Pentland’s academic credentials and voluble intelligence help legitimate a social vision that repelled and alarmed intellectuals, public officials, and the general public just decades ago. Most noteworthy is that Pentland “completes” Skinner, fulfilling his social vision with big data, ubiquitous digital instrumentation, advanced mathematics, sweeping theory, numerous esteemed coauthors, institutional legitimacy, lavish funding, and corporate friends in high places without having attracted the worldwide backlash, moral revulsion, and naked vitriol once heaped on Harvard’s outspoken behaviorist. This fact alone suggests the depth of psychic numbing to which we have succumbed and the loss of our collective bearings.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1333