In places of disaster, war, and conflict, humanitarian organizations offer food, medical care, water, and shelter to those affected by natural hazards or violence. Guided by principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence, in the public imaginary (and in reality) these humanitarians are present and proximate to those most in need, offering care and comfort. Increasingly, these organizations use data and digital tools as part of their work, whether to expand their reach, provide information, support programs, monitor and evaluate the provision of services, or track equipment, supplies, and people. Data and digital tools are remote by nature, with “data” aggregating people and their stories into numbers in spreadsheets or log frames, and digital tools affording ways to connect, one step removed from the realities on the ground. How do humanitarians use these digital tools? And what can this tell us about governance, the exercise of power, and the international order? Most fundamentally, how does the use of data and digital tools transform humanitarian response?
The three books under consideration in this essay—#Help, Technocolonialism, and Humanitarian Extractivism—explore and offer possible answers to these questions. Each book represents a significant intervention into a growing body of literature that examines this topic,Footnote 1 including, for example, a series of articles in an updated data protection handbook from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).Footnote 2 The authors, in their respective books, examine the “digitalization” (the ways that aid is becoming automated through the use of data and digital technologies) and “datafication” (“the articulation of information, concepts, processes or systems in mathematical and machine-readable formats”) of humanitarian action (Sandvik, p. 5). In doing so, they juxtapose the idealized image described in the first sentences of this essay with its deconstructed technological reality, presenting instead a humanitarianism that remakes the current order, creates new risks, or, at its worst, harms those it is designed to help.
The books’ analyses are detailed, compelling, and convincing. Setting some caveats aside, discussed further below, all three books left me with a sense of a task unfinished and a job undone, related both to the Janus-faced nature of technology and the thorny dilemma of how to “close the gap between theory and practice” that is at the heart of Ethics & International Affairs’ mandate. Fundamentally, each book concludes that the various transformations technology has wrought in humanitarianism are, at best, unintended, inconsistent, or unfulfilled in their impact and, at worst, deeply problematic. The impacts of technology and data are clearly mixed. Growth in AI, for instance, is enabling great strides in medicine at the same time that it is facilitating surveillance and exacerbating the climate crisis. All three books under consideration suffer from some selection bias, having a tendency to focus on cases that emphasize the negatives while neglecting the positives. In doing so, the conclusions leave mostly unanswered the question of what, if any, positive impacts data and technology have had on or for humanitarian response and those whom it is intended to help.
Relatedly, as a scholar who has spent chunks of my career working in the policy and operational spaces of humanitarianism, I have frequently found myself in policy conversations in which scholarly work was deemed mostly irrelevant (literally described as “too academic”) or in settings in which academics offer “policy-relevant findings” without detail, recommendations, or clear relevance, or critique policymakers and frontline humanitarians without acknowledging the pressures and realities of their work. Because of my work on both sides of the divide, I find myself wishing for further reflection about the implications of the authors’ analyses, precisely because of the encompassing nature of their critiques. Moreover, the current context of the seismic shifts in the humanitarian sector following the 2025 defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its subsequent closure, as well as other global donor funding cuts, underscores a need for pragmatic options, particularly since USAID funding supported much of the data and digital infrastructure crucial for humanitarian response.Footnote 3 In a context of vastly decreased resources, both human and financial, it is unclear who will provide funding to sustain humanitarian data collection and digitally enabled programs. Likewise, it is not yet apparent how efforts to protect the humanitarian “digital subject” or to use data effectively and responsibly will fare as organizations decide whose jobs and which initiatives to prioritize. Throwing out digital technology, in the sense of the proverbial baby with the bathwater, seems impossible given how digital technologies permeate our lives, whether we are involved in humanitarianism or not. Yet the alternative is more problematic, even dystopian: a future world in which the digital humanitarian subject has fewer protections than currently exist. While, in fairness, all three books were published or finished well before January 2025, the ramifications of the current context are especially pertinent for data and digital technologies, making the lacunae all the more obvious and pressing.
Below I summarize the arguments and threads uniting the three books and offer some initial thoughts about the implications for a humanitarianism of the future.
