Fleur Johns • FreshEd

Fleur Johns
Digital Humanitarianism

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #336 – Digital Humanitarianism (Fleur Johns)

Overview

Today we look at digital humanitarianism and how digital interfaces are constructing new forms and modes of governance. My guest is Fleur Johns who has recently authored the new book #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order.

Fleur Johns is a professor in the faculty of law and justice at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.

Correction: In the interview, Fleur Johns mentions the 1998 floods in Bangladesh when in fact she meant the 1988 floods.

Citation: Johns, Fleur, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 336, podcast audio, November 13, 2023. https://freshedpodcast.com/johns/

Transcript

Will Brehm 0:00
Fleur Johns, welcome to FreshEd.

Fleur Johns 0:03
Thanks, Will. Thanks for having me.

Will Brehm 0:05
So, let’s start with a kind of a big question that hopefully frames the conversation for the rest of this episode; what is humanitarianism?

Fleur Johns 0:23
A big question indeed. I would say humanitarianism is governance in a mode of assistance. Governance through attention to people’s suffering and misfortune. And when I say governance, I’m thinking of all forms of kind of steerage and provisioning. So, that done by governments but also done by other actors. So, governance has a very expansive significance in that context. There is, of course, a more familiar and narrower idea of humanitarianism, which is associated in particular with the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has this commitment to principles of humanity, neutrality, independence, and impartiality. So, that’s agencies like the Red Cross practice governance in a mode of assistance, of assisting people, of attending to their suffering and this misfortune with a commitment to humanity, assisting all of humanity or as many people as possible without discrimination; neutrality, assisting people without aligning themselves with any particular government or political or ideological program; impartiality, similar kind of commitment, and independence. So, that’s the version that is perhaps most readily at hand, but I think of humanitarianism in a slightly broader sense, not just associated with organizations like the Red Cross,

Will Brehm 2:38
Right. So, you look beyond particular actors. And you look at sort of these processes that happen, the governance, so to speak, among many different actors in many different locations and times. So, just briefly has humanitarianism and the governance, as you were talking about it, has it changed over time? To try and understand today, it might be good to think about how it operated previously.

Fleur Johns 3:03
Yeah. So, one could say a lot about when to start the story of humanitarianism. The Red Cross version typically gets started in the 19th century, and associated with the story of a particular man called Henry Dunant, and his reaction to the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino in 1859, and his then subsequent establishment of the International Committee for the Red Cross in 1863. So, that’s associated with the version that I just described. But many scholars and historians have pointed out that sort of principles of humanitarianism, the idea of governing through assistance, governing through attention to suffering and misfortune can be traced easily to the 18th century, and in some versions to the 17th century, and is associated with principles and preoccupations, characteristic of the enlightenment of humanism, and to some extent of scientism, as well, and developments in scientific thought. So, wherever you start the story, the changes that I’ve been looking at recently, are associated with who does this work. And generally speaking, you’ve seen, I think, an expansion of the range of institutions and organizations that are committed to this kind of work at the national level, the regional level, and internationally. And you’ve seen a kind of institutionalization of it. In particular, since the late 19th century, you saw a lot of and again, another phase in the mid 20th century, and then later phases as well, you’ve seen the establishment of big organizations, regionally and internationally dedicated to ameliorating suffering. And with that we’ve seen also the growing professionalization of humanitarianism. So, whereas it used to be associated very much with a practice of volunteerism, you’ve seen a lot of this kind of emerging cohort of humanitarian professionals who dedicate their lives and have a sort of skill sets specialized in this area. And you’ve also seen change in the sense that this practice of governing through assistance has become much more central to many states’ foreign policy, and to some extent their military strategy. And you might think of the various ways in which military programs are sometimes justified as humanitarian intervention, or the emphasis placed on compliance with international humanitarian law, which is another register of humanitarianism -a kind of specialized register. If you think about contemporary conflict, and this kind of continual emphasis upon compliance with international humanitarian law, that’s indicative of the way in which humanitarianism has kind of become central to states foreign policy, including their military endeavors. And you’ve seen also expansion in the way that international organizations think about their humanitarian work. The UN, since the late 90s, describing an increasing range of humanitarian crises as threats to the peace. So, whereas we might have thought of the UN as traditionally concerned with states waging war against each other. The UN has increasingly characterized humanitarian crises as threats to international peace and security and with that, has become more involved in a broader range of dilemmas and disasters, including those within particular states. And that’s sort of broadly something that happened since the mid 90s and particularly associated with the Rwanda conflict and things like that. So, I mean, I could go on, but you get the sense of this kind of expanding range of actors, and the spread of humanitarian modes of acting into all sorts of corners of international relations and law and politics.

