Reviewing Mirca Madianou’s new book, “Technocolonialism: When Tech for Good is Harmful”

In 2013, Typhoon Haiyan swept the Philippines. An exceptionally powerful cyclone, it uprooted livelihoods, homes and communities. Mirca Madianou watched as humanitarians rushed into the Philippines and rolled out an extensive network of digitally mediated humanitarian engagement efforts. This propensity to implement digital humanitarian efforts alongside aid and assistance has only grown since then: Madinou describes refugee registration via Skype in Greece, humanitarian dashboards at WFP, biometric registration of Rohingya refugees, and hackathons aplenty in the global north. These digital programs offer a snapshot of a particular moment in time – limited as they are to a particular crisis, and often to a particular program or intervention.

With her new book ‘Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful’, Madianou expands the humanitarian viewpoint beyond the moment of humanitarian intervention to consider technological uptake across space and time. This move allows Madianou to bring others into the orbit of humanitarian discussion; those who are affected by crisis but not included in humanitarian assistance, those whose feedback goes unresponded to, and ultimately those who resist and remake humanitarian tech tools.

“Although digital technologies are championed as a means of empowerment, they are ultimately vessels of containment and instruments of control.”

Unravelling the web of technology, colonialism, and humanitarian work is a tall order, one that Madianou rises to with vigour. For those who have already been working to understand the intricacies of how technology is deployed within humanitarian contexts, Madianou is likely a familiar figure: her work on innovation, experimentation and profitisation of technology use in the humanitarian sector has made her a key thinker in this space.

For those newer to Madianou’s work, this book is a comprehensive introduction to her oeuvre, providing a synthesis of her thinking and work over the last 10 years. Madianou offers technocolonialism as a term that captures both the current moment of tech use in the humanitarian sector and its long historical tail. As the central premise, the concept of technocolonialism provides cohesion to the book while giving her range to explore the organising structures produced by technocolonialism.

Madianou’s book is an impressive feat, capturing the ever-evolving face of technology in the sector, while identifying the core evergreen undercurrents that push it forward. Madianou posits 6 key logics of technocolonialism: ‘humanitarian accountability, the logic of audit, the logic of capitalism, the logic of solutionism, the logic of securitisation, and the logic of resistance.’ These 6 logics ‘intersect and produce the phenomenon of technocolonialism.’ Through these logics Madianou successfully traces technocolonialism across the myriad of technological waves that have swept the sector. From biometrics, to chatbots, blockchain and AI, Madianou demonstrates the analytical relevance of technocolonialism noting how the first five logics especially give rise to each crest of innovation. 

Especially important is the way she centres colonialism within this discussion – not as metaphor, or a facet of neo or post-colonialism, but instead a clear continuation of colonialism. Madianou argues that colonialism is a ‘a tenacious structure’ that persists through the colonial genealogies of both humanitarianism and technology, and whose presence is reanimated in the use of technology to control, surveil and impart epistemological force on refugees, individuals on the move and those whose lives are upended by crisis and conflict. To advance this lens Madianou proffers infrastructures and infrastructuring as a way to map, ‘the power relations between the various actors [governments, tech providers, humanitarian orgs, and beneficiaries] and the constituent elements of the system [data flows, platforms, technologies e.g biometrics, blockchain] and enable us to map the driving logics of the humanitarian system onto the vast appendages of ‘humanitarian workers, host governments, donors private companies, volunteers, digital developers, [and] crisis-affected communities.’

This choice contributes to reinvigorating the conversation around colonialism in the sector. Within the introduction, Madianou delivers a pacy recap of post-colonial theory that avoids the density that often besets post-colonial analysis. Her prose makes clear why humanitarians must pay attention to the colonialism that still lurks in the supposedly post-colonial, and the way in which the colonial roots and entanglements of humanitarianism, and technology development continue to endure and take on new guises.

She reminds us too of the liberal agenda that though perhaps weakened, has not entirely subsided, and continues to have an explanatory power for current modes of innovation and experimentation within the sector. For those newer to post-colonial theory, I recommend returning to this phenomenal introduction to help orient and guide future reading. Especially notable is the way Madianou’s writing feels as though it goes beyond referencing, and instead pays homage — through the vivid picture she paints — of how these thinkers give rise to ‘productive overlaps and convergence.’ This is a blistering pace she delivers impeccably and manages largely to keep up. It would have been really powerful for this to permeate the last few chapters where the book’s analytical velocity slows down somewhat. Nonetheless Madianou offers an exceptionally lucid introduction and initial chapters that expertly excavate the building blocks of her thinking. 