Analyzing and Critiquing the Digitalization of Humanitarianism
All three books offer cogent and complex interdisciplinary analyses of the ways in which the digitalization and datafication of humanitarian action at worst (unintentionally) undermine its moral claims and at a minimum contribute to new modes of governance whose outcomes are not yet clear. First, in #Help, Fleur Johns delves into the digital transformation of humanitarianism, and asks, “How are possibilities for politico-legal life on the global plane reconfigured by the influx of digital technology into humanitarian practice and what intimations does this offer of global ordering to come?” (p. 21). To answer, Johns adopts the capacious notion of “interfaces” as an analytical tool. Interfaces and their “effects and preconditions” (p. 9), she explains, are means that enable standardized communication between and among people and digital technologies, including technology’s underlying hardware and software. This lens allows her to reveal the complex logics and relationships at play, and to uncover the duality of the digital transformation, in terms of both what it enables and what it closes down in the political and legal spheres. She acknowledges the unusualness of her approach, arguing that uncovering these relationships is not possible using the more traditional tools of the legal scholar. Thus, alternative analytical tools of doctrines, institutions, platforms, algorithms, and ideas are rendered less useful in understanding “how legal possibilities get shut down or opened up and how power accrues in and around these techniques along the way” (p. 24).
In the chapters that follow, Johns traces interfaces related to maps (the Missing Maps Project in chapter 2); populations (the Managing Information in Natural Disaster [MIND] interface in chapter 3); and emergencies (the UN World Food Programme [WFP] HungerMap Live, chapter 4), with particular attention to the tensions that arise in their use. The MIND interface, for instance, aggregates vast data from multiple sources (satellite imagery, X (formerly Twitter), news feeds, Google Maps, and Wikipedia) to create layers of visualized information designed to convey urgency. Each layer presents a different vision and scale of the disaster, created and curated by myriad, often unknown individuals and entities; the layer of social media privileges the individual story, whereas the geospatial layer provides a bird’s-eye overview. This merging of various data sources for population-level statistical analysis tends to obscure the people actually affected and their needs. As she writes, “Through these different iterations [layers] of the interface, the problem on which the MIND interface invites users to dwell is constantly shifting . . . . [T]he world of MIND is a world parsed according to the passing interests of the time-poor and the information-overloaded” (pp. 87–88). Adopting the terminology of “emergency” to describe a digital space necessitates continued alertness and attention, in which the availability of data about emergencies effectively makes all—and none—responsible. Johns turns to interfaces related to states, law, and policy before concluding with a chapter exploring the uses of digital interfaces, together with the ways they fall into disuse or are appropriated (misused) for other purposes. Together, these myriad uses offer multiple avenues for changing and reorganizing global governance.
While Johns aims to illuminate the “remaking of the international order” through the digitalization of humanitarianism, both Madianou and Sandvik are more explicit in their critiques. In her book Technocolonialism, Mirca Madianou analyzes the ways that digital technology, data, AI, and their associated practices reinforce and magnify historically mediated, colonial power imbalances between the Global North and the Global South, especially those related to race and gender. To illuminate these imbalances, Madianou examines the underlying and largely invisible digital infrastructures that support humanitarian response—biometric systems, social media, and chatbots, as well as blockchain, satellite imagery, and the Internet more generally. Because the ways that people experience these infrastructures is conditioned by current and historical power dynamics, especially in a humanitarian response, Madianou adopts the lens of “infrastructuring” to capture the underlying relational dynamics and contestations (pp. 13–14). The inequalities that result from the use of digital infrastructures, in turn, create new forms of structural violence that are physical, symbolic, and epistemic. She writes, “Technocolonialism illuminates the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces and the extent to which they reinvigorate and rework colonial relationships” (p. 5).
