From the opening page of Skinner’s first book, The Behavior of Organisms, published in 1938, he sounds Meyer’s (and Planck’s) caution: freedom is merely ignorance waiting to be conquered. “Primitive systems of behavior” assign causality to “entities beyond man.” Equally inadequate are the “advanced systems of behavior” that ascribe control to vague fictions such as the “self” or “free will.” “The inner organism,” he wrote, “may in resignation be called free, as in the case of ‘free will,’ when no further investigation is held to be possible.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1160