Will Brehm 6:46
And it also seems like in that case of the UN, it seems like it’s a justification for the expansion of the UN’s role, right? It becomes the reason why certain action takes place. That particular reason might not have existed previously.

Fleur Johns 7:01
Exactly. And that’s suggestive of the way humanitarianism links to power that one mode -and there are a number of ways it does- but one mode is as a mode of justification and legitimation. To say, I have authority to do this, I have a mandate to do this. The UN or a national government, or because I am doing it for humanitarian purpose. And that gives me in some instances, legal right to do things but otherwise also a sort of social license.

Will Brehm 7:29
It’s an interesting insight into power and humanitarianism, because you think about things like who gets to define what disadvantage is that needs humanitarian assistance?

Fleur Johns 7:39
Exactly. And, I mean, that’s why humanitarianism is also a site of intense contestation, because prospective recipients of humanitarian assistance are very attuned to this propensity for humanitarianism to serve the ends of power, and so will sometimes push back and say, well, actually, we don’t need that form of assistance, we need this other form of assistance. So, we want it from this entity, but not an entity. So, it’s obviously not a one-way thing. And this has been going on for a long time. I mean, nations and empires have often turned to a kind of humanitarian register to justify and explain and legitimize their extension of power, as have nongovernmental organizations of many kinds and corporate actors, for that matter, as well. But you’ve also seen, as I said, intended beneficiaries also try and capture something of this power making aspect of humanitarianism and say to push back, for instance, on efforts of dehumanization to say we’re the relevant actors here and we have something to say about this.

Will Brehm 8:44
Yeah. It’s quite fascinating how complex it gets in terms of the power dynamics and who gets to speak and who has the power? Do we have any sense of sort of how big -I don’t know if I should call it a sector- the humanitarian sector is? Is there a way to quantify the size maybe in like $1 term or something like that. How do we know just how large it is?

Fleur Johns 9:05
Well, there are a lot of efforts to quantify. It’s a great question, Will, because this is something that people are working on. But when you look at them, they always strike me as very under inclusive because of the sort of ever spreading nature of the humanitarian register, and its various kind of branches. But there is a publication called The State of the Humanitarian System Report that’s published by a network of nongovernmental organizations and international organizations, and they quantified the international humanitarian assistance, the value of it, at the end of 2021 is 31.3 billion and they noted that it had nearly doubled in a decade. But then you have the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in another report, The Global Humanitarian Overview saying that at the end of 2021, the UN system was assisting 183 million people across 63 countries, and that required $41 billion worth of assistance. And that was only a fraction of the 274 million people that they’ve said at the end of 2021 required assistance. And then in 2023, they’re now saying 368 million people are in need and they’re currently targeting 252 million people and require $57 billion to do that. So, you can get this sense that it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And each of these figures are actually quite under inclusive of corporate activity, not for profit, intra-national humanitarianism, and all kinds of modes that don’t sort of reach the official foreign relations register. So, if you can think of it as a sector, and it’s a little difficult to wrap your arms around it in those terms, but it is ever expanding, and the amounts of money and the kind of level of need is increasing exponentially.

Will Brehm 10:52
It’s like it’s an industry. And I’m very critical and I can think of different scholars that have sort of written about some of it. Before we turn to your focus in this new book of yours, you mentioned in the book in the beginning, you say something about how a lot of what we used to call development and development assistance has now been sort of reframed or reworded into humanitarianism. And so that discursive shift, why is that important, do you think? How do you read that discursive shift?

