Pentland is sanguine on this point: total knowledge is within reach. As he states, “In just a few short years we are likely to have incredible rich data available about the behavior of virtually all of humanity—on a continuous basis. The data mostly already exists.” The right to the future tense—and with it social trust, authority, and politics—is surrendered to Big Other and the transcendent computational systems that rule society under the watchful eye of a group that Pentland calls “we.” He never defines this “we,” which imposes an us-them relationship, introducing the exclusivity of the shadow text and its one-way mirror. It is an omission that haunts his text. Does it refer to the priesthood of data scientists like Pentland? The priesthood in collaboration with the owners of the means of behavior modification?

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1370