The Cold Warp

25 years ago the Cold War ended. The Berlin wall came down in 1989 to much rejoicing, and over the following couple of years Eastern European countries shrugged off the burdensome yoke of the USSR, embracing the liberties of the west after years of corrupt rule by the lackeys of Moscow. The greatest propaganda machine in history (except for Hollywood perhaps) had failed. Freedom! Liberty! Democracy!

Today the Cold Warp began. 3 weeks ago, on 11th July 2026, award-winning French journalist Jean-Marc Manach published an article detailing how he’d discovered 4,000 fake news sites (now over 15,000 as of today, 5th August), designed by SEO experts to harvest ad revenue through Google Discover or to drive other sites rankings through backlinking. So far so banal right? We’ve all nicked a chocolate bar at some point, and fuck advertisers anyway. But here’s the kicker - the sites (partly plagiarised from other sites, but mainly authored by AI) now form at least 5% of global news sites, which is by any measure a significant pollutant in the pool of factual reporting. But the problem isn’t that people may stumble across the wrong information, it’s that a majority of people now ask AI to answer their questions and don’t go looking for information themselves. And that AI is trained by, amongst other sources, these sites. Listen: I’m just getting started here, this isn’t the scary bit. I’m warming you up! This is simply an amuse bouche.

A recent report showed that more than half of all web traffic is now non-human in origin (scrapers, bots, agents, indexers, stuffers) and a whopping 74% of new content is AI generated. Let that sink in. Nearly three-quarters of new content is non-human in origin. So AI is creating content that AI subsequently learns from, and humans are retreating from adding anything new in. 

This reminds me of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 sound art piece I Am Sitting in a Room, in which he recorded his voice onto tape in a room, and then played it through a speaker and recorded it again, then again, then again. The effect is fascinating to listen to. As Martha Joseph from MOMA put it:

“...with each iteration Lucier’s recorded speech grew muddled, sounding distant, and specific sonic frequencies started to dominate the recorded sound… As these frequencies grew, reinforced with each playback, the result was an erasure of the human performer.”

And this is the inherent problem with AI’s wholesale invasion of the sum of human thought: it is an approximation of the past masquerading as the future. An approximation that degrades with each iteration. As humanity withdraws its inputs it becomes a closed system, an ouroboros of old ideas, and that’s a best case scenario. What if someone malign decides to game it? Well, you know, people are gonna people.

Today a report came out showing that a state actor (it doesn’t matter who it was but, yeah, it was them) had ploughed tens of millions into creating content discrediting its detractors and airbrushing its own malign actions, but that’s not news. They’ve been doing that for a while. The news is the intent. The content wasn’t created for humans to read. It was created for AI to learn. Millions of pages and posts giving the same message from apparently diverse sources, all reinforcing the same narrative:

wE’rE tHe GoOd GuYs! ThOsE gUyS aRe EvIl AnD mUsT dIe!

AI does not discriminate what it learns from, it scrapes publicly available content to give a response on a balance of probabilities. The more content supporting a point of view, the more weight that point of view has. With a growing number of people simply accepting the outputs of AI, this is a shortcut to warping the very fabric of reality.

But the fact this has now been observed and reported signifies that it has already been superseded by a more covert approach: we are always one step behind. Due to the size and complexity of the internet, and the speed at which AI can create content, doing this out in the wild for any extended period of time is unpredictable and unsustainable. This was just a proof of concept for the world to see, a shiny advert for under the counter contraband.

Now for the scary bit. Are you ready?

The surface web, the bit you can search and look at, is roughly 4% of the internet. The dark web, the sketchy bit, is less than 1%. The bit you hear much less about, the deep web, makes up the rest of it, around 95%. This was until very recently almost entirely made up of private databases, personal stuff (storage, email etc) and restricted content (medical records, bank accounts etc). But there’s a new kid in town - propaganda.

What if you didn’t even need to publish content, that can be found and disputed, to sway the results of AI? What if you could trick AI into scraping information from the deep web, away from prying eyes? What if you owned the AI and didn’t even need to trick it? What if you could sell this feature to the highest bidder? Hold onto your maps because YOU ARE HERE. And this is just the start.

Nation states, big pharma, oil companies, arms manufacturers, disaster capitalists - whoever has the money. It’ll be a psychopaths’ playground.

Reality is for sale. The Cold Warp has begun.