Description
This article traces the recent strategic partnership of the World Food Programme with the US-backed tech monolith, Palantir Technologies, to address structural transformations taking place in humanitarianism, with particular attention to food assistance. Many, including academics and advocates for responsible data, showed little to no trust in the partnership due to ethical gray zones, which are not limited to but include the lack of transparency and accountability concerning the ways that Palantir can use the personal data of aid recipients. However vital these ethical concerns and questions are, narrowing the analysis to what is ethical or not through the lens of social policy and technocratic approach is not only reductionist but also overlooks colonial rationality inherent in the notion of ethics as it takes its origins in moral philosophy. Putting the ethics question into the context of current tech-determinist humanitarian governance, this article first contends that data extracted from digitized, hungry, and territorialized bodies might be politically used in ways that render these subjects insecure, with socio-political implications reaching far beyond the bounds of ethical framework. Second, this tech-determinist humanitarian industry creates a battle of imagination when they speak on behalf of communities in need in terms of preferable, possible, and efficient choices available to alleviate hunger while foreclosing the possibilities to imagine a more just, equitable, and worthy future.
