Pentland and Eagle began with 100 MIT students and faculty centered at the Media Lab, equipping them with 100 Nokia phones preloaded with special software in a project that would become the basis of Eagle’s doctoral dissertation. The two researchers exposed the revelatory power of continuously harvested behavioral data, which they validated with survey information collected directly from each participant. Their analyses produced detailed portraits of individual and group life: the “social system,” as the authors called it. They were able to specify regular temporal and spatial patterns of location, activity, and communication-use patterns, which together enabled predictions of up to 90 percent accuracy regarding where someone was likely to be and what that person was likely to be doing within the hour, as well as highly accurate predictions about an individual’s colleagues, casual friends, and close relationships. The team identified patterns of communication and interaction within work groups, as well as the broad “organizational rhythms and network dynamics” of the Media Lab. (Eagle became CEO of Jana, a mobile advertising company that offers free internet to emerging markets in exchange for behavioral surplus.)
As the theory and practice of reality mining continued to evolve in Pentland’s lab, work projects, and theories, the MIT Technology Review singled out “reality mining” as one of its “10 Breakthrough Technologies” in 2008. “My students and I have created two behavior-measurement platforms to speed the development of this new science,” Pentland said. “These platforms today produce vast amounts of quantitative data for hundreds of research groups around the world.”13
This allegiance to speed is, as we know, not a casual description but rather a key element in the art and science of applied utopistics. Pentland understands the rapid encroachments of Big Other and instrumentarian power as a “light-speed, hyperconnected world” where virtual crowds of millions from anywhere in the world “can form in minutes.” He views the MIT community as the avant-garde: brilliant pioneers of light speed, already in sync with its extreme velocities and thus a model for the rest of society. Reflecting on his students and colleagues, Pentland writes that “I have also gotten to see how creative cultures must change in order to thrive in the hyperconnected, warp-speed world that is MIT, an environment that the rest of the world is now entering.”14 Pentland reasons that his group’s adaptation to MIT’s norms of rapid deployment simply foreshadows what is in store for the rest of us.
In the MIT Technology Review’s enthusiastic 2008 tribute to “reality mining,” it noted the then-still-new and disturbing facts of behavioral surplus: “Some people are nervous about trailing digital bread crumbs behind them. Sandy Pentland however revels in it.” Pentland would like to see phones collect “even more information” about their users: “It’s an interesting God’s-eye view.”15 Indeed, Pentland regularly celebrates “the predictive power of digital breadcrumbs” in his articles, indulging in the euphemisms and thin rationalizations that are also standard fare for surveillance capitalists and that contribute to the normalization of the dispossession of human experience. He says, for example,
As we go about our daily lives, we leave behind virtual breadcrumbs—digital records of the people we call, the places we go, the things we eat and the products we buy. These breadcrumbs tell a more accurate story of our lives than anything we choose to reveal about ourselves.… Digital breadcrumbs… record our behavior as it actually happened.16
Pentland was among the first to recognize the commercial relevance of behavioral surplus. Although he does not discuss it explicitly, he appears to embrace the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism as the necessary condition for an instrumentarian society. Pentland’s own companies are extensions of his applied utopistics: proving grounds for instrumentarian techniques and the habituation of populations to pervasive rendition, monitoring, and modification in pursuit of surveillance revenues.
From the start, Pentland understood reality mining as the gateway to a new universe of commercial opportunities. In 2004 he asserted that cell phones and other wearable devices with “computational horsepower” would provide the “foundation” for reality mining as an “exciting new suite of business applications.” The idea was always that businesses could use their privileged grasp of “reality” to shape behavior toward maximizing business objectives. He describes new experimental work in which speech-recognition technology generated “profiles of individuals based on the words they use,” thus enabling a manager to “form a team of employees with harmonious social behavior and skills.”17
In their 2006 article, Pentland and Eagle explained that their data would be “of significant value in the workplace,” and the two jointly submitted a patent for a “combined short range radio network and cellular telephone network for interpersonal communications” that would add to the stock of instruments available for businesses to mine reality.18 Eagle told Wired that year that the reality mining study represented an “unprecedented data set about continuous human behavior” that would revolutionize the study of groups and offer new commercial applications. He was reported to be “in talks” with a large company that already wanted to apply his instruments and methods.19 Pentland argued that information gathered by his sociometers—“unobtrusive wearable sensors” measuring communication, voice tones, and body language—“could help managers understand who is working with whom and infer the relationships between colleagues” and “would be an efficient way to find people who might work well together.”20
