Planetary Intelligence and Surveillance
The 11th Biennial Surveillance Studies Network / Surveillance & Society Conference
From 9 to 12 june 2025
Presentation
The condition of our world is increasingly framed through planetary metrics: temperature rise, biodiversity loss, financial instability, migration flows, etc. Surveillance underpins these metrics, producing ways of seeing and managing the planet itself. We are promised a new era of planetary intelligence: surveillance systems that can map, predict, and manage the risks of a fragile world. But these very systems also fragment, exclude, and reproduce old asymmetries. Planetary intelligence is not neutral; it is shaped by inequalities, exclusions, and struggles over power. Surveillance is presented as the key to planetary survival, yet it often accelerates insecurity and injustice. #SSN2026 invites us to grapple with what it means to think of surveillance at the scale of the planet.
We are living in a moment where “intelligence” has become planetary. Infrastructures of sensing, monitoring, control and computation now extend across scales: from satellites orbiting the Earth to predictive algorithms embedded in the most intimate aspects of everyday life. Surveillance technologies now claim planetary reach: global infrastructures, algorithmic systems trained on worldwide data, and satellites and networks that promise to know, predict, and govern life on Earth. Surveillance is both a driver and a product of this planetary turn.
“Intelligence” today means many things: the work of secret agencies, the capacity of machines to learn, and the collective attempt to know and manage the Earth itself. Surveillance feeds and is generative of all three, enabling and being transformed by them. From predictive policing to climate modeling, from espionage to artificial intelligence, surveillance is the connective tissue of our planetary intelligence. Surveillance lies at the heart of these transformations. It both enables and depends on new forms of planetary intelligence — whether through data extraction on a global scale, the training of artificial intelligence systems on the traces of human activity, or the monitoring of climate, migration, and conflict through planetary infrastructures.
This planetary turn raises important questions:
Whose intelligence counts, and whose knowledge is excluded?
Which forms of life are rendered visible, measurable, and governable, and which remain invisible or deliberately obscured?
How do geopolitical rivalries, colonial legacies, and global inequalities shape the emergence of planetary surveillance infrastructures?
What methods of resistance to authoritarian planetary intelligence exist? How can these methods be developed?
Surveillance appears, spreads, and intensifies not only in the name of security but also in the name of planetary management: climate monitoring, global health, financial stability, digital platforms, or border regimes. Yet planetary intelligence also generates new possibilities for critique, resistance, and reimagining collective futures.
SSN 2026 seeks to engage with these entanglements of surveillance and planetary intelligence. We invite proposals for papers, panels, doctoral colloquium participation, artistic and activist interventions, and other contributions on all aspects of surveillance in and across the planetary condition.