For Meyer and for Skinner, our attachments to notions such as freedom, will, autonomy, purpose, and agency are defense mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance. I think of Dickens's Scrooge when he first encounters the doleful, chain-dragging ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley and denies the apparition, saying, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” So it is with freedom: an undigested bit of fear, a crumb of denial that, once metabolized, will dispel the apparition and deliver us to reality. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1154