Skinner called his work “radical behaviorism,” insisting that the only meaningful object of behavioral study was observation of action devoid of subjective attributions. That’s what made it radical. “Behavior is what an organism is doing—or more accurately what it is observed by another organism to be doing,” he declared in his first book’s opening pages. “Operant” behavior was his term for this active, observable “doing.” The vocabulary for rendering descriptions of operant behavior was to be purged of inwardness: an organism cannot be said to “see” but rather to “look toward.” Only such objective descriptions can render measurable behavioral facts that, in turn, lead to patterns and ultimately to the documentation of causal relationships between environment and behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1161