“Let the Private Sector Take Care of This”: The Philanthro-Capitalism of Digital Humanitarianism

Abstract

In this chapter, I illuminate new political economies of humanitarian technologies. Crowdsourcing, social media, and mass collaboration—collectively termed digital humanitarianism—are increasingly impacting humanitarian work. At the same time, for-profit businesses are becoming more involved in humanitarianism in the phenomenon called “philanthro-capitalism.” In fact, for-profit businesses are now partnering with digital humanitarians and developing technologies for their use. I argue that these phenomena signal broader shifting relationships between the state and the private sector, enabled through digital humanitarian technologies. Digital humanitarianism and philanthro-capitalism should be understood in the context of a greater climate of austerity and neoliberal political-economic reforms in humanitarianism. In this climate, humanitarian agencies see digital humanitarianism as an innovation that enables their continued operation. These shifts increasingly inculcate private, for-profit logics, rationalities, and imperatives into humanitarianism, aid relief, and most broadly the public sector. These processes take the specific form of philanthro-capitalism, as forprofit businesses such as Esri, Google, and others develop the tools and languages for digital humanitarianism. It is through these shifts that humanitarianism is becoming a new site for capital accumulation; the process by which crisis-related knowledges and needs are being turned into profit. It raises important questions about the relationship between crisis and capital accumulation, and how the profit imperative frames the types of needs and crises receiving attention. This represents a new struggle around how knowledge, needs, and people are encoded as data and the types of assistance that are deemed appropriate based on those representations.