Will Davies:

Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges. The fact that the resolutely ‘anti-political’ behaviorists of the 1920s, for example, produced techniques of psychological control that could serve the interests of military and corporate power, is one demonstration of this. The NSA revelations arguably herald a similar moment of reckoning for digital data collectors and analysts. Google’s childish political mantra of being anything other than ‘evil’ ignored the historical lesson, that apolitical, purposeless knowledge is often one of the greatest assets to the strategies of the powerful.