Fleur Johns 11:21
Yeah. Perhaps the easiest way of giving a sense of it, and what’s at stake in it is to give a specific example. So, one story I tell in the book is of the 1998 Bangladesh, floods. Devastating floods that covered over 70% of the country of Bangladesh, including half of the capital city, Dhaka. And in the wake of those devastating floods, that was one instance where this convergence between what had been thought of as development assistance and development work, and humanitarian relief work, this convergence became really apparent, because the World Bank and a number of governments, in particular the French government, but a number of governments started proposing very far reaching measures that went far beyond the conventional idea of humanitarian assistance, both in terms of scope -temporal, and spatial scope- and the kind of level of investment and transformation that they sought. And they started to argue that in order for Bangladesh to be economically stable, and to achieve economic growth -to be on a development trajectory- they had to build up their disaster preparedness capacity. And they had to be assisted in that. And that required the argument went -although there was lots of debate, and in the end, the World Bank didn’t really get its way- the argument was that that required very expensive infrastructure development. All sorts of levees and dams, and including software development, all sorts of development. So, there was an argument essentially, that the state needed to be transformed in the course of the aftermath of a humanitarian disaster and the costs of building up its preparedness for subsequent one. And it needed to be financed to do that, in order to be sure of being on a development trajectory. So, this is significant, because it’s not a short-term intervention, it’s not a temporary claim to legitimacy. It’s really an argument for the transformation of the state, both physically and organizationally and financially. And so that’s one of the reasons why the convergence is significant. The other reason why it’s significant is because of the way the kind of politics of that convergence cut. And I think it’s easy to say that it cuts in several different ways. But let me give you a couple of examples. One is to say that this convergence between humanitarian assistance, humanitarian relief, and development thinking domesticated the language of development, and particularly kind of tempered or domesticated a discourse of development that was associated with decolonization and former colonized peoples in the 60s and 70s entering the UN system, adopting resolution saying that they had the right as a matter of international law to freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development. So, this was a language of development that was associated with self-determination and countering the force of colonial rule. So, this was one register of the right to development and the language around development. And when you merge that with humanitarianism, humanitarianism to some extent, takes over that and makes the problem seem less about people being self-determining, and more about people being kind of made secure, made safe. So, it becomes more an orientation towards the donor and the donor making certain quote unquote, problematic areas of the world secure and stabilizing them, and less about those peoples exercising the right to self-determination and setting their own path developmental path. But of course, that’s not the only way. Another kind of political implication of this convergence was that it was associated with an idea that was that natural disasters are not and have never been natural that people don’t randomly die in an earthquake or a hurricane. They died in part because of their exposure to the risks of hurricane or an earthquake that is associated with their preexisting social, economic and political conditions. So, people die have varying levels of vulnerability to natural disasters. So, this body of work on this argues. And so therefore, natural disasters are a political formation, a social and economic formation, not just a meteorological one or a climactic one. And so, whereas on one hand, the convergence of humanitarianism and developmental thinking was associated, suggesting earlier with this kind of domestication of an anti-colonial post-colonial decolonizing registered development and a kind of turning that towards the donors, interests and concerns. It was also concerned with this more provocative, you might say, progressive idea about rethinking the way we think about natural disaster and saying this, these are actually intensely political matters, not just things that we need to think of in technical or scientific terms. So, lots of things going on but it is a significant moment. And it’s not a single moment but that convergence of these trajectories did have very significant ramifications.

It’s so fascinating. You can see a lot of those moments in the present. I kept thinking of the climate crisis and the way in which the discourse around climate activism and climate justice is exactly that latter point that you were making, basically, is that there’s nothing natural about why certain people are going to be more affected by climate change than others. But we could probably talk about that all day, but I want to actually now switch and sort of turn to the focus of your book, because it’s basically, given all of that history of humanitarianism, you then open up this door, let’s say, to thinking about what you call digital humanitarianism. So, how does digital humanitarianism fit in to this larger story that you’ve just been telling.

