![]() Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that her conversations with Skinner “left me with an indelible sense of fascination with a way of construing human life that was-and is-fundamentally different from my own.” Skinner believed that humans could be conditioned like any other animal, and that behavioral psychology could and should be used to build a technological utopia where citizens were trained from birth to be altruistic and community-oriented. Less well remembered is the fact that he constructed a larger box, with a glass window, for his infant daughter, though this was revealing of his broader ambitions. Skinner, who had perhaps the largest forehead you’ll ever see on an adult, is best remembered for putting pigeons in boxes (so-called Skinner boxes) and inducing them to peck at buttons for rewards. In the 1970s, when Shoshana Zuboff was a graduate student in Harvard’s psychology department, she met the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner. ![]() ‘The Happy Way’ by Pushwagner from Soft City, published by New York Review Comics in 2016 ![]()
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