In a 2009 collaboration with several graduate students, Pentland presented results on the design and deployment of a “wearable computing platform” based on the sociometric badge and its machine analytics. The goal, the authors said, was to make machines that can “monitor social communication and provide real-time intervention.” To that end, twenty-two office employees were “instrumented” with the badge for one month in order to “automatically measure individual and collective patterns of behavior, predict human behavior from unconscious social signals, identify social affinity among individuals working in the same team, and enhance social interactions by providing feedback to the users of our system.” The research provided credible results, revealing patterns of communication and behavior that the authors concluded “would not be available without the use of a device such as the sociometric badge. Our results… argue strongly for the use of automatic sensing data collection tools to understand social systems.” They warned that organizations will become “truly sensible” only when they employ “hundreds or thousands of wireless environmental and wearable sensors capable of monitoring human behavior, extracting meaningful information, and providing managers with group performance metrics and employees with self-performance evaluations and recommendation.”21
The 2002 invention was continuously elaborated and eventually shepherded from lab to market. In 2010 Pentland and his 2009 coauthors founded a company, Sociometric Solutions, to bring Skinner’s longed-for “instruments and methods” to the marketplace. It was one of many companies that Pentland would create to apply the rigors of his social physics to captive populations of office workers.22 Sociometric Solutions’ CEO, Ben Waber, one of Pentland’s doctoral students, calls his operation “people analytics,” and in his book of the same name, he anticipates a future of “connection, collaboration, and data” with the badge or something like it “deployed across millions of individuals at different companies in countries all over the world for not minutes but years or decades.… Imagine what we could learn about to help people collaborate more effectively.…”23
Pentland and his crew continued to develop the sociometer and its applications, and by 2013 the device had been used by dozens of research groups and companies, including members of the Fortune 1000. A 2014 study, authored with Waber and colleagues from Harvard and Northeastern University, quantified gender differences in interaction patterns. The success of the analysis occasioned this announcement: “It is now possible to actively instrument human behavior to collect detailed data on various dime
nsions of social interaction.” The authors signaled their aim to employ MacKay’s cardinal rule of unobtrusive surveillance for effective monitoring of herds, flocks, and packs, acknowledging that the continuous pervasive collection of human behavioral data could succeed only when conducted outside the boundaries of human awareness, thus eliminating possible resistance, just as we saw at Facebook. As the researchers enthused, “Electronic sensors can be used to complement or replace human observers altogether, and while they may convey a slight sense of surveillance this perception is likely reduced as sensors get smaller and smaller, and consequently less obtrusive.” They concluded that “minimally invasive ways to instrument human behavior” would enable comprehensive data collection in “naturalistic settings.”
By 2015, the company opted for euphemism in a rebranding effort, changing its name to Humanyze. Its technology is described as a platform that uses a “smart employee badge to collect employee behavioral data, which it links to specific metrics with the goal of improving business performance.”24 Waber portrays the work as “moneyball” for business, enabling any organization to manage its workers like a sports team based on measures that reveal how people move through the day, with whom they interact, their tone of voice, if they “lean in” to listen, their position in the social network across a variety of office situations, and much more, all of it to produce forty separate measures that are then integrated with a “business metric dashboard.” The company does not identify its client organizations, although one account describes its work with 10,000 employees in Bank of America’s customer service centers and a partnership with the consulting firm Deloitte.25 Writing in Scientific American on the power of sociometric data, Pentland says, “I persuaded the manager of a Bank of America call center to schedule coffee breaks simultaneously. The goal was to promote more engagement between employees. This single change resulted in a productivity increase of $15 million a year.”26
Of the nineteen commercial ventures currently listed in Pentland’s MIT biography, many are surveillance-as-a-service companies. For example, Pentland cofounded Endor, which markets itself to business customers as a solution to the prediction imperative. Endor’s website explains its origins in “the revolutionary new science” of social physics combined with a “proprietary technology” to produce a “powerful engine that is able to explain and predict any sort of human behavior.…” The site explains that every human activity (e.g., phone call records, credit card purchases, taxi rides, web activity) contains a set of hidden mathematical patterns. On the strength of its analysis, “emerging behavioral patterns” can be detected before they can be observed “by any other technique.… We’ve been working with some of the world’s top consumer brands to unravel the most demanding of data problems.”27
In 2014 another Pentland company called Sense Networks was acquired by YP, two letters that once stood for “yellow pages” and now describe “North America’s largest local search, media and advertising company connecting consumers with local businesses.” The 2014 YP statement on its acquisition of Sense Networks portrays a familiar picture of the behavioral surplus land grab, describing the firm as a “sophisticated location data processing platform to deliver mobile audiences at scale. Sense’s retargeting solution for retailers can identify and reach shoppers and prospects of the top retailers with relevant mobile ads when they are near the retailer… at home or work.”28