By way of illustration, Madianou opens her book with the well-known 2017 example of the Rohingya Muslim refugees who fled the persecution happening in Myanmar. Upon arrival in neighboring Bangladesh, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) biometrically registered and classified the Rohingya as “Myanmar nationals.” The initial registration resulted in a series of protests, ultimately turning violent, against the “symbolic erasure” of the Rohingya people and a fear that their data would be shared with the perpetrators of harm (the Myanmar government). This fear was ultimately realized when, several years later, UNHCR shared the refugees’ biometric data with Myanmar authorities (p. 1).Footnote 4
Technocolonialism functions by way of six logics—accountability, audit, capitalism, “technological solutionism,” securitization, and resistance—each of which become animating analytical tools in the chapters that follow. In chapter 2, Madianou discusses the limitations of biometrics, including the involvement of the private sector (the “logic of capitalism”) and its goal of surveillance (the “logic of securitization”), and traces their use back to their colonial foundations in fingerprinting. Both are rooted in suspicion: “Just as the colonial authorities introduced fingerprinting because they suspected local people of claiming pensions twice, UNHCR introduced iris scans in order to tackle ‘two-timers’” (p. 64). In chapter 3, Madianou examines the logics of accountability and audit through the digital collection of program feedback, arguing that, as currently configured, digital feedback is a false and extractive accountability that serves to satisfy donor requirements (the “logic of audit”) over gathering and eventually responding to the perspectives and needs of those receiving aid. She writes, “Rather than helping people to hold humanitarian agencies to account, feedback channels silence those who have grievances because they are left out [of the distribution process]. In so doing, feedback channels play an active role in the process of exclusion and marginalization” (p. 88).
AI-facilitated chatbots have been launched to facilitate and automate the sharing of information in humanitarian response efforts, or to pilot specific services, such as an automated psychotherapy chatbot launched in support of Syrian refugees in Lebanon (p. 102). As examples of digital infrastructures in humanitarian response, chatbots embody the logics of “technosolutionalism” (a solution in search of a problem) and capitalism, and serve to enable further “surreptitious experimentation.” Surreptitious experimentation is permitted by infrastructures that operate continuously and invisibly in the background of humanitarian response. These infrastructures do not seek or require consent, even as they facilitate an as-yet-undefined new possibility of further experimentation. Instead, they “[remain] hidden—yet in plain sight” (p. 128) and further entrench marginalization and power asymmetries.
These chapters culminate in a discussion of the “humanitarian machine” that “automates harm” (p. 129). Digital infrastructures require standardized data to support “interoperability,” essentially the ability to automatically process, use, and share forms of data. Standardization and automation are appealing precisely because numbers and technology carry authority, particularly with donors. They enable “making decisions without appearing to make decisions,” supporting the humanitarian “claim to be apolitical” (p. 129) that is a central tenet of the humanitarian principle of neutrality. Madianou’s discussions of surreptitious experimentation and the machine are especially captivating, where the machine makes possible a fundamental paradox “between care and indifference, and care and surveillance” (p. 131). Through unpacking these logics and how they are enmeshed with colonial classifications of race and gender, Madianou illustrates how technocolonialism both transforms humanitarianism and contributes to new forms of structural violence that serve to harm instead of help.
Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, in Humanitarian Extractivism, adopts “extractivism” as her analytical tool, referring to how humanitarians use data and surveil the populations under their care, including how these processes of surveillance and experimentation in humanitarian action are reconfiguring the sector. She argues that the “practices of extraction—and their consequences—need to be better understood and recognized as a central aspect of the digital transformation” (p. 4). Each chapter in the book highlights these practices in their various guises, pointing to a suite of technologies and processes to illustrate how they reorder humanitarian work, space, and relationships. Sandvik begins by discussing the digital body, comprised of its legal, legible, relational, and vulnerable elements. As she writes, “Making crisis-affected people legible as humanitarian subjects—knowing whether they are non-citizens, unrecognized citizens, or documented citizens (displaced persons)—is of crucial importance” (p. 27). Legibility is important because digital identity can encompass legal status (such as being registered or a refugee or an asylum seeker) and relational elements (such as through DNA and other data that establish biological relationships between individuals), as well as being a member of a group categorized as vulnerable (such as children or refugees). She uses the “digital body” as a foundation for the entire monograph and explains how it functions as a precondition for receiving humanitarian assistance and protection. In short, the digital body—inscribed and encapsulated in biometrics; wearables (such as the Khushi Baby infant necklace with an embedded digital chip that was later used as a biometric surveillance platform); and data superplatforms (such as UNHCR’s PRIMES data-sharing platform) concerning recipients of aid—functions as a “body double” for the physical person and makes possible the extraction of data and what she terms the “centralisation of vulnerability.”
