PERSON
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
The Austrian-born Oxford scholar of internet governance who coined datafication, argued for the lost virtue of forgetting in a world of permanent digital memory, and spent four decades building the conceptual vocabulary that the AI age turned out to need: n-equals-all, correlation without causation, data as capital, and the governance of human decision in the age of machines.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is the thinker who studied information before the rest of the field noticed that information, not technology, was the story. Born in 1966 in Zell am See, Austria, he founded a software company at twenty, took law degrees at Salzburg, Harvard, and the LSE, built information law as a discipline almost single-handedly, and eventually settled at the Oxford Internet Institute as Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation. His defining intellectual habit is to recast his gaze—his phrase—from the technology to the information flowing through it: not the chip, but what the chip carries; not the model, but the
datafication of the world that made the model possible. This habit produced four books that now read as a single extended diagnosis of the AI age written before the age arrived:
Big Data (2013, with Kenneth