Aaron Vick's The Injection is a piece about pipes.
Not literal pipes—the metaphorical infrastructure through which beliefs flow from their points of origin to their points of installation in individual minds. The funding mechanisms, media ecosystems, repetition engines, and legitimization structures that transform manufactured claims into "common sense."
The piece asks visitors a simple question about each of six beliefs: do you agree? Then it shows them something they didn't ask for: where that belief came from.
We tend to think of beliefs as possessions—things we hold, positions we've taken, conclusions we've reached. The language itself suggests ownership and agency. My beliefs. I think. I believe.
The Injection proposes a different model: beliefs as installations. Not chosen but received. Not reasoned but absorbed. Not held but hosted.
This is not a claim about all beliefs, or even most. It is a claim about a specific category: beliefs that feel like common sense, that seem too obvious to require justification, that have become part of the ambient intellectual atmosphere.
These beliefs, Vick suggests, are precisely the ones most likely to have been manufactured—because the goal of successful belief infrastructure is to make itself invisible. A belief that still requires argument is a belief that hasn't yet been fully installed. The measure of success is when the belief stops feeling like a belief at all and starts feeling like simply "the way things are."
What distinguishes The Injection from a lecture or a polemic is its evidentiary foundation. Each of the six belief supply chains presented in the piece is documented through primary sources, academic investigations, or journalistic exposés.
Climate uncertainty: The 1998 American Petroleum Institute memo, leaked to the New York Times, explicitly states that "victory will be achieved when average citizens 'understand' (recognize) uncertainties in climate science." Internal Exxon documents show that 83% of peer-reviewed papers and 80% of internal communications acknowledged human-caused climate change, while 81% of public advertorials expressed doubt. The infrastructure is not inferred. It is confessed.
Dietary fat: The 2016 JAMA Internal Medicine investigation uncovered documents from the University of Illinois Archives showing that the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard researchers approximately $50,000 (in 2016 dollars) to produce a literature review that downplayed sugar's role in heart disease. The resulting paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, shaped dietary guidelines for fifty years. The funding was never disclosed.
Diamond engagement rings: N.W. Ayer's internal documents, now part of the advertising industry's own self-mythologization, describe the challenge they faced in 1938: "No direct sale to be made…no brand name to be impressed…simply an idea—the eternal emotional value surrounding the diamond." The "tradition" they created is younger than most visitors' grandparents.
The superpredator myth: A single article in The Weekly Standard in November 1995 coined a term that would change laws in 48 states. The author, Princeton professor John DiIulio, later recanted entirely: "The superpredator idea was wrong…it was about as far off as one could possibly get." But the laws remain. Thousands serve sentences imposed during the panic.
Shareholder value: Milton Friedman's 1970 New York Times Magazine essay is not a leaked document or a hidden memo—it is a public intellectual argument. But its transformation from "one economist's opinion" to "the biggest idea in business" (The Economist, 2016) to "what many people believe is a legal requirement" (it isn't) illustrates how installation works through legitimization and repetition rather than evidence.
The piece does not manufacture its evidence. It curates evidence that was already manufactured—and then exposed.
The Injection operates through a simple interactive structure: six questions, six traces.
The questions are phrased as belief statements: "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day." "A diamond engagement ring is a traditional symbol of love and commitment." "There is still significant scientific debate about whether human activity causes climate change."
Visitors respond: Agree, Disagree, or Not Sure.
Then the infrastructure appears. A timeline. Dates. Names. Dollar amounts. Quotes from internal memos. Sources.
The piece adapts to responses. Visitors who agree with a belief see how it was installed. Visitors who disagree see something different: that awareness doesn't undo installation. You still had to contend with the claim. You still had to form a position in response to it. The infrastructure succeeded in setting the terms of the debate, even if it failed to determine your conclusion.
This adaptive structure resists the easy narrative of "the fooled" versus "the enlightened." Everyone encounters the infrastructure. Everyone is shaped by it. Disagreement is not escape.
The piece ends with an acknowledgment:
This piece was also designed to shape what you believe. It selected which supply chains to show you. It framed them in particular ways. It has its own infrastructure.
Did it work?
This is not false modesty. It is structural honesty.
The Injection cannot stand outside the system it describes. It is itself a media object, designed to influence belief, operating through selection and framing and repetition of its own. It has funders (or at least, material conditions of production). It has editorial choices—six beliefs, not sixty; these documents, not others; this framing, not alternatives.
To present the piece as a neutral revelation of hidden truths would be to reproduce the very invisibility it critiques. The piece would become another pipe, claiming to be a window.
By acknowledging its own infrastructure, The Injection attempts something more difficult: to make visible the machinery of belief-installation while operating as an instance of that machinery. The piece does not escape the system. It metabolizes the contradiction.
Whether this works—whether self-implication constitutes a meaningful difference or merely a sophisticated form of inoculation—is left to the visitor.
The Injection is the second piece in Vick's installation The Prior, following The Forecast.
Where The Forecast addresses the colonization of the future self through predictive systems, The Injection addresses the colonization of the present self through installed beliefs. Together, they map a territory of preemption: the ways in which both what you will do and what you already think have been shaped by systems that precede and exceed individual agency.
The title of the installation—The Prior—carries a double meaning. In Bayesian statistics, a prior is the assumption that precedes evidence, the belief you start with before updating. In ordinary language, the prior is what came before, what was already decided, what you inherit without choosing.
The Injection suggests that what feels like your own reasoning is often an elaboration of priors you didn't choose—beliefs installed so early or so thoroughly that they became the foundation on which subsequent reasoning was built.
You can update your priors. But you cannot reason your way back to a state before they were installed. The infrastructure got there first.
A piece like The Injection invites questions about its own political positioning.
The six beliefs traced in the piece span conventional political categories. Climate doubt is coded as right-wing; the superpredator myth was bipartisan but implemented primarily through tough-on-crime conservatism; shareholder value is neoliberal orthodoxy; the sugar/fat switch operated outside partisan frames entirely; breakfast and diamonds are apolitical in conventional terms but deeply ideological in their service of commercial interests.
This distribution is deliberate. The Injection is not an argument that one political tribe has been fooled while another sees clearly. It is an argument that belief-installation is a structural feature of how ideas propagate in media-saturated societies—and that no position, no identity, no political affiliation confers immunity.
The visitor who arrives confident that they have seen through the lies of the other side will find their own beliefs traced. The infrastructure is not partisan. It is universal.
We do not typically see the pipes that carry water to our faucets, the wires that carry electricity to our outlets, the cables that carry data to our screens. Infrastructure, when it works, is invisible.
The same is true of belief infrastructure. When it works—when a manufactured claim becomes common sense, when a funded campaign becomes conventional wisdom, when a strategic memo becomes the way things are—the infrastructure disappears. All that remains is the belief, feeling as natural and inevitable as running water.
The Injection makes the pipes visible. Not all of them—that would be impossible—but enough to establish that they exist, that they are constructed, that they serve interests, that they were not always there.
The piece does not promise liberation from the infrastructure. It does not claim that seeing the pipes will free you from their influence. It makes a more modest claim: that knowing the pipes exist changes your relationship to the water that flows through them.
You still drink. But you know, now, that it came from somewhere.
The Injection is the second piece in The Prior, an installation exploring the infrastructure of belief, prediction, and identity. It follows The Forecast (2026).