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John Mitchinson’s
Zeitgeisters
Profiles of the people whose ideas are helping to shape the future
CARISSA VÉLIZ
Philosopher
If you are feeling overwhelmed or exhausted by the debates raging over the power of Big Tech and the seemingly impossible task of reversing the intrusions of surveillance capitalism, the work of Carissa Véliz will come as a welcome blast of courageous common sense.
Dr Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University and the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy.
In 2025, she was named by El País as one of the 10 most influential thinkers in the world on technology. Her work maps out similar terrain to that of Shoshana Zuboff (featured in this column in December 2022) and the Byline Books-published The Little Black Book of Data and Democracy by Kyle Taylor, but complements both by mounting a spirited philosophical defence of the idea of privacy and a celebration of all things analogue.
Where to Start
The best introduction to Véliz’s work is her 2020 book Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data, which was an Economist Book of the Year, and which takes aim at the whole idea of the data economy.
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