Big data visuality and interstitial spaces of autonomy: Drones and blockchains in and around Myanmar's civil war
Emergent technologies – from blockchains to drones – have sparked debate over their benefit to marginalized populations. When used in humanitarian contexts, proponents laud their ability to facilitate service delivery while critics hold that these technologies enact new regimes of control. Yet, both...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
SAGE Publishing
2025-03-01
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| Series: | Big Data & Society |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251320007 |
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| Summary: | Emergent technologies – from blockchains to drones – have sparked debate over their benefit to marginalized populations. When used in humanitarian contexts, proponents laud their ability to facilitate service delivery while critics hold that these technologies enact new regimes of control. Yet, both advocates and adversaries alike presume that the form of big data visuality generated by these technologies operates to intensify and perfect knowledge over these populations. We dispute this assertion, observing instead that this gaze both obscures even as it enhances, leaving gaps in putative control regimes. In this article, we consider instead how various projects have been improvised around humanitarian crises in Myanmar – blockchain for stateless Rohingya in Malaysia and drones for Burmese revolutionaries fighting against the country's military regime – appropriating some of these same technologies for their own purposes. These technologies interact with and draw upon broader milieus – areas not worth controlling, people not worth regulating – to enable projects that attempt to generate interstitial spaces of autonomy. Such spaces are defined not as circumscribed zones – plotted two-dimensionally on a map and (relatively) fixed temporally across time – but as mutating, rhizomatically interlinked spheres of connections. The creation of these interstitial spaces is hardly a good in itself, but can be interpreted as an indictment of the failures of the humanitarian regime. Indeed, these projects are not simple repudiations of humanitarian care and the ‘international community’ that deploys it; rather, they are reactions to the material neglect that manifests in the regime of biopolitical control deployed by states and their multilateral institutions. |
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| ISSN: | 2053-9517 |