PRIMES, for instance, stores biometric data about refugees, functioning as a digital identity system that is interoperable with other data registries maintained by states; UN agencies (for example, the WFP’s SCOPE digital platform); and the private sector. According to UNHCR, “Registration and identification of refugees is key for the people concerned, as well as for States to know who has arrived, and facilitates access to basic assistance and protection. . . . At the center of UNHCR’s work with registration and identity management, lies PRIMES, UNHCR’s digital Population Registration and Identity Management Ecosystem. PRIMES brings together all of UNHCR’s digital registration, identity management and case management tools into one internally connected and interoperable ecosystem.”Footnote 5 Centralizing and storing these datasets via interoperable, mostly UN-sponsored “superplatforms containing multiple databases and digital services” (p. 16) makes exploiting these data all the more possible and potentially harmful, with multiple entry points to the personal data of already-vulnerable populations. Further, since data can remain on these platforms indefinitely, the vulnerability of these individuals is no longer time bound and can extend well into the future, as the example of the Rohingya data above illustrates (p. 25). In collecting troves of data, humanitarian datasets become tempting targets, as evidenced by the hack of the ICRC’s Restoring Family Links platform, and humanitarians themselves unintentionally become potential threats to the protection of those they aim to assist and safeguard.
In chapter 3, Sandvik examines how the digital transformation has allowed for the accumulation of power and redefined risk and expertise, particularly through the use of digital tools to remotely manage humanitarian programs and the risk inherent in working in violent or insecure environments. Moreover, this transformation has embedded private-sector interests through public-private partnerships to promote innovation, such as UNICEF’s Wearables for Good design challenge, examined in chapter 4, and the piloting of drones, analyzed in chapter 5. For instance, the Wearables for Good challenge resulted in the “innovative” Khushi Baby infant necklace, initially emerging out of a course on appropriate technology for global issues. It soon “developed into a sophisticated biometric surveillance platform capturing data from babies, mothers, families and health workers” (p. 64). As a humanitarian wearable, however, Sandvik argues that it illustrates the “dematerialization of aid” by shifting the aim from providing services to babies and mothers to harvesting—extracting—their data. Thus, these various forms of extraction encompass not only data but also the ways humanitarians work, making way for new spaces and forms of partnerships that redefine governance and the humanitarian project.
Despite their differences, the three books dovetail neatly, with various threads connecting their analyses and evidence. All three authors write about power and governance from interdisciplinary perspectives yet differ in the audiences they aim to address. Whereas Johns situates her work in international law and politics, Madianou foregrounds her argument in decolonial and postcolonial critical theory, as well as the Black radical tradition, anthropology, and critical race and border studies. Sandvik, who like Johns studied law, anchors her analysis in the humanitarian studies literature, particularly around governance. Although the authors’ goal in Technocolonialism and Humanitarian Extractivism is to critique, in #Help the author is explicit about not offering normative evaluations of the digital interfaces she analyzes. Instead, she uses them to illuminate “what and who humanitarian digital interfaces are for, and what kinds of times, spaces, and relations they make and unmake” (p. 224). Both Johns and Madianou employ the notion of “infrastructures” and “infrastructuring” as analytical tools to uncover the effects of digitalization on humanitarian response, reflecting on both the visible and invisible processes and structures underlying digital transformation. Madianou and Sandvik highlight the links between these infrastructures and how they enable extraction and undermine accountability—Madianou through a discussion on feedback mechanisms that function more to serve donor audits than to improve programs, and Sandvik through a discussion on wearables that extract data and help to centralize vulnerability.
Positive Impacts?
With the potent critiques summarized above, it is tempting to conclude that all is lost in the digital humanitarian space: that technology has so fundamentally transformed the actors and purpose of action that it is no longer recognizable as a human-to-human response to suffering aimed at protecting and saving lives. Yet there are spaces of exception, which the selection of examples implicitly highlights, and appropriation, where technologies are usurped for uses other than those originally intended. It is perhaps telling that the most egregious “use cases” of technology appear in two or sometimes all three of the books. For instance, the World Food Program’s (WFP) HungerMap LIVE features in #Help, with Johns highlighting how the dashboard belies the messiness of the data and the resource allocations it aims to enact (p. 127), and Madianou underscoring its ability to “enchant” its viewers and portray hunger as measurable and containable (pp. 138–39). The WFP’s SCOPE platform and its link to UNHCR’s biometric data via PRIMES are discussed in the three books as “superplatforms” or interfaces that expose humanitarian subjects to risk. The IrisGuard biometric program and the WFP partnership with PalantirFootnote 6 likewise feature in all three books as illustrative of the potentially problematic nature of private-sector partnerships that result from this digital transformation.