So, this is, in some ways, a continuance of the story, and in some ways a break. There’s aspects of continuity and aspects of discontinuity, but what I argue in the book is that especially in the wake of the turn to measurement and reportable outcomes that is associated with the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals. So, especially in that connection, a growing number of governments, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations, and corporate actors have turned to digital technology as a way of doing humanitarian work or understanding and addressing humanitarian problems. And with that, you’ve seen humanitarian action and humanitarian institutions increasingly working on trying to represent humanitarian conditions and humanitarian problems as computable decision problems. So, problems that are amenable to analysis using computers not exclusively, but with it, through a turn to data science and digital technology in a wide variety of ways. So, using remote sensing, all sorts of things. And with that shift that turn to doing humanitarian work and understanding humanitarian problems with the aid of computation and data science, you see a change in the composition of the humanitarian workforce, if I can say it like that -not that there is a singular workforce, obviously- and the kind of archetypal settings that we associated with humanitarian work. So, of course, humanitarian work is still ongoing by the kinds of humanitarian professionals who’ve been working on this for decades and a long time, and in many of the kind of classical settings, the refugee camp, the classical settings of humanitarian work, but at the same time, you see the incursion into humanitarian work and the adoption of humanitarian language by data scientists and software engineers, and you see many international organizations developing innovation arms that are concerned with exploring and demonstrating the possibilities of using data science and digital technology to do humanitarian work or to pursue humanitarian goals. And with that, a concern with their access to electrical grids and telecommunications, infrastructure and undersea cable networks. And all this infrastructure becomes understood as absolutely critical to humanitarian work as much as access to all the various forms of material that have been historically associated with humanitarian work. And the argument of the book is that this doesn’t just change what people do or who does it or where they do it, but it also changes the forms of knowing that are associated with humanitarian work, and the way that need and the needy, detected, represented, analyzed and addressed and the way that they’re imagined being analyzed and addressed into the future. And that’s not just a wholehearted, wholesale shift. It’s not just we do away with all forms of analog knowledge, and we switch to the digital. It’s a combination of digital and analog that’s always at work. A kind of tangle of the two and yet the argument of the book is that there is with the growing prevalence of the digital or the logic of digital technology and the practice of data science and remote sensing and so forth, and machine learning the various kinds of forms of knowledge making they’re associated with recourse to digital technology, you see a change in the temporality of humanitarian conditions, the time frame in which we try and understand them and seek to address them. And the formatting of humanitarian conditions, if you like the way we depict and represent and share knowledge about them. And the various inputs and outputs that are being utilized for decision making in this context,

Will Brehm 20:33
It’s really quite fascinating. And as you were talking, I kept thinking that Elon Musk is now a humanitarian because of his Starlink, and how essential infrastructure it is to a lot of remote areas that don’t have access to the internet.

Fleur Johns 20:46
Absolutely. And we had -I mean, in the 19th century, there were corporate actors who claim to be humanitarian, as well. And you know, many titans of industry established foundations so it’s not entirely new but the prominence and the deference afforded figures like Elon Musk, but also at many different scales. The kind of deference to this form of access, to certain forms of technology, and also, the deference to certain forms of expertise represents a significant shift, I think. So, yeah, he’s a figure that we can think of as emblematic of this, even though that’s obviously met with a lot of public skepticism and critique. And yet he does provide services in Ukraine, for instance, that are absolutely crucial. And he derives benefit from positioning himself at the heart of that as a humanitarian actor.

Will Brehm 21:35
Right. Going back to that notion of legitimacy, gaining legitimacy and power through positioning yourself as humanitarian. So, maybe to bring some of these more theoretical concepts to life, maybe we could just dig into an example that you’ve written about in a few places. This is in Indonesia, and it’s called the Pulse Lab, Jakarta. And I think you use this as sort of a site to explore the way in which digital humanitarianism sort of is operating and is making those temporal changes, is making those epistemological changes that you were talking about. So, what is Pulse Lab Jakarta, and how does it fit into this bigger notion of digital humanitarianism?

Fleur Johns 22:13
Yeah, Post Lab Jakarta -I was very fortunate to be able to meet and converse over many years with some fantastic interlocutors in this organization. It’s an outfit that is essentially a joint venture between the Indonesian government working through their national development planning agency, Bappenas, and the United Nations, in this instance, represented by the UN Development Programme, and it’s one of a series of labs, as they were known, that was established under the rubric of something called the UN Global Pulse Initiative, which was announced by the UN Secretary General in 2009. And then Pulse Lab Jakarta was one of the labs established and it was established in 2012. And the idea initially -the language of the pulse- was the idea that you could perhaps use technology to try and quote unquote, take the pulse of the world. You could understand in closer to real time that was currently possible where people needed assistance from the UN or from the Indonesian government. And that you might be able to respond to that or understand it in a more timely way, or in a more cost-effective way, or in a more granular way, there are a variety of different claims, if you used alternative data sources that had been traditionally used in humanitarian work. And so, if you use mobile phone data, anonymized, or satellite image data, or data derived from other forms of remote sensing. So, that was the original idea. Pulse Lab Jakarta is interesting to me for a number of reasons but one thing that’s interesting is the way that they’ve kind of worked with and change that idea of the time. So, what they’ve more recently done is a combination of data science and social science work. So, they use techniques of ethnography and social science to kind of humanize, I guess, some of the work that they’ve done to validate what they’re learning from these alternative data sources and try to kind of strengthen the robustness of what they were doing. So, that was a shift that took place over time.

