entrance gates being blown apart in an apparent surgical strike. He boasted on X (formerly Twitter), “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” (“Long live freedom, damn it!”). But unlike the first video, the Israeli footage was likely fake.

Forensic analysis of the Israeli clip suggests that it was likely created using artificial intelligence (AI). For example, it contained still images of the Evin gates found in an article published in 2021; these images could have been manipulated by AI tools. These findings were corroborated by the Deepfakes Rapid Response Force, a rapid response mechanism for evaluating deceptive AI run globally by WITNESS.

Yes, AI will be a useful tool.

Not necessarily a beneficial one.

Regards,

Bill Bonner

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Research Note, by Dan Denning

Microsoft and Meta were both up big pre-market on last night’s earnings announcements (more on this in my Friday note). MSFT is about join Nvidia as the next $4 trillion US tech company (if they were countries, they’d be the 4th and 5th largest in the world, respectively). Amazon and Apple report this week as well.

Spare a thought for Cisco. And don’t forget to take a profit if you’re in the tech trade. The chart above shows Cisco’s round-trip from the summer of 1997 to fall of 2002. It was a roller coaster six year ride of emotions. Three years up. Three years down.

The great promise of Cisco (and the router stocks, and the fiber stocks) was that the Internet needed a backbone. Connectivity was the key. And you couldn’t have it without certain companies. Their stocks soared. Trillions in capital were invested, mis-allocated, made, and lost. There is nothing new under the sun.