Amir H. Payberah - 2025-06-23

While we are witnessing Israel's attacks on Iran and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we are going to discuss Technocolonialism by Mirca Madianou in our next book club, a powerful reminder that colonial violence is not just a metaphor from the past; it is present, brutal, and ongoing. What we are witnessing today is stark evidence of that reality.

The book reveals how tech and AI tools used in humanitarian aid are far from neutral. Rather than serving simply as instruments of help, these technologies often extend and entrench long-standing colonial power structures. The term technocolonialism describes how these tools, largely built and governed in the Global North, are deployed in the Global South under the banner of innovation, efficiency, and accountability. However, instead of empowering those in crisis, these systems frequently extract personal data, impose rigid classifications, and further marginalize those already pushed to the edges.

At the heart of this analysis is the idea of the "humanitarian machine", a complex network of NGOs, governments, and private companies whose digital infrastructures increasingly determine how aid is delivered. These systems operate on the logic of suspicion and control, reducing people to data points and sidelining the role of local communities and knowledge. What emerges is a form of "infrastructural violence": slow, systemic harm embedded in the everyday operation of technical systems that reproduce racial, gendered, and class-based inequalities. And because these systems carry the appearance of objectivity, their failures are often overlooked, misinterpreted, or dismissed as individual misfortune.

Still, the book refuses to portray those affected by these systems as merely passive. Through "mundane resistance", communities engage in subtle acts of refusal, repurposing, and adaptation, reshaping the use of these tools in ways that challenge their intended control. These everyday acts resonate with Asef Bayat's concept of "non-movements", as seen in the lives of the urban poor in Iran or youth during the Arab Spring, where social change arises not through formal protest but through the cumulative force of dispersed ordinary acts. Both frameworks challenge the idea that resistance must be loud, visible, or organized. Instead, they highlight the political agency embedded in daily life: quiet, creative, and often invisible gestures that unsettle dominant systems. In bringing these acts to light, Technocolonialism offers not only a critique of digital humanitarianism but also a call to rethink aid, technology, and justice from the ground up, centering the perspectives and experiences of those most affected.