That’s quite interesting. So, they take the pulse of a local community through these digital technologies, and they gather all this data, and they sort of represent what’s going on through that data. But then they want to bring that data to life. So, then they embrace these sorts of ethnographic methodologies that researchers might know all sorts about.

Yeah. So, they talk about bringing small data and big data together to kind of validate things. So, their idea is not that you start using mobile phone data to find out where people are in the aftermath of an earthquake, for instance, and you just do away with a lot of the forms, but the idea is that it’s complementary to other forms of responding to an earthquake. Now, it’s important for me to say that this was never an evaluation of Pulse Lab Jakarta. What I was really fortunate to have been that they were open to talking with me about the work they were trying to do over a number of years and I was able to talk with them in particular about some of the prototypes that they developed. Some that were taken up by the Indonesian government or by international organizations like the World Food Program, and some which didn’t end up going anywhere. And I was interested in that way of working as well, which is somehow characteristic of this turn to digital technology in humanitarian work. This concern with generating prototypes as a kind of proof of concept, and then trying to develop and refine those, and in some cases scale them up. So, that’s a preoccupation to some extent of this kind of work and Pulse Lab Jakarta was able -their generosity and openness enabled me to really see that close hand and talk with the people doing that work about what they were worried about, and how they were wrestling with some of the political and epistemological shifts that I was talking about earlier.

Will Brehm 25:55
It seems like there’s this logic of, you know, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, where you’re just sort of seeing what works. And then you’re going to dump a bunch of money into the thing that sticks and then scale it, and hopefully, you can make your billions or whatever it is. It seems like that’s kind of the logic that Pulse Lab Jakarta might be operating with; see which prototype sticks to the wall.

Fleur Johns 26:18
Yeah. There’s an aspect of that. And certainly, when I first went to the lab, you know, it has that feel. It’s got young, smart people working in kind of what looks to some extent, like Silicon Valley surrounds. There’s writing on the windows and beanbags and things like that, and there is an emphasis upon using good enough data to create a usable prototype and then soliciting a lot of feedback. So, you get something that’s usable for the time being, and then you solicit a lot of feedback, and you try and improve it and you see if it’s useful to someone, and if it is, then it goes through further optimization. So, the logic is familiar from the language and writings of practitioners in Silicon Valley, and I was very critical of that kind of, but over time, I think I came to see that it wasn’t uncontested, that when you choose to work in something like Pulse Lab Jakarta, you’re choosing not to work in other areas. You’re choosing not to take up other job opportunities that are available to you. So, this was intention with other commitments that someone working in the Indonesian government, or the UN brought to the work, including commitments to public science, reproducibility. So, there was a lot of emphasis upon accessing data that was scientifically robust if they were using weather data, and so forth. And also using open source; there was a strong commitment to open source, which we can talk about the strengths and weaknesses of that. But there’s also this commitment to humanitarian endeavor, which again, you know, it’s not unambiguously good, doesn’t mean they’re always doing good or that the effects of their work are always good. But it is different to the kinds of commitments that someone if you choose to go and work for a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, or a startup firm in Silicon Valley that’s well funded by venture capital, you will have slightly different commitments, or you would bring slightly different commitments to your work. And that was also evident that kind of struggle with the normative conflicts that were central to their work and kind of got embedded in their technological outputs. That was interesting to me as well, because I wanted to kind of resist the idea that, Oh, this looks like something from Silicon Valley therefore, it is equivalent to everything that we see coming out of Silicon Valley.

Will Brehm 28:24
Yeah, it is quite interesting to think about. As you said, the humanitarian sector, the people who work in humanitarianism, has grown, and it includes people that would work in a place like Pulse Lab Jakarta, who might easily as you said, get jobs elsewhere, who might never have been in the humanitarian sector, were it not for their own individual choice, whatever it is to sort of land there.

