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Emergent technologies – from blockchains to drones – have sparked debate over their benefit to marginalized populations. Proponents laud their ability to facilitate service delivery – whether by traversing dangerous or obstructed spaces (as with drones), or by circumventing corrupt or coercive actors or institutions (as with blockchains).

Conversely, critics hold that these technologies enact new regimes of control: drones monitor humanitarian subjects with a detached gaze often disconnected from the imperative to save; blockchains have been deployed by humanitarian organizations to immure marginalized populations.

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. Such understandings presume that technologies work as their engineers/deployers imagine because the technologies encounter a milieu – one simultaneously material, institutional, and libidinal – that assents and enables them.

The talk questions this assertion, observing instead that this gaze both obscures even as it enhances, leaving scotomata – gaps, holes – in putative control regimes. Various projects improvised around Myanmar – blockchain for stateless Rohingya in Malaysia, drones for Burmese revolutionaries fighting against the military regime – appropriate some of these same technologies for their own purposes, generating interstitial spaces of relative autonomy: not circumscribed zones -- plotted two-dimensionally on a map and (relatively) fixed temporally across time – but continually mutating, rhizomatically interlinked spheres of connections.

And yet, their effects are still limited: these interstitial spaces are hardly liberatory in themselves – they continue to be constrained by the same milieu which enables them. Instead, they can be interpreted as an indictment of the failures of the global capitalist / humanitarian regime, and can be interpreted in part as appeals to this regime to see them differently, to reinvigorate a sense of material connection between erstwhile ontologically divided zones.

About the speaker

, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore, has conducted long-term fieldwork in Myanmar and its environs. His first book (, Stanford University Press, 2023) focuses on political activism in Burma, while his current book project examines Rohingya ethnogenesis amidst dislocation and mass violence. His work has appeared in several esteemed academic journals, and he's the co-editor of .

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Image credit: Abstract image of bokeh lights suggesting gaps, holes & rhizomatic links by from , used under  license