Essay: Plan of Attack
How techniques of information control pioneered during the pandemic will probably be used to stop you eating meat
In my latest essay for American Mind, “The Nexus of What’s Next”, I talk about the startling revelation that Moderna now has its own “Global Intelligence” department, which allows it to monitor and control global flows of information in its own favour, with the aid of governments, NGOs and Big Tech.
Basically, Moderna gets to say who says what about its products.
This is corporate information control on a new level, and we’re only going to see more of it in the coming years. What’s so sinister about it is that most people won’t even know it’s happening.
Of course, information control has been central to modern capitalism since the invention of advertising. Companies want you to think good things about their products and they want to reduce your exposure to negative publicity, from media coverage in all its forms to individual user reviews. Companies have an active interest in monitoring the markets and gauging consumer sentiment as closely and accurately as possible. This is good business sense. If you ran a company — whether it was a gardening business or a supplement manufacturer — you’d do the same, to some extent. I’d do it too.
But what Moderna is now doing is a major departure from “market research” and advertising as traditionally conceived. Allow me to quote the essay at length:
Moderna is going much further than just monitoring opinion for the purposes of better advertising. As the Unherd report makes clear, the company has moved into the realm of actively controlling the flow of information upon which decision-making is based. Moderna is now an arbiter of who can speak and who can’t, and what may permissibly be said. This is bad news, and it portends far greater ills if it goes unchallenged. This isn’t just about Moderna.
We shouldn’t be naïve about what advertising, in the traditional sense, is and does. Edward Bernays published his second book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, a full century ago now. Nor should we be naïve about the extent to which pharmaceutical companies use and have used advertising, especially in the U.S. but also elsewhere, to shape public opinion and drive behavior—that is, consumption of their products. The harm—the iatrogenesis—this can cause is plain to see…
In many cases, the harm is an unintended consequence, but in others it arguably isn’t. A notorious recent instance of the latter case is the Sackler family’s catastrophic marketing of Oxycontin, as chronicled in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Empire of Pain.
Moderna is now, effectively, running an information-warfare department, using techniques that were put to the test during the pandemic. Through the unprecedented collusion that took place between governments, the media, Big Pharma and Big Tech, particular narratives about COVID-19 and its treatment were “amplified” and others were “minimised”, ostensibly in the name of public health. The targets: “misinformation” and “disinformation”.
I don’t like using this euphemistic language, because we all know what it meant in reality: preventing people from knowing the truth about the virus and its treatment and exercising a free choice informed by their own assessment of the situation. It also meant punishing those who dared to speak out against what was being done. People’s reputations and livelihoods, not to mention their health, were destroyed. People died. Lots of people.
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