Disinformation Before the Internet (1991)
The Naval Security Officer looked across his desk at me with a noticeably stern look on his face. A minute before, he had made the strange comment, “Let’s get this over with.”
That was weird enough. But when he followed with, “They don’t know you in Fort Smith, Alaska.” I was, as the Brits would say, gobsmacked.
I questioned what I had heard: “Alaska?”
He nodded, so I slowly spoke the truth: “Fort Smith, Arkansas, not Alaska.”
There is no Fort Smith, Alaska. A claim to the contrary was startling disinformation.
I bear some of the responsibility for the error. For most of my life, people abbreviated Arkansas as Ark. But when I filled out the security paperwork, I only had two initials to work with. In 1991, there was no World Wide Web. Google was still years away from its public birth, and I had no set of encyclopedias handy. So, I made an “educated” guess.
I didn’t know any two-letter abbreviations for Arkansas. My instinct told me that the two-letter abbreviation AR must stand for Arizona, so AK must be the right choice.
Well, as we all know now, that was wrong. I was born in Fort Smith, AR, not AK.
Now, mind you, I had already been working for the Navy for 12 years in Washington, D.C., and had made several trips to the Navy base in Panama City. But it took nothing more than one erroneous alphabetical error to bring the Panama City onboarding process to a halt.
A temporary one, fortunately.
After the Internet (2025)
Now that the Internet and AI knows all things about everybody, and that information is freely available to the world’s masses, you would think such disinformation would be rare.
But it seems to have gotten worse. Two recent events bear witness to the propagation of internet disorder.
To avoid the quandary of not knowing which Internet claims are true and which false, I’m reporting on my own personal facts—facts that I have no doubt about.
Example 1
For instance, I was Googling my name while searching the internet for a 1996 paper I’d given for a rebreather forum in Redondo Beach, California. Shockingly, I found a brief article published recently in a Fort Smith, Arkansas online publication. It started by getting my name and birthdate correct. But almost everything else was wrong. Not wrong by a little bit, but wildly inaccurate.
In that article, the misinformed writer claimed I was born in Lewiston, Idaho. My academic path included a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Idaho and a Master’s degree in Oceanography from Florida State University.
All of that was disinformation. None of it was even close to the truth.
Now, I can perhaps understand the newspaper’s homage to their phantom scientist with my name and birthdate, because according to them, I was a homeboy of sorts. Apparently, my formative years of physiological research were at the University of Arkansas, where “he completed his doctoral studies.”
That was not true either.
The actual facts are out there, so I’m perplexed that so much disinformation could be in digital print.
Unless there really is something to this alternative universe thing.
Example 2
A December, 2025 incident puzzles me even more.
The following is an excerpt from the third email “letter” I received from the same university. (I deleted the name of the Indian University to not embarrass anyone.) Admittedly, it is very gracious letter. It begins with:
“Esteemed Prof (Dr) John Clarke
Nobel Laureate
Warm Greetings from____ University, India
Hon’ble Nobel Laureate, I hope this message finds you in good health and high spirits.
With the utmost respect, we write to gently follow up on our earlier correspondence regarding our sincere invitation for you to grace the Convocation Ceremony of _______ University. We hold you in the highest regard, and it would be a profound honour for our academic community to welcome a Nobel Laureate of your distinguished stature.”
You may have already guessed the problem: I am not the John Clarke with a Nobel Prize in Physics for my work in quantum mechanics. There is such a fellow in the U.K. with the same name. Unlike me and most of the world, he seems to actually understand quantum mechanics. I don’t.
To be fair, the University covered its bases by addressing this email to every John Clarke they could find at prestigious universities, just in case. But they also addressed it to my website, the one you’re reading now. That website has no university affiliation.
Actual facts are easy to find. That is the supposed beauty of the internet. Unfortunately, wrong “facts” are even easier to find.
What does it all mean?
I am forced to conclude that perhaps true scholarship is dead. AI and the Internet have created a caste of people who gravitate to publishing even illusory information, assuming one of two outcomes. Either no one will check the facts, and they will thus appear knowledgeable (and be suitably rewarded), or they will cast their nets far and wide, hoping that somehow the right person will get their message.
The strange thing about it, actual facts are easy to find. That is the supposed beauty of the internet. Unfortunately, wrong “facts” are even easier to find.
AI on AI
Out of curiosity, I ran the Fort Smith article past a Large Language model, ChatGPT an AI chatbot. It quickly determined that the article’s structure was diagnostic.
“The article:
- Correctly included a less-obvious personal detail (diving and aviation background)
- While simultaneously fabricating or misplacing formal academic credentials
That inversion (getting “color” right but “core facts” wrong) is a strong fingerprint of synthetic or semi-synthetic authorship.
A careful human biographer almost always gets degrees, institutions, and chronology right first,
personal color later (or not at all). This piece does the opposite.”
ChatGPT concluded its analysis with a pithy observation. “You weren’t misled; you were observing a system error in the wild. The AI hallucinated, but the responsibility belongs to the writer/editor.”
Just as I thought!
Entropy
Remember what you learned in school about entropy? All things tend to become disordered over time? Well, it seems to me that the more order we attempt to build into our Internet knowledge bases (the assumed intent of such a database), the more disordered the universe of information actually becomes.
A classic way to express that is to add ink to a bowl of water. Whereas the water had been pure, the ink corrupted it. It was no longer pure, no longer drinkable. Convection and diffusion, and ultimately entropy, disordered the bowl’s contents. Neither pure water nor pure ink remained. You could claim that the water was pure, but that would be a lie.
So, they don’t know me in that fictional town, Fort Smith, Alaska. They also don’t know me in Lewiston, Idaho, or the University of Arkansas, or a university town in India. And that’s alright with me. I can live with it. However, if the world database becomes a stinking pot of frequently stirred cesspool overflow, eventually nothing will be known with certainty.
I don’t think I can live with that. I may need my trusted encyclopedias once again.
I once imagined the Internet as water—clear, pure in its newness—but that was before the ink of disorder appeared. Whatever the elements had been, they did not remain separate. The ink spread, darkened, altered the whole. There was no returning to the before, no skimming it out with care or time. Theorists naively believed that you could boil it down, distill something clean from the damage, but that could not eliminate the uncertainty. You would never know if what you consumed on the internet was tainted or not.
Perhaps that is what growing older with the Internet is all about: not the recovery of purity, but learning to live happily inside the color.
But I sure hope that is not our destiny.
