Many of us will by now have heard the term “the Internet of Things”, used to describe a budding environment that the technology corporations want to make wider reality. An omnipresent exchange of data between an untold amount of receivers and transmitters, potentially spanning all materials and processes that can become measured electronically. Most significantly, it is the relationship between sensors (that gather data) and machines (that act on that data), all at newly microscopic sizes, promising to make everything from streetlights to seaports “smart”. It’s been picking up steam in recent months, and indeed although the implications are nearly incomprehensible, it is being treated as the logical next step for technological-industrial society, generating a multitude of new products and services as all kinds of devices and algorithms come to mediate daily life. After all, we have already come to rely less on a conscious relationship between each individual and the make-up of our living surroundings, and more on what a lifeless digital display conveys to us. Work, “free time”, travel, education, politics, shopping, intimacy – everywhere the screen, and the space between gets lessened all the time.

The Internet of Things is a proliferation of electronics, primarily implanting micro-chips directly into objects, bodies or the wider environment. This is part and parcel of the vision that IBM are known for despicably calling a Smarter Planet. Smarter, not in the sense of intuitive, relational wisdom that is formed through the experience of an engaged co-existence, on and of the earth we inhabit. But in the sense of a sterile, calculated machine prediction, filtered through statistics. To this end, (and with considerable support from governments and industry,) the technology corporations want their sensors to densely inhabit everything from cities and commodity supply chains – which they euphemistically term “ecosystems” – to actual rivers and forests. As well as detectors to automatically operate the heating and air-conditioning when people enter a building, soil sensors that communicate to farmers about water or fertilizer levels. Nano-scale devices in the atmosphere to predict the weather, in bridges to better monitor the state of the cement, or to tag and track what’s left of the wildlife, all with completely unknown/irreversible effects in the long-term from micro-particles spreading through and accumulating in the environment and inevitably in the food cycle – this is what Dr John Manley of HP Labs Bristol research base had the gall to call the Central Nervous System for the Earth. It is nothing but an acceleration of the patriarchal and exploitative cultural ethos to become master over the biosphere – which we are bizarrely considered a separate part of – in order to perpetuate the insatiable industrial system and way of life that is despoiling the globe, even at the cost of wiping out the source of our and all existence, and to ration everything into food for the system; grist for the mill, of this prison we could call civilisation.

In a situation like today, individuals no longer generally use technologies they themselves have formed and understand to create the lives they choose, but are ruled by and through technologies – that capitalist-industrial society uses to reproduce itself and to acculturate them. The accompanying alienation and surrender to industrialist logic makes the depth and complexity of the element, plant-animal and energetic worlds seem daunting; because despite the interrogations of modern science, they are not reducible to reason, or indeed to static categories. To the ones who want to gain power over others (human and not), it’s very much in their interest that we are further indoctrinated into their culture where the chaotic majesty of the planet has pretty much lost all meaning – and only the technologies to re-interpret life back to us as images, products or services come to make sense.