Pentland understands his experiments and paid interventions in workplace settings as emblematic of the larger challenges of social relations in an instrumentarian society. Once again we see the intended path from the economic to the social domain. Those instrumented office workers function as living labs for the translation of instrumentarian relations to the wider society. Pentland appeared in 2016 at a conference organized by Singularity University, a Silicon Valley hub of instrumentarian ideology funded in part by Larry Page. An interviewer tasked to write about Pentland explains, “Though people are one of the most valuable assets in an organization, many companies are still approaching management with a 20th century mentality.… Pentland saw the factor that was always messing things up was—the people.”29 Like Nadella, Pentland described his aims as developing the social systems that would work along the same lines as the machine systems, using behavioral data flows to judge the “correctness” of action patterns and to intervene when it is necessary to change “bad” action to “correct” action. “If people aren’t interacting correctly and information isn’t spreading correctly,” Pentland warns, “people make bad decisions.… What you’re trying to do is make a human-machine symbiote, where the humans understand more about the network of interactions because of the computers, and the computers are able to understand more about how humans work.” As the interviewer notes, “Pentland has found this data [from sociometric badges] goes a long way in helping organizations mend their ‘broken behaviors.’”30
Pentland’s vision of an instrumentarian society grew in proportion to his instruments, his ideas waxing increasingly ambitious as the new tools and methods from his lab merged with the contemporary swell of computer mediation, all of it on the path to Big Other’s global ubiquity. Pentland articulated his ambitions for the capabilities and objectives of this new milieu in a series of papers, published primarily between 2011 and 2014, but one remarkable 2011 essay of which he is the sole author stands out: “Society’s Nervous System: Building Effective Government, Energy, and Public Health Systems.”31
Pentland begins the report by announcing the institutional bona fides of this work: “Drawing on a unique, multi-year collaboration with the heads of major IT, wireless, hardware, health, and financial firms, as well as the heads of American, EU, and other regulatory organizations, and a variety of NGOs [a footnote here indicates the World Economic Forum], I describe the potential for pervasive and mobile sensing and computing over the next decade.…” From there, his reasoning leaps across a range of inferences to stitch together a crucial rationale for a totalistic society constructed, sustained, and directed by instrumentarian power. The initial premise is reasonable enough: industrial-age technology once revolutionized the world with reliable systems for water, food, waste, energy, transportation, police, health care, education, and so forth, but these systems are now hopelessly “old,” “centralized,” “obsolete,” and “unsustainable.”
New digital systems are required that must be “integrated,” “holistic,” “responsive,” “dynamic,” and “self-regulating”: “We need a radical rethinking of societies’ systems. We must create a nervous system for humanity that maintains the stability of our societies’ systems throughout the globe.” Referring to the progress of ubiquitous computational sensing devices able to govern complex machine processes and information flows, Pentland observes that the “sensing” technologies necessary for this nervous system are “already in place.” Even in 2011, Pentland understood that the basic contours of Big Other were up and running, describing it as a “world-spanning living organism” in which “wireless traffic systems, security sensors, and especially mobile telephone networks are combining to become intelligent reactive systems with sensors serving as their eyes and ears… the evolution… will continue at a quickening speed… devices will have more sensors.…”32
But Pentland saw a problem. Although ubiquitous technologies are well on the way to solving the technical challenges of a global nervous system, Big Other will not be complete until it also understands human behavior on a global scale: “What is missing… are the dynamic models of demand and reaction,” along with an architecture that guarantees “safety, stability, and efficiency.… The models required must describe human demand and reactions, since humans are at the core of all of these systems… the necessary observations are observations of individual behavior.…”33
Pentland had identified a dangerous void, which foreshadows the “profound shift” that Nadella extolled to Microsoft developers in 2017 when he said: “People and their relationship with other people i
s now a first-class thing in the cloud!” “People” would have to become part of Big Other’s purview, lest they fall prey to “incorrect” behavior. Society’s safety, stability, and efficiency hang in the balance. Fortunately, Pentland informs us, the instruments and methods to capture behavioral surplus for reality mining are uniquely suited to answer this call:
For the first time in history, the majority of humanity is linked.… As a consequence, our mobile wireless infrastructure can be “reality mined” in order to… monitor our environments, and plan the development of our society.… Reality mining of the “digital breadcrumbs” left behind as we go about our daily lives offers potential for creating remarkable, second-by-second models of group dynamics and reactions over extended periods of time.… In short, we now have the capacity to collect and analyze data about people with a breadth and depth that was previously inconceivable.34
In a style reminiscent of Larry Page’s rejection of “old laws,” Pentland is equally critical of a range of concepts and frameworks inherited from the Enlightenment and political economics. Pentland insists that the “old” social categories of status, class, education, race, gender, and generation are obsolete, as irrelevant as the energy, food, and water systems that he wants to replace. Those categories describe societies through the lens of history, power, and politics, but Pentland prefers “populations” to societies, “statistics” to meaning, and “computation” to law. He sees the “stratification of the population” coded not by race, income, occupation, or gender but rather by “behavior patterns” that produce “behavior subgroups” and a new “behavior demographics” that can predict disease, financial risk, consumer preferences, and political views with “between 5 and 10 times the accuracy” of the standard measures.35
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 52