Browsing a corporation’s mind

Abstract

Industry archives are a treasure trove. No matter how old, their minutes, correspondence, memos, or invoices always tell the truth. What they tell us is an ageless truth about corporate lies. Thanks to the millions of pages of the ''cigarette papers,'' scholars and journalists worldwide were able to reconstruct and analyze decades of deceitful tactics by the most deadly industrial sector humanity has ever created-the tobacco industry [1]. Hundreds of books, academic articles, and investigative news articles have been published in the past 25 years, generating a trove of knowledge. The documents reveal profound disruption of scientific processes through an elaborate strategy aimed at ''manufacturing doubt'' [2] about the dangers of smoking. Scattered industry archives, made public from litigation and 'discovery' processes or freedom of information requests, also made it possible to study how industries manufactured doubt around the hazards associated with other toxic substances. Asbestos, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and petrochemicals each most certainly deserved one or several databases of their own. But now justice is done. Thanks to the ToxicDocs database [3], we can dive deeper into the documents describing hazards, documents written by the makers of the poisons. Journalists working on these issues need to familiarize themselves with these ToxicDocs archives if they want to understand what is happening today. Industry tactics and propaganda are not reinvented each and every morning. They stem from decades of sophistication. One inspires the other. Industry sectors even share Swiss Army characters-scientists, consultants, and propagandists [4]. The production of alternative scientific facts to whitewash hazardous products and noxious practices has now become a business sector in its own right.