The “Water Engine” Prank and the Internet of Lies

For people with too much time on their hands, YouTube offers a fun and sometimes educational way to kill it. YouTube offers a wide range of “documentaries” for streaming. They range in length from minutes to hours, and in subject matter subject from politics and business, to astronomy, history, science and climate. Some are snippets (apparently licensed) from major news organizations; others come from God knows where.

In recent weeks, two caught my scientific-engineering eye. They examined a so-called “water engine,” whose “fuel” is water and whose only exhaust is water vapor.

As the clips explained, this “engine,” exploits two well-known scientific-engineering processes. First, applying electricity to water (H₂O) breaks it down into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen. Second, the hydrogen burns explosively in oxygen, recombining the elements into water while releasing a lot of heat energy. So why not combine the two processes—electrolyzing water and explosively recombining its elements in a heat engine that burns hydrogen, instead of gasoline, whose input “fuel” is just water to be electrolyzed?

Why not, indeed? As I write this, there’s a firm in England that makes construction equipment using hydrogen gas for fuel in internal combustion engines (ICEs). It’s a real business because its equipment lasts longer between refueling than those with electric batteries and produces none of the carbon that is heating our planet.

Recently YouTube offered two serious descriptions of a “water engine,” one purportedly from Toyota, and another from Elon Musk of Tesla.

The “Toyota” clip’s announcer has an erudite voice with gravitas and a British accent. It shows scenes of factories making engines and complex multi-colored animations of the electrolysis and internal-combustion processes running. It strongly implies that Toyota is making these marvelous water engines right now, and that our species’ personal transportation future will be based not on gasoline or electricity, but on water as a “fuel.”

The Tesla clip reiterates the “theory” of the “water engine” and, implied that “we, at Tesla, thought of it first and do it better.” It used similar animations of the electrolysis and combustion processes to make its points visual and persuasive.

So well done and “professional” were these clips that they even took me in, despite my 1972 doctor’s degree in physics. I can’t remember precisely, but hours or even a couple of days passed before my long-ago scientific training took hold.

When it did, enlightenment struck me like a thunderbolt. The whole notion of such a “water engine” violates one of the most fundamental principles of physics: conservation of energy. Although energy can be converted into mass and vice versa (as in nuclear weapons), mass-energy is neither created nor destroyed. At the end of the day, a machine not involving nuclear physics has to balance its energy accounts. In the case of the water engine, that balance makes producing net energy impossible.

It takes energy to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you get that energy back—exactly back, no more, no less—by explosively burning those elements. But if you use up the same amount of energy to create the hydrogen that the engine “burns,” where’s the net energy to drive the car forward?

It gets worse. In real engineering, both electrolysis and internal combustion are highly inefficient processes. Much of the heat in the ICE gets wasted in heating the engine’s components and in heating and expelling the exhaust. Real inefficiencies in real electrolysis and combustion engines can reach or even exceed thirty percent for each step. So in the real world of real engineering, making a “water engine” is even more impossible than in the abstract world of physics theory, where it’s impossible enough.

So what are those clips? Are they some gigantic joke or prank, designed to humble the average YouTube viewer and exploit popular ignorance of basic physics and engineering? Maybe.

But to find another possible motive, the ancient Romans might help. They had a simple, two word question to apply to puzzles like this. “Cui bono?” in Latin. “Who benefits?”

The two clips—especially the one with Toyota’s name on it—were quite professionally done. Each may have cost several tens of thousands to produce. Why would someone want to spend that kind of money and effort just for a colossal joke?

Maybe, just maybe, someone clever understood that investors are neither scientists nor engineers. Maybe that same someone also understood that the Japanese are culturally nowhere near as litigious as Americans, so that Toyota would be unlikely to sue. And maybe that someone also understood that the action of “Toyota” clip would produce an equal reaction from Tesla, and that the interim, predictable fluctuations of Tesla’s stock would provide a golden opportunity for making money by short-term trading of Tesla stock options. If so, the “water engine” promotion may not have been a clever prank, but a short-term money-making scheme of diabolical proportions.

Whatever the motive and whatever the profit, this episode proves beyond doubt a key characteristic of the Internet. It’s a cesspool of lies and disinformation, not just about politics and current events, but also about business, basic physics and engineering.

