It is not surprising, therefore, that instrumentarianism’s specific “viewpoint of observation” was forged in the controversial intellectual domain known as “radical behaviorism” and its antecedents in turn-of-the-century theoretical physics. In the remainder of this chapter, our examination of power in the time of surveillance capitalism pivots to this point of origin far from totalitarianism’s murder and mayhem. It takes us to laboratories and classrooms and the realms of thought spun by men who regarded freedom as a synonym for ignorance and human beings as distant organisms imprisoned in patterns of behavior beyond their own comprehension or control, such as ants, bees, or Stuart MacKay’s herds of elk.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1143