Corporate Masking: (In)visibility, Petro-nationalism, and Role Play in the Line 3 Pipeline Battle
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the concept of corporate masking – its ability to reveal and conceal simultaneously and, within this duality, transform that which is masked – as a performance strategy used by energy companies during high-profile and highly visible frontline pipeline battles. Using Enbridge’s Line 3 Replacement project and the subsequent protests as a case study, I examine how the company attempted to transform how the public viewed and interacted with its political and social influence over the approval and construction of the pipeline. Drawing on discussions of petro-nationalism, visibility politics, and theatrical masking, this article explores how the company enacted a corporate masking performance to maintain control over its desired visibility and establish itself as a neutral arbiter of energy transportation and security. I examine how Enbridge’s masking performance had a distinctly embodied dimension that created what this article explores as embodied assignment, a form of capitalist subject formation in alignment with petro-nationalist desires, curated and colonized by energy companies. The paper aims to explore how companies engage in anti-democratic politics on the frontlines when their infrastructure and company image experience negative, heightened visibility.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it