The ‘social physics’ program attracted establishment acclaim from UN to Microsoft to Google.

Evidence

Nearly two hundred years later, Pentland’s theory and research in social physics have made him the focus of articles in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the New Yorker, as well as a prominent speaker on the global circuit, from the UN and the World Economic Forum to corporations and international conferences. At Microsoft and Google he has been featured as the “presiding genius” of the “Big Data revolution,” whose “groundbreaking experiments” and “remarkable discoveries” have made his work “the bedrock of a whole new scientific field.” With the publication of his book Social Physics, Pentland was introduced at the popular Digital-Life-Design Conference in 2014 by the well-known social media analyst Clay Shirky, who opined that Pentland’s Human Dynamics Lab “has done more to explain human behavior in groups in the last ten years than any other institution in the world.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2650

Categorization

• XREF: The hyperbolic institutional endorsement of social physics connects to how prediction and certainty rhetoric legitimates surveillance-capitalist power — parallels Moore’s Law reverence earlier in the book.