The condition of our world is increasingly framed through planetary metrics: temperature rise, biodiversity loss, financial instability, migration flows. Surveillance underpins these metrics, producing ways of seeing and managing the planet. We are promised a new era of planetary knowledge by using 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 governance is shaped by historically entrenched inequalities, exclusions, and 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: from micro habitats to global ecosystems and processes.

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 different forms of life on Earth. Surveillance is a driver and a product of this planetary turn, as states, citizens and more-than-human others grapple with social and environmental change and crisis, and plan for the possibility of hostile and stable futures.

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 ecosystems, climate, crime, migration, and conflict through planetary infrastructures, some of which are located on and above the earth. 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. It may also be harnessed for the production of ecosocial goods.