Well, this post aged well… It was written in 2021, and as of December 2024 (when I’m writing this comment), mainstream media narrative manipulation absolutely is a major topic. Awkwardly enough for me - someone who no longer votes in presidential elections and who is not a fan of Donald Trump - it was a favorite point of the Trump/Vance campaign.

At the time of writing, a distressing number of the major implementers of public conversation and narrative-setting1 are visibly fumbling to do damage control, get ahead of embarrassment and memory-hole inconvenient missteps.

In this case, the topic is the so-called “Lab Leak Theory”: the hypothesis2 that SARS-COV-2 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (not as a weapon, but as an accident).

Up until a few days ago, major news and social media outlets were branding (or banning) any discussion of lab origin as xenophobic conspiracy theory. I won’t go into how and why this abrupt reversal of course happened, because others have covered that particular meta-story. Here are a few quick links to that end:

This post is unfinished. Some additional areas I’d like to cover:

  1. why fact checking isn’t science (Zaynep: https://www.theinsight.org/p/checking-facts-even-if-one-cant)
  2. widespread and overt narrative control
  3. narrative control needs to be the top story!
    • covid is the most consequential topic of our time.
    • our sense-making apparatuses totally failed to deliver
    • this should never be tolerated again
  4. notice whether or not this element of the events (the narrative control) is discussed or is allowed to be discussed (it may be victim to the same constraints itself)
  5. The next time you see this happening, you should notice it, see who is doing it, how they support their position, how the respond to counter-narratives

Footnotes

  1. Eric Weinstein calls this the G.I.N. - Gated Institutional Narrative ↩

  2. The distinction is meaningful. In science, theory is as close to what the general public thinks of as a fact as anything gets (the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, heliocentricity theory). A theory is the explanation of a phenomenon, it is testable and makes falsifiable predictions. A hypothesis is essentially a proposal that may one day “graduate” to theory. ↩