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. This special theme examines how datafication operates within humanitarian and development settings as Tech for Good. In particular, we trace how Tech for Good initiatives commodify compassion, by reconfiguring who is authorized to act, whose knowledge counts, and whose labor becomes invisible in the pursuit of efficiency and accountability. In this introduction, we provide a brief background of the changing role of businesses and digital technology in development and humanitarian aid and introduce Commodifying Compassion as a conceptual lens to understand Tech for Good today. Building on this work and grounded in the articles of this special theme, we map how Tech for Good emerges as a particular digitalized configuration of commodified compassion.