Technocolonialism: When Technology For Good Is Harmful

Cover
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Abbreviations
Introduction
	Colonialism
	Infrastructures
	The poetics of infrastructure and the imaginaries of ‘technology for good’
	Technocolonialism
	Outline of the book
	A note on language and terminology
1  The Logics of Digital Humanitarianism
	A brief history of humanitarianism: Empire, capitalism and bureaucracy
		The institutionalization of compassion
		Empire and the suffering of others
		Humanitarianism and capitalism
	The transformations of humanitarianism and the turn to the digital
		The logic of humanitarian accountability
		The logic of audit
		The logic of capitalism
		The logic of technological solutionism
		The logic of securitization
		The logic of resistance
	Conclusion
2  Biometric Infrastructures
	Biometrics, race and empire
	The biometric–industrial complex
	Biometrics in the humanitarian sector
		Bias
		Safeguarding risks
		Data reusability and function creep
		Lack of meaningful consent
		Coloniality of digital identity programmes
	Conclusion
3  Extracting Data and the Illusion of Accountability
	Accountability to affected people as feedback
	Automating accountability? Why digitizing and automating feedback is not a solution
	Tracing the trails of feedback data: How affected people pay the donors
	The harm of not closing the feedback loop
	Conclusion
4  Surreptitious Experimentation
	Making sense of experiments
	Experimentation in a historical context
	Artificial intelligence
	Chatbots
	Extractivism
	The coloniality of technological experiments
	The enchantment of technology: Magic and power
	Surreptitious experimentation
	Conclusion
5  The Humanitarian Machine
	Bureaucracy: A moral sleeping pill?
	The power of numbers and computation
	Humanitarian infrastructures
	Containing crises
	The structural violence of automated decision making
	The binary logic of the machine
	Affective encounters with the machine
	‘The change that doesn’t change anything’
	Conclusion
6  Mundane Resistance
	Resistance in asymmetrical settings
	Protest and activism
	Digital witnessing and storytelling
	Mundane resistance
		Non-participation
		Hidden transcripts
		Appropriation as resistance
		Mourning and memorialization
	Resistance or reproduction?
	Conclusion
Conclusion
	The infrastructuring of humanitarian space and the porousness of humanitarianism
	Infrastructural violence
	Normalizing (infra)structural violence
	Technocolonialism and infrastructuring
	What is to be done?
		Reimagining humanitarianism?
		Reimagining infrastructure
		Reimagining solidarities: Organize!
A Note on Research Methods
	The Humanitarian Technologies Project (The ‘Haiyan study’)
	The ‘digital humanitarianism project’
Acknowledgements
Notes
	Introduction
	1 The Logics of Digital Humanitarianism
	2 Biometric Infrastructures
	3 Extracting Data and the Illusion of Accountability
	4 Surreptitious Experimentation: Enchantment, Coloniality and Control
	5 The Humanitarian Machine: Automating Harm
	6 Mundane Resistance: Contesting Technocolonialism in Everyday Life
	Conclusion
References
Index
EULA