Fleur Johns 28:46
Absolutely. I mean, and the career trajectories of the people who come in and out of these kinds of organizations. And I didn’t just look at Pulse Lab Jakarta. I’ve looked at prototypes developed in a range of other organizations, but there was sometimes collaborations that were fairly short term. So, you might have someone from the university working with researchers in the UN or something like Pulse Lab. So, it might be a short-term collaboration, or you might have people taking up longer term contracts with this organization. So, the composition of the workforce also has this prototypical short termism kind of to it; that people come together to work on a project, and they work together for this specific purpose, and then they might move on to something else. And that sort of means that you’re kind of constantly bolting things together without necessarily any continuous plan underpinning the whole thing.

Will Brehm 29:37
Which seems to go against a little or maybe the traditional ways that we might think the State operates, where they might have these plans -the five year plan is always you know, the joke about former Soviet sort of influence countries- but it’s sort of the point being is that the State somehow has these longer term visions and goals that they’re working towards, rather than these sort of desperate prototypes that, as you said, get bolted together.

Fleur Johns 30:03
Yeah, yeah. And I was interested in that as well. I mean, the Indonesian government still produces five-year plan and longer-term plans, and the national development planning agency, Bappenas is very much committed to and has lots of expertise in planning for the work of the state in this mode. But still, they’ve got, you know, some 17,000 islands and hundreds of millions of people and they understand the work that they can do in the mode of this kind of continuous planning to reach its limits in various ways. And so, this logic of prototyping comes in as a kind of supplement to the planning and in some respects, challenges certain aspects of the way states have done things, including because of this emphasis upon the orientation towards collecting real-time or near real-time data, and the implication that that should be then acted on. That there’s an expectation that everything should be responsive to this real-time data. You can’t just collect it; you have to actually do something about it. And that obviously requires a very different mode of governing. And so, kind of keeping that expectation at bay becomes a preoccupation as well.

Will Brehm 31:12
Maybe by way of conclusion, thinking about Pulse Lab Jakarta and these sort of different ways of governance and digital humanitarianism, it seems like your book really sort of raises a lot more questions and points in sort of a future direction to start thinking about some of these issues. How would you sum some of that up? Like, what should we be looking at into the future here?

