Instead of politics, markets, classes, and so on, Pentland reduces society to his laws of social physics: a reincarnation of Skinner’s “communal science.” Indeed, Pentland regards his work as the practical foundation of a new “computational theory of behavior” capable of producing a “causal theory of social structure… a mathematical explanation of why society reacts as it does and how these reactions may (or may not) solve human problems.…” These new mathematical analyses not only reveal the deep “mechanisms of social interactions” (Skinner’s “special capacities of the group”) but also combine with “our newly acquired massive amounts of behavior data” in order to reveal the patterns of causality that make it possible to “engineer better social systems,” all of it based on “unprecedented instrumentation.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1382