Pentland frames MIT’s speed norms as the avant-garde model for surveillance society

Evidence

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.” 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. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1344

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘applied utopistics’ framing established earlier in this book on how surveillance capitalists portend a total instrumentarian order. — connects to: Academic researchers legitimate surveillance capitalism by providing its theoretical support. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1331

Broader Connections

• Academic researchers legitimate surveillance capitalism by providing its theoretical support. #exemplifies (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1331