Green Surveillance: Imagining a Sustainable Internet of Things

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The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) constitutes a communication system that enables comprehensive and continuous monitoring of the effects of human activity on Earth’s ecosystems, thus potentially facilitating the green transition to sustainable forms of social life. But the scope and the scale of the necessary monitoring simultaneously entails surveillance, not only of natural and built environments, but of persons and their actions as well, extending far beyond the online tracking of citizens and consumers which over the past decade has generated widespread public debate and motivated substantial legislation regulating digital infrastructures in the European Union and beyond. The GREENWATCH project anticipates and assesses the ethical dilemmas that follow from green surveillance: What kinds and which degrees of surveillance will the present human cohort be prepared to accept in the coming decades to ensure the livelihood of the species centuries and millennia into the future? Comparing the three world regions driving the development of IoT – Europe, the United States, and China – the study maps the empirical scenarios being projected for IoT as part of the green transition; theorizes the process of green surveillance as information feedback to national and international systems of governance as well as to individual citizens, consumers, and corporations; and evaluates both the scenarios and the practice of surveillance against the background of classic philosophical traditions of local and global social justice, complemented by recent conceptions of climate justice and environmental justice. Through IoT, Earth is sending a message that the human species is obliged to respond to, across ideological and civilizational divides, for survival and, at best, individual and collective human flourishing (eudaimonia).