In his penultimate essay, written in 1990, barely three years before his death, Skinner mourned the prospects of behavioral prediction as the foundation of a new society built on scientific certainty: "To say that a person is simply a place in which something happens seems even more threatening when it raises questions about what we are likely to do rather than what we have done." In those last years he seemed more resigned to the tenacity of human friction and its stubborn allegiance to something like free will, his voice less outrageous and aggressive than the author of Beyond Freedom & Dignity, two decades earlier. Anger and contempt had shaded into weariness and despair with his final reflections: It may be said that this is a discouraging view of human behavior and that we shall be more likely to do something about the future if we continue to believe that our destiny is in our hands.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1208