Commodifying Compassion in the Digital Age: The Promise and Perils of Tech for Good

Digital and data-driven technologies are transforming the humanitarian and development sectors. With the promise of faster, more efficient and accurate aid delivery, these technologies are often designed and implemented in partnerships between aid organizations and private technology firms. Consequently, "Tech for Good" has emerged as a significant humanitarian domain, where Big Tech companies aspire to create innovative technological solutions to humanitarian problems and link their business interests and strategies to humanitarian causes. However, despite the optimism surrounding business- and data-driven aid solutions, their actual effectiveness and value remains questionable, particularly for the people who are supposed to benefit from them. At the same time, the growth of “Tech for Good” and increasing links between the humanitarian and private sectors raise important concerns about the ethical implications of privatizing humanitarian efforts, the sustainability of technology-centric models of aid, and the potential for commercial interests to overshadow the needs of recipients. This special theme at Big Data & Society engages critically with these debates and developments by analyzing the discursive and material ways in which digital technologies and private tech firms impact humanitarian helping today. From a range of disciplines, including political economy, anthropology and communication studies, the articles and commentaries in this special theme advance scholarship on the commodification of compassion to understand how this commodification is intensified by big data and “Tech for Good”.