In 2010 Pentland and his 2009 coauthors founded a company, Sociometric Solutions, to bring Skinner’s longed-for “instruments and methods” to the marketplace. It was one of many companies that Pentland would create to apply the rigors of his social physics to captive populations of office workers. Sociometric Solutions’ CEO, Ben Waber, one of Pentland’s doctoral students, calls his operation “people analytics,” and in his book of the same name, he anticipates a future of “connection, collaboration, and data” with the badge or something like it “deployed across millions of individuals at different companies in countries all over the world for not minutes but years or decades.… Imagine what we could learn about to help people collaborate more effectively.…”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1351