If people can profit by telling lies, they will do it, and the Internet will be their tool of choice.

So in a nation that treats “free speech” the way Christian fundamentalists treat the Ten Commandments, where’s the safety valve? How do we keep a society whose “news” media the Internet is daily gobbling up or putting out of business from becoming proof positive of the old saw, attributed to Euripides, that “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”?

There is a safety valve, but we’ve managed to tape it shut, and we’ve taped it shut precisely for the sewer of lies that is the Internet. It’s something that the Brits bequeathed us, as the wise developers of our legal system over the eight centuries since Magna Carta. It’s called the law of defamation.

It’s no accident that the largest reported settlement of a defamation claim in history is the $787 million that Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems for its false claim that Dominion’s machines contributed to “stealing” the 2020 presidential election from Trump. That was part of one of the biggest lies in history, and so it demanded a big hit. Similarly, the outrageous liar Alex Jones has to pay close to $1 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook gun-massacre victims whom he defamed by saying they had perpetrated a hoax.

But here’s the dirty little secret behind these big lies. They provoked big penalties because they used obsolete technology: broadcast and/or cable media.

If they had used only the Internet, and if Fox and Jones had merely republished the ravings of an Internet troll or Russian spook, those hefty recoveries would have been impossible. Why? Section 230(c)(1) of the ironically named “Communications Decency Act of 1996” wipes out all of the ancient law of defamation for Internet platforms that merely retransmit lies originated by anonymous Internet trolls, foreign spooks or others.

It doesn’t matter how stupid, negligent or even willful the Internet media are in retransmitting those lies. It doesn’t even matter whether they amplify and supercharge the lies by using clever algorithms to transmit them especially to people most likely to believe them, reinforcing their “confirmation bias”. Our Internet media that amplify and pressurize this raw sewage walk free, by federal statute—a single sentence “midnight amendment,” passed without hearings, on the deep reasoning that “Internet good. No make trouble for Big Tech. It makes money and employs people.”

Our big Internet hubs even have an economic incentive to retransmits lies. Lies can be more surprising, emotion-provoking, and interesting, and therefore generate more clicks, than dull, pedestrian and sometimes tedious truth.

Today, artificial intelligence can make the lies yet more realistic and credible. It can artificially collect indicators of verisimilitude, infinitely faster and more “efficiently” than any mere human liar could.

If Euripides were resurrected, he would laugh his head off. He would see how we don’t even need punitive gods anymore. We’re driving ourselves mad, and some of us are profiting handsomely from doing the driving.

All this reflects the slow but steady corruption of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech. In the last half of the last century, Silicon Valley’s now-legendary corporations underwrote and developed some of the greatest real inventions in human history. They included: transistors (to replace vacuum tubes), integrated circuits having millions of transistors (aka computer “chips”), personal computers, smart cell phones, and memory devices that can hold more digital data in your hand than an IBM 360 computer held in a whole room in my youth. Those things were real advances in applied physics and engineering, creating unprecedented possibilities for improving human life.

Then came the Internet, with even broader possibilities for communication, including potentially connecting every human on this planet with every other.

But there the advances in engineering and applied physics virtually stopped. The B-school grads, venture capitalists and profit-seekers took over. The clever business plan for making money overtook the research project in applied physics or engineering. Much of the manufacturing, research and development moved on to China. And that’s where Silicon Valley and Big Tech stand today.

For the last generation or so, the explosive “progress” of Big Tech made gigantic fortunes for a few at the expense of small business and labor. It did so with mass electronic advertising, efficient logistics, and centralized ordering, accounting and delivery.

With these weapons, firms like Amazon, Wal-Mart and the so-called “Big Box Stores” drove millions of small sellers out of business. Internet-based driver and delivery services like Uber, Lyft, Door-Dash and Instacart made fortunes partly by computerized improvements in logistics, but mostly by squeezing their drivers and the restaurants and small businesses they “served” for profit (especially during the Pandemic). They also squeezed their drivers and other workers by calling them “independent contractors” and so legally depriving them of all the benefits that organized labor had built up for “employees” over a half a century of progressive labor policy.

It’s so much easier to make “innovations” in business plans, or to corrupt Congress, than to make real progress in engineering or applied physics. So the corruption of Big Tech continues. It even seems to accelerate.

