For a year, digital technology has been hailed as the panacea for the refugee crisis. Media are brimming with reports about apps and hackathons, announcements of teach-them-how-to-code training sessions and bold commitments to the humanitarian cause by technology firms.

Airbnb, Uber, and even the cultish Singularity University have all jumped on the bandwagon. From Karim, the AI chatbot that offers refugees counselling, to a blockchain-based identification service that helps refugees lacking proper documents to prove their identity, there’s a flurry of innovative solutions. The message is loud and clear: technology might be in private, corporate hands, but these hands are so gentle and generous, so humane and caring, that they will keep on giving.

Is this yet another proof that a brand new era of responsible capitalism is upon us? Corporate executives certainly think so. In 2004, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, penned a tome with the modest title of Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well. Eight years later, John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, published another one, with the even more modest title, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. Apparently, corporations are born heroic but are everywhere in government-imposed chains.

The contrast with the ruthless, rapacious capitalism of the earlier era couldn’t be starker. The old, irresponsible capitalism, addicted to pillaging and exploitation, produced the refugee crisis in the first place: think of energy firms battling it out for Middle Eastern oil or financial firms like Goldman Sachs using developing countries as ATMs.

The new compassionate capitalism is tied not to the exploitation of natural resources or financial engineering, but, rather, to the harnessing of creativity and technological ingenuity. Aspiring to be different, it heals the wounds opened by its predecessor. Where its predecessor demanded compliance and standardisation, it provides for self-realisation and diversity.

Such humanitarianism is a yearning for a quasi-magical world, where technology miraculously resolves problems

Or this is what it says. In reality, the technological euphoria spawned by the refugee crisis suggests that we update the list of clever co-optation efforts that arise from compassionate capitalism –from “greenwashing” for fake ecological commitments to “openwashing” for fake transparency pledges – with yet another term: “empathy-washing”. It seems apt to describe growing corporate efforts to hijack humanitarian crises in order to tout corporate commitment to humanitarianism.

Empathy-washing initiatives create the false impression that the crisis is under control, with individual ingenuity, finally unlocked by privatised technologies, compensating for the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground. And even if some of them do temporarily relieve the effects of the crises – against their causes, privatised technological solutions are impotent – they also entrench the power of technology platforms as indispensable intermediaries essential to the smooth administration of the post-crisis political landscape.

The recent demise of the I Sea app, which encouraged users to locate and report sinking refugee boats using real-time satellite footage of the Mediterranean sea, reveals how empathy-washing can go wrong. Created by the Singapore office of the advertising firm Grey Group, the app has not only won an award at a prominent ad conference in Cannes but has also received much admiration in the media.

The problem is that the app didn’t show users any real-time satellite footage. What they saw instead was just a static image of the ocean; searching for actual boats on it was pointless. The I Sea app demanded so little of its users and it promised them so much in return. Finally, spiritual redemption no longer required an onerous expedition to an actual refugee camp.

Such frictionless and fictitious humanitarianism persists only because it expresses a deep yearning for a quasi-magical world, where technology – and today technology is indistinguishable from private capital – could step in and miraculously resolve all our problems.

But the I Sea app is a relatively minor offender. Consider “Freedom-As-A-Service,” a strange mix between a thought-experiment gone wrong and an earnest template for business expansion, unveiled by Cisco at a UN summit on identity in New York in late May.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A family of refugees registers for asylum in Greece. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty

Cisco’s write-up of the idea blends the corporate jargon with hippie-speak and is thus not easy to decipher. It appears that Cisco wants to replace government-issued identities – which refugees, for obvious reasons, often lack – with new, digital identities that would depend on intermediation by corporations like Cisco. The actual role of corporations, however, would be kept invisible, as new digital infrastructures built around technologies like the blockchain permit [used to register all bitcoin transactions] to hide deep corporate involvement under the veneer of algorithmic, decentralised, and leaderless decision-making.

“The building blocks for the Freedom-As-A-Service economy,” argues Cisco, “is all about empowering people, refugees and immigrants.” But empowering to do what exactly? As Cisco puts it, “bartering, renting, lending, trading, leasing, swapping” – in other words, it’s all about inserting refugees into an entrepreneurial economy where the only chance of salvation is finding new ways to fully commodify one’s existence.

It’s hard to know if Cisco says these things because it cares about refugees – or because it cares about blockchains. It has been promoting blockchain-powered infrastructures for some time. In December 2015 it joined efforts with IBM, the London Stock Exchange Group, Wells Fargo and many other corporations to push for an industry-wide blockchain standard. Cisco, rightfully, sees the blockchain and its promise of decentralisation as an excellent business opportunity – which, mind you, would not rid us of firms like Cisco but would only increase our dependence on them.

Not so long ago, the juxtaposition of “freedom” – something to be guaranteed by laws – with the “as a service” business model – something to be offered by a company in a commercial context – would seem oxymoronic. However, as we expect corporations to take over the functions of not only the welfare state but also of humanitarian relief, “freedom as a service” makes perfect sense.

In the future – which, somehow, increasingly looks like our feudalist past – to be truly free, we’ll first have to pledge allegiance to a giant technology provider. Should our corporate overlord “pivot” to a new business model or simply decide that our freedom can no longer be justified in its cost-benefit analysis, we’ll have to find some other private guarantor of freedom.

Fleeing from the effects of neoliberal capitalism, all of us are becoming permanent refugees – with technology giants occasionally taking pity on us by offering us free services, identity papers, and an opportunity to make money in the sharing economy. And, soon, there won’t be anywhere to flee.