The report’s critique of behavior modification has unique relevance for our time. It begins by asking a question that we must also ask: “How did they get away with it?” Their answer invokes the “exceptionalism” of that era. Just as surveillance capitalism was initially able to root and flourish under the protection of a so-called “war against terror” and the compulsion for certainty that it stirred, in the middle of the twentieth century the means of behavioral modification migrated from the lab to the world at large primarily under the cover of cold-war anxieties. Later, the behavior-change professionals of the 1960s and 1970s were summoned into civilian practice by a society turned fearful after years of urban riots, political protests, and rising levels of crime and “delinquency.” The senators reasoned that calls for “law and order” had motivated the search for “immediate and efficient means to control violence and other forms of anti-social behavior. The interest in controlling violence replaced more time-consuming attempts to understand its sources.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1016