Pentland understands that Big Other is not only an architecture that monitors and controls things. Big Other's instrumentation and data flows also make people mutually visible to one another, from the updates on your breakfast to the population flows in cities. Back in 2011, Pentland enthused, "Revolutionary new… infrastructures are providing us with a God's eye view of ourselves." The aim is a computer-mediated society where our mutual visibility becomes the habitat in which we attune to one another, producing social patterns based on imitation that can be manipulated for confluence, just as the logic of the machine hive suggests.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1365