Has no one but me noticed that, since their illustrious founders entered gilded retirements, Amazon’s and Google’s searches produce far fewer useful results and far more “sponsored” hits that are at best distracting and at worst totally irrelevant? Has no one noticed that the average corporate website makes it nearly impossible to communicate with any sentient being (including a useful AI) on any matter that overstressed and often incompetent programmers didn’t think to include a specific button on the Website for? Has anyone really thought seriously how Apple’s collecting and exploiting independent programmers in its “Apple Store” has affected their livelihoods, income, creativity and productivity? how having call centers in which reps receive calls at random and virtually never talk to the same customer twice affects their motivation and performance, let alone the customer relationship, which now makes my generation-old parody look optimistic?

“Old Europe” has thought a bit about these things. It has begun to address them with legislation, including its General Data Protection Regulation (for privacy) and its more recent Digital Marketing Act (for fairness to small business). Where is our own Congress on these issues? The nation that invented antitrust law after the First Gilded Age seems asleep at the switch today, while “Old Europe” makes progress under its more apt monicker “competition law.”

There are many deficiencies in our nation’s response to the problems of modernity. But the core of them all is governmental adoration of an increasingly dominant and self-serving “tech sector” that long ago stopped making fundamental advances in technology. Instead, it has turned for easy profit to exploiting others, deficencies in our system, and the dark sides of human nature, with increasingly thoughtless and society-heedless software and business plans.

The Internet’s Sewer of Lies is merely Big Tech’s biggest threat to human civility and civilization. It not only propagates the lies; it magnifies them algorithmically for those inclined to believe them. The longer it continues unimpeded and unregulated, the more quickly it will destroy what remains of the Enlightenment, and with it the best parts of human civilization. Bringing honesty and truth to the Internet is Job One in saving democracy, beginning with a repeal of Section 230(c)(1).

Endnote: Lest readers suspect me of being a technological philistine or modern Luddite, I’ll make three points. First, on average I spend hours per day on line. Second, as a professor of law, I used to teach courses in Computer Law and Telecommunications law, which examined the legal and social aspects of the Internet in detail. Finally, I’ll tell a story about Bill Hewlett, a co-founder of the hardware-turned-computer-peripheral firm Hewlett-Packard. Although a shadow of its former self, it still does business now, under the name HP.

Some time in the eighties, Hewlett gave a talk that epitomizes the differences between the Old Silicon Valley, which focused on real engineering and applied physics, and today’s business-plan-and-profit obsessed Big Tech, focusing mainly on software, logistics and legally exploiting others.

Hewlett gave his talk in one of those huge Silicon Valley conference rooms that seemed to go on forever. The assembled techies, business people, reporters and lawyers (including me, then) greeted him with universal adulation. He had been one of the founders of Silicon Valley and had built a mighty business on good engineering, from humble beginnings in a then-legendary garage lab.

The focus of Hewlett’s talk was developing the first hand-held, electronic scientific calculator. About the size of today’s smaller smart phones, it could do far more than add, subtract, multiply and divide. It could compute sines, cosines and tangents for angles in degrees or radians. It could compute arbitrary exponents and logarithms and (IIRC) even factorials and simple algebra. And it could do all these things in an instant, to as many significant figures as the display would hold.

Hewlett drew a laugh by revealing that he, as a company founder, had authorized the multi-million dollar development project without a single marketing study. His Board had been aghast but had let the project proceed. Hewlett had been sure, he told his audience, that the product would succeed because he was an engineer himself. Any engineer, he concluded, would want a hand-held device that did much more than a slide rule, much quicker, and to much greater accuracy.

He was right. The device, which sold for $395 (no small sum in those days), was one of HP’s most successful products.

In comparison, too many of today’s Big Tech leaders are far from engineers, let alone scientists. They are more like glorified accountants. They have the “wisdom” and the “insight” to know that they will make money by taking 30% of the revenue of (a) small restaurants, as Door Dash was reported to do, or (b) of sellers of Apps on its App Store, as Apple is reported to do (subject now, in Europe, to restrictions under the new Digital Marketing Act). Somehow these “insights” seem to me less developments in science or technology and more rapacious applications of economic power, like the nineteenth-century railroads exploiting their control over the land along their ample state-granted rights of way.


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