International Business Machines used its data surveillance and collection capabilities to help plan all six phases of the Holocaust. The scale of the genocide was impossible without IBM’s collaboration with the National Socialist regime. The corporation’s ability to track, record, and report data was central in identifying Jews, expelling them from society, confiscating their assets, ghettoizing them, deporting them to camps, and eventually exterminating millions. All the while, one scholar explains, “the New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939 to 1945.”

Covid injection normativity took the very practices Desmond decries to new levels – the capacity and readiness to track, record, analyze, report, and quantify human data. The scale of the project was impossibly short of the collaboration of corporations like the New York Times and International Business Machines. The Times incessantly tracked, recorded, and quantified the data with little objection from Desmond. And IBM launched the first Vax Pass in the US, New York’s Excelsior Pass. “Digital papers, please?” read one headline from March 2021. Public radio throughout the country touted the IBM rollout.

The most tangible “roots” of our experience today lie in the construction of corporate power in the 20th century, and the entwining of that power with state authority. American corporations and their university allies had funded the tracking and tracing of human data for the eugenics programs which guided “public health” for generations. Many of those corporations, besides IBM, also collaborated with the National Socialists in enhancing their war-making machine, the Carnegie Institute and Rockefeller Foundation among them.

Postwar, Harry Truman warned “about the way the CIA has been functioning,” long before the agency had a venture capital arm which, in collaboration with DARPA, invested in Moderna and its RNA vaccine development.

These tangible roots of our experience have less to do with capitalism than corporatism – the public-private partnerships which share personnel and subsidize the well-off and connected.