How It Began

In 2019, when Taylor released Crashing Through The Front Door  they found themselves at a crossroads. They had come out as transgender two years before, and after writing a book about LGBTQ culture, they felt increasing pressure to only write queer stories. Internally, they were still sorting out many aspects of their own queer identity that were tied to gender.

Taylor shifted their full time work to tech marketing where they honed their skills to create digital campaigns, customer journeys, and content that moves people to action. It was while working in tech marketing that Taylor began to understand the power of the surveillance economy. Their work in tech marketing taught them how to monitor a consumer’s behavior and track their digital footprint.

Learning how these small aspects of the surveillance economy worked was unsettling for Taylor. They wanted to move away from marketing and focus on a passion that has been passed down in their family — studying the environment. Taylor’s grandfather and grandmother were biologists, their mother is a naturalist and migration tracker, and their father is a social scientist. Caring for the natural world is an important part of Taylor’s identity.

They decided to shift their writing to environmentalism, and wanted to do so in the context of living in an urban area. Taylor then received two graduate degrees, one in creative nonfiction and one in Urban Sustainability.

It was during their graduate fieldwork that they had a conversation about open source movements in agricultural tech and how different these movements were across the globe. It was during this conversation that Taylor formed the thesis. They choose to research open source and sustainable tech through IoT data governance — a highly technical topic and an incredibly important one with the rise of green tech.

Taylor discovered an intricate web between the same surveillance economy that made them so uncomfortable in tech marketing and the way many pieces of “green” and “sustainable” tech functioned. They spent the next three years tracing a line between green tech, the data it collects, and how it’s used by police against women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ people in particular. The research became the manuscript titled Empire of Insight. 

Book Blurb

When we hear “green tech” most of us don’t think about the Chicago police officer sitting behind a desk watching a transgender activist move around the city. We probably don’t think about an apple farmer in Oregon who can’t access the software that powers their tractor every morning. The undocumented immigrant who is picked up by ICE, just because he walks past a neighbor’s smart doorbell on the way to work, is likely not the first person who comes to mind when we talk about climate change. 

But all of them should be. 

These seemingly separate stories are all real examples of “green tech” in action. 

Tech is often presented as the magic wand that can make climate change disappear, just a half a degree before it's too late. There are some aspects that are promising. Carbon removal from the air does work, but it’s incredibly expensive. There is green tech that can pull saline from the sea to offer clean drinking water. There are roads that can absorb flooding and can charge an electric car while it drives. There is even a tractor that might soon run off of methane while it rolls through a field.

However, the green tech that we are far more likely to encounter on a daily basis is all around us. It’s presented as the “small choices” that we can make to help the planet and soothe our collective climate anxiety; it’s the electric car charging stations; it’s the smart thermostat that sets itself; it’s the AI-powered traffic camera that a local official just approved. 

They are all pieces of what this author calls “technotranquilty” — how big tech companies are using climate change as an excuse for unlimited surveillance, and police are the best customers. 

There are many pieces of “green tech” that are valuable, only because it watches you.