Accounting for digital humanitarianism

As the book unfolds, Madianou’s reflections on accountability in the sector are among some of the book’s key contributions to both the literature and humanitarian practitioners making decisions on tech tools. In the third chapter she gives an intimate depiction of how accountability efforts are experienced, and what the other side of supposedly straightforward, tech-facilitated accountability efforts look like. This works to further Madianou’s infrastructuring approach – the limitations of feedback as conveyed through ethnographic data make visible the sleight of hand wherein feedback becomes synonymous with accountability. The skilled use of ethnography is particularly alive in this chapter, where Madianou’s interlocutors are not mere data points but rather critical contributors who help advance her own understanding and add vital analysis on their own terms.

The experiences of those who are invisible to accountability mechanisms, whose feedback is  – unbeknownst to them – often not considered or included as it falls outside of the narrow remit of relevancy for humanitarian organisations, demonstrate the way technological tools filter humanitarian action. Trust in the infallibility of the machine is not necessarily new, but the cover it gives to humanitarians to provide a veneer of coherence helps explain why technological tools are especially alluring in such a complicated operational space. What’s more, the vast infrastructures enabled by humanitarian tech cloaks the harm such systems produce — by filtering out feedback that is not from aid recipients or focused on the specific intervention, humanitarians miss key insights and reflections. 

In this conversation, the logics of technocolonialism outlined in the introduction come into their own, with Madianou demonstrating how different logics — in this case the logic of accountability and the logic of audit — clash with one another and explains why good intentions are not always enough to ensure good outcomes or thoughtful tech deployment. ‘Technocolonialism’ is clear-eyed about the shifting nature of infrastructures and especially the differences in how they are perceived and experienced. The fourth and fifth chapters expose the significance of how the humanitarian sector is layering tools and technologies and the manner in which this can make mistakes permanent and render humanitarians unable to explain how or why certain decisions are made. Simultaneously, it also demonstrates the efforts to make technology appear seamless and inevitable – a form of ‘technological enchantment that hides the work of mediation’ and other similarly ‘messy process[es]’ and occludes the harm they may produce. 

Technocolonialism: a critical eye for critical times

‘Technocolonialism’ walks a difficult path between its academic origins and the intense applied relevance of its subject matter. When combined with the framework of logics through different technologies it results in instances of overlapping arguments that can mean less in-depth exposition. Chief among these is Madianou’s analysis of what tech companies stand to gain or why they are so interested in humanitarian spaces which would be fascinating to see further excavated. Here the strong and well built arguments about how technocolonialism is not a symbolic link to colonialism but rather a grounded critique and analytical framework, would serve as an interesting way for both reader and author to identify further lines of academic inquiry and to furnish humanitarian decision makers or those based more in practice, to strengthen their line of reasoning, and better reflect on the proliferation of public private partnership – a key aspect of the humanitarian infrastructure and importation of technocolonial related harms. Equally, a sense of how Madianou thinks humanitarians should respond to technocolonialism and work to undo it would be a fascinating bridge between Madianou’s academic perspective and her astuteness regarding humanitarian practice.

These are nice to haves however and not must-haves. Besides, Madianou finishes on the twin peaks of the last chapter on mundane resistance, and the conclusion which introduces infrastructural violence (an idea that could have warranted its own chapter) embodies the potency of technocolonialism. The concept’s explanatory power makes it an accessible point to more critical thinking — without sacrificing theoretical substance — allowing the reader to hold many disparate threads at once while establishing linkages across them.

At this moment when humanitarians are recalibrating, it is clear a more comprehensive tool is needed to guide humanitarian work. Technocolonialism offers a mirror for humanitarian actions of the past, as well as a forward-looking litmus test for a more reflexive humanitarian practice. Though focused on tech in humanitarian spaces, in many ways the specific forces Madianou’s book confronts are the forces most palpable in this time: the gravitational pull of innovation, the flattening of how we capture complex human responses, the regression to technological promises of supposed convenience and the papering over of how tech tools actually work. It is a critical read and a resonant capstone on her pioneering work over the last decade. We would do well to heed her message.