These examples of the very real downsides of technology represent meaningful chunks of the data collected in the humanitarian sector, and by design and necessity involve significant partnerships with the private sector. They are also infrastructures to which only some—notably the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful—have access, raising questions about the examples of digital transformation that are not included. What about instances where feedback loops have helped to improve response, or where digital infrastructures have facilitated communication central to a timely or effective response? In the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola crisis, the lack of digital connectivity—with many frontline health workers lacking either mobile phone credit or stable Internet connectivity—led to reports of “no cases” of Ebola, because the missing data were interpreted to mean an absence of the virus, thereby slowing efforts to contain the spread of the disease. Similarly, sharing information about the spread of rumors and misinformation about Ebola and Ebola-related health programming via a mobile phone texting platform allowed organizations to quickly counteract their spread via text message and community radio and to modify the ways they responded.Footnote 7 Even acknowledging the potentially problematic partnerships or digital programming that occurred, or the interoperabilities and lack of data protection that incurred significant risk for patients and their families,Footnote 8 these are examples of the mostly positive impacts of technology that fall outside of the examples analyzed in the monographs under consideration.
Additionally, and crucially, much (though not all) of the data to which all three books refer are “big data,” or vast troves of data collected not to directly facilitate humanitarian response but to be used in conjunction with or in support of it. Many of the use cases discussed in #Help, for instance, refer to large-scale, aggregable data. They are therefore primarily quantitative, numeric (or at least converted to numbers to facilitate analysis), or visual (such as satellite imagery), and often collected for other purposes. Yet much humanitarian data can and should be understood as qualitative as well, in the form of stories and written or oral feedback about the needs and conditions of those affected. These data are smaller in scale and use, and not so easily aggregated, notwithstanding the use of advances in AI that make it possible to do so.
The potential contributions of even the most personal and sensitive data may become apparent only in historical perspective. For instance, biometric data are individualized and mostly immutable, with very real digital and physical dangers related to their use in humanitarian response. Yet, there are other possible considerations related to these digital bodies. The archives of the ICRC, UNHCR, and others have been central for historical analysis and the understanding of humanitarian response, including through the use of individual refugee records. It is possible to imagine a situation where refugee biometric data are deleted but an associated archival record of digital personal information is retained, allowing for descendants of refugees to research the movement of their ancestors or for future historians to analyze the actions of UNHCR or other humanitarian actors in years to come, including how they used technology. Similarly, digitized archival records of individual deaths allow for the documentation of human rights harms as part of legal prosecution and accountability efforts. These examples arguably illustrate nonhumanitarian use cases for these data, yet they also offer potential avenues to strengthen principles of justice, humanity, and dignity through the use of digital technologies in a humanitarian response.
Each of the books nods to the idea of the duality of technology, whether referring to the use or appropriation of technology by humanitarian subjects for self-defined purposes other than those originally intended. Madianou devotes an entire chapter to the “logic of resistance,” citing mundane forms of technological resistance. She includes the example of individuals using mobile phones in posthurricane Haiyan in the Philippines to barrage community leaders with SMS text messages in order to highlight and protest their exclusion from aid distribution lists. As Madianou summarizes the situation, “Dina and Carol [two of her interlocutors] were able to use the infrastructures and affordances of mobile phones to amplify their voice and challenge their marginalization” (p. 162).
In another example of appropriation, Johns describes the mis- and disuses of technology by local fishermen and vandals who repurposed tsunami monitoring equipment. By tying their boats to the remote sensors, in essence using them as mooring buoys, the fishermen damaged the sensors and thereby rendered them useless in detecting tidal waves. The “vandals” (so designated in the media) then stole and sold the equipment as scrap metal. Both groups used the equipment to directly or indirectly feed their families, rather than for its original, intended purpose. In short, they appropriated the technology for their immediate use, instead of a future-focused potential use (pp. 213–15). Johns uses this example in support of her conclusion that a “wider range of persons and activities than typically attract notice are active in shaping international order through digital media—and that digital humanitarianism may be a setting for communities to enter into contention over the parameters and priorities of international legal and political order” (p. 27). Though these examples of appropriation showcase elements of the dual-use nature of technology, they still do not focus on the ways that technology has positively impacted a humanitarian response (especially since the fishermen example resulted in the inability of the sensors to provide crucial warnings of a tsunami). They could be construed, however, as examples of technology users asserting their own humanity and demanding respect.