Fleur Johns 31:33
Well, the book is really an argument for wide ranging public engagement with this new practice of governing. I mean, “new” in inverted commas, partially new, partially not. And I go into a lot of detail about the certain interfaces, the way in which these prototypes take shape in certain websites, or certain applications that are designed to say facilitate governmental or UN response to famine, or air pollution, or various different humanitarian problems. And I go into them with some detail to say, this is not something that’s happening in California, that’s remote from us. We can engage with these modes of governance, and we can engage critically with them. And when you engage with an interface, if you think of an interface as something that’s actually layered, so it’s not a singular surface, is not a singular kind of technology but it’s a layer that has a front end and a back end, roughly speaking. With the front end being all the kinds of dispositions and attitudes and forms of attention that are elicited from the user. So, you and I are having this conversation via Zoom. We might think of Zoom as a layered interface and one layer of that is the way we are encouraged to interact through this medium. So, that kind of human side of this. But then, of course, the back end has many different layers as well. And there’s lots of work that goes into maintaining all these layers. So, the book studies kind of tries to take apart a little bit, if you will, some of the interfaces through which this humanitarian work is being done to say, actually, we can look at the politics of this, we can think about what form of attention we’re being invited to give, who’s being made to count, what is being made prominent, what is being pushed into the background. Just as we’re used to reading texts, we can somehow critically engage with, you might say, “read” these interfaces. And because of the emphasis upon prototyping, and kind of continual feedback and input, these points of engagement are not insignificant, because the products, if you like, the interfaces, through which humanitarian work has been done, are always presented as in the process of being optimized. And so, what the book imagines slightly speculatively, because obviously, not all forms of feedback are welcome, but imagines that we can envision a much broader range of people as users of these interfaces, and imagine much broader range of interactions or non-interaction. So, turning away from the interface we could imagine as a form of use, form of feedback. If we think of a much broader range of interactions with these interfaces as feedback to them, as engaging with them, then it’s possible to identify questions that they push to the side. And maybe let me give you a specific example because I realized this is sounding quite abstract. So, when I’m talking about this kind of expanded understanding of use and imagining kind of a critical engagement with interfaces, one of the stories I tell at the end of the book is of a system called InaTEWS, which is an early warning system for tsunamis that was developed after the tragic Boxing Day tsunami in Southeast Asia. And this system was designed around a system of smart buoys at sea. So, floating devices that were detecting wave heights and transmitting data about wave heights to assist through a specially designed software system alongside other meteorological inputs and so forth. And the idea was that these smart buoys that were tethered off the coast in combination with the software system and other inputs would raise early warning about an incoming tsunami, and that people living in coastal areas would be alerted to the fact before the giant wave is upon them, or before human reporting of the giant wave would be possible that it was going to be coming and that they would get out of the way. That was the idea. You know, it’s a brilliant idea, great idea. Lots of brilliant scientists worked on this, it was a collaboration between a number of governments, and it was introduced, and it’s still operating, as far as I know, in Indonesia. In September 2018, there was an earthquake on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, and a series of tsunamis followed, and 1,300 people died, and 60,000 people were displaced. And in the aftermath, it was noted that this early warning system didn’t work. And there was lots of kind of collective kind of institutional soul searching about what went wrong. There were lots of different versions of the answer, you know, that there hadn’t been investment in maintenance, that the government at various different scales hadn’t perhaps set aside enough for training and maintenance or kind of incorporated these inputs into their way of responding to emergencies. But one aspect of it was that fisherfolk, fishermen and women were reported to have tied their boats to some of these smart buoys, or to have hauled them away for scrap, or to sell them in order to feed their families. And, and there was quite a lot of press in the Indonesian media after the Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami talking about these so-called vandals and criminals, and the tragedy of this incredible system, this work of science having been rendered useless by this misuse of the system by so called vandals and criminals. And there was some looting at the same time. And there was also some reporting of the people doing the looting, who were saying to some of the journalists, well, you know, it’s all well and good, but there’s no aid and we need to eat, we need to eat. And so, what I suggest at the end of the book is, it’s possible to understand this kind of interaction with the system, this digital system as a form of use of a system. Tying a boat is a form of use. It’s obviously not an intended use. It’s not making use of the capacities of the system, but it’s still a form of use from what is possible to understand. We don’t know what the people in question were thinking, or they didn’t tell us what they’re wanting to communicate, if anything from this, but it’s possible to imagine that what they’re saying to the system is, this is great, I understand you’re trying to do something good, but that’s not what we need right now, we need something else. And so, the we need to eat is one possible version. And so, we can think of a broader range of users if we allow for use to include off label uses, including potentially destructive uses. And we think of this as central infrastructure, mediating the way people communicate with their governments and with donor organizations. If we think of it as doing much more than just transmitting meteorological data, but actually mediating as an interface between the citizen and the state, then, there’s more at stake in that, and if we think of it more expansively, then we can hear questions that are hard to put in the register of the system itself. Such as questions of, is this what we should be investing in, versus other possible ways of investing that funding? Now, that kind of challenge is really hard to put in the language of the system itself, because it only invites certain form of input. It doesn’t invite that input, it doesn’t invite human input that says, actually, you know what, let’s scrap this and do something else. But essentially, that’s what they were saying. So, I’m interested in that kind of imagining the role of the digital interface as involving much more than just communicating data, and imagining engagement with an eye to a much broader range than we tend to engage, tend to think about. And that’s the kind of spirit I suppose of the book that it tries to foster or encourage that there might be possibilities associated with this form of mediation, this form of interface between states and citizens that we haven’t yet -it’s not fully foreclosed, it’s not fully set down by the system itself. And people are yet to make something of this. And we’ll be making something of this in many different settings in many different ways beyond the idea that this is just the power of the state bearings down on us.

Will Brehm 40:00
Well, Fleur Johns, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. There’s a lot to unpack but I think you are pointing at a really kind of beautiful engagement with that digital humanitarianism, that interface, and the layers that we might not actually see if we only approach it from the Silicon Valley approach from the data inputs, but actually look beyond and some of these human interactions and the resistance in terms of those use values. So, thank you so much for joining FreshEd.

Fleur Johns 40:30
It’s my pleasure, Will.

Translation

Resources

Related Author Publications/Projects

#Help: Digital humanitarianism and the remaking of international order

Digital humanitarian mapping and the limits of imagination in international law

Nowcasting for hunger relief: A study of promise and perils

Governance by data

The temporal rivalries of human rights

Mentioned Resources

Global Humanitarian Overview 2023

Floods in Bangladesh