The ensuing storm of controversy made Beyond Freedom & Dignity an international best seller. “Skinner’s science of human behavior, being quite vacuous, is as congenial to the libertarian as to the fascist,” wrote Noam Chomsky in a widely read review of the book. “It would be not absurd but grotesque to argue that since circumstances can be arranged under which behavior is quite predictable—as in a prison, for example, or… concentration camp.… therefore there need be no concern for the freedom and dignity of ‘autonomous man.’” (In the mid-1970s graduate department at Harvard where I studied and Skinner professed, many students referred to the book as Toward Slavery and Humiliation.)

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1013