The professor believed that humanity desperately needed a plan, and he imagined powerful new instruments that could engineer behavior in every domain. As early as 1953, he anticipated today’s digitally engineered casino environments, whose sophistication in the precise shaping of gamblers’ behavior has made them a testing ground for state security agencies and surveillance capitalists alike: “But with proper instrumentation it should be possible to improve upon established practices in all these fields. Thus gambling devices could be ‘improved’—from the point of view of the proprietor—by introducing devices which would pay off on a variable-interval basis, but only when the rate of play is exceptionally high.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1172