Unfinished Critique
Vast changes resulting from the U.S. funding cuts to foreign aid in 2025 are already affecting and will continue to affect the humanitarian sector, all of which are likely to exacerbate the daunting challenges outlined in each book and considered in this essay. This leaves us with the question of what now? Complete disengagement from the use of digital infrastructures is impractical, and arguably unhelpful, but what other concrete options exist? It is precisely this question that undergirds a lingering sense that each book is an unfinished critique. Curiously, only Madianou’s Technocolonialism engages this question directly. Johns contends that the structuralist and poststructuralist approach she adopts to analyze the interfaces of law and policy do not offer “arguments for reform” (p. 173), thereby tacitly offering an explanation for the lacunae of pragmatic approaches in her monograph. Sandvik references her longstanding scholar-practitioner activism and her role as insider and critical friend (p. 4), implicitly suggesting that continued engagement addresses this gap.
Madianou, by contrast, specifically addresses the pragmatic implications in her final chapter. As she acknowledges, aid agencies do save lives and provide care, and humanitarians clearly hunger for change, with some inviting her to events to help them figure out how to “do better” in the future (p. 148). She explains the persistence of harm despite the “reflexivity and self-criticism” that exists among humanitarians with reference to the “humanitarian machine” that allows and even invites critique and some measure of reform, yet emerges fundamentally unchanged. As she writes, “Operating as a machine allows for the absorption of criticism without fundamental change” (p. 131). Her calls for the reimagining of humanitarianism, infrastructure, and solidarity (pp. 192–98) emphasize a social justice approach to humanitarianism, collaboration and “bottom-up” design of tech infrastructure, and organizing in favor of solidarity. In the latter, she cites the refusal of civil society groups and the government to allow biometric registration in the Ukraine war as an example of those on the receiving end of assistance asserting their rights, and as an important counterpoint to the endurance and strength of technocolonialism.
While helpful and hopeful, this reimagining is so vast as to remain somewhat obscure and amorphous. The practitioner side of me yearns for an approach similar to that of Mareike Schomerus’s Lives amid Violence,Footnote 9 which tackles the conundrum of the persistence of conflict and violence despite years of postwar development assistance. Schomerus transparently wrestles with the big dilemmas of implementing her analysis in a “postscript.” In these pages, she aims to shift practice away from linear modes of thinking and toward new modes that require both inner work and system change, and offers a series of concrete suggestions for development practitioners to shift their practice accordingly. Even so, she acknowledges that practitioners sometimes face impossible choices. These choices are very real. While I acknowledge that the example of classifying and sharing Rohingya biometric data is an egregious example of technocolonialism, it is also possible to understand (yet not excuse) how it happened, since legally operating in a country requires government permission. This often comes with conditions, such as sharing data, that may eventually prove problematic with regard to protecting those registered in the system. One concrete solution to this rests with those being registered. In Ukraine, recipients of assistance have demanded what is known as the “right to be forgotten,” asking to have their data deleted.Footnote 10 The options for those operating the vast infrastructures of humanitarian response, however, are less clear.
Perhaps the problem with wanting more pragmatic and concrete solutions is that many of them only scratch at the surface of harm and offer incremental change. They cannot in and of themselves reconfigure or transform practices and associated infrastructures that are deeply colonial or extractive. The assumptions embedded into the interfaces of MIND or HungerMap LIVE imply that providing or visualizing data about an actual or pending crisis will elicit action. Reality tells us otherwise. True change requires sweeping (sometimes amorphous, at the outset) calls for a systemic overhaul. The current crisis in the humanitarian sector offers a potential moment of opportunity, given calls for a “humanitarian reset” and the eightieth anniversary of the United Nations.Footnote 11 Data may be key to processes of change but must function in conjunction with political action and broad-based coalitions.Footnote 12 Documenting positive uses of data and digital interfaces, as well as acts of appropriation, resistance, and new, initially unintended uses of these infrastructures, could point to a whole new set of concrete alternatives. Change requires new modes of social and political organizing and response, some of which start small and all of which require recognition—not abstraction—of the individual humanity of those affected by violence and disaster.
The answers and alternatives to the dilemmas posed in these books are not self-evident. But the dilemmas certainly highlight the need for a creative reimagining of the digital infrastructures that underpin humanitarian response.
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