Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire": Anticipating Uberveillance

Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire: Anticipating Uberveillance

M.G. Michael, Independent Researcher

Katina Michael, Arizona State University

Terri Bookman, Independent Journalist

Abstract

This article uses Wim Wenders’ romantic fantasy film Wings of Desire (1987) to contrast the roles of angels with uberveillance. Varying points of view are considered in the surveillance spectrum, demonstrating that while we can artificially fabricate omnipresence, omniscience still belongs to the heavenly realm. Humans will continue to encroach on personal privacy through the latest technological exploits penetrating the human within, while the angels will stand by their limitations acknowledging their role as listeners but not intruders. This article acts as a reminder of the intrinsic worth of human life in synergy with love, beyond the quantification of advanced technologies that seek to decorporealize and propel us to gamify our existence. What is important? It is the human connection; the ability to hold out our hand to another and have it clasped in reciprocity. This will reunify the world faster in compassion than any other technological marvel thrust upon us.

Keywords

Wings of Desire, uberveillance, angels, Berlin, point of view, watching, surveillance

Introduction

In Wim Wenders’s poetic 1987 film Wings of Desire, two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, wander a still-divided Berlin, invisible to most humans, but able to hear their thoughts.

Acclaimed as “extraordinary” and named as one of the best films of the 1980s by critics such as David Denby in New York Magazine,[1] and winner of accolades from international film festivals,[2] the movie hums with spiritual energy, and has much to say about the human condition. As an exploration of omniscient access to humans’ innermost thoughts, desires, and grief, the film also provides an intriguing window within which to consider uberveillance. Uberveillance, coined by M. G. Michael in 2006, is defined as “an omnipresent electronic surveillance facilitated by technology that makes it possible to embed surveillance devices in the human body.”[3]

As angels in Wings of Desire, Damiel and Cassiel (and the other angels) are witnesses to human lives. They existed before human evolution. Their roles are to record, to take sacred note of the details of what they see and hear of human behavior, and to reflect on what they have learned from and about human beings over eons.

It is hard to think of a more appropriate setting for such a spectral errand than the war-ravaged, riven, yet still magnificent, late twentieth-century Berlin of the movie. Wenders weaves in brutal scenes of Berlin’s history, ever-present in the city’s atmosphere. The angels are a benevolent force, a contrast with Berlin’s World War II history. Yet, while loving and good intentioned, the angels are powerless over events, unable to prevent tragedies such as domestic violence, poverty, or suicide. Still, they try to comfort those in distress with their presence, attempts that are only sometimes successful.

Contrasting Angels and Uberveillance

Contrasted with the concept of the angels’ caring nature in Wings of Desire, technical uberveillance is a more complicated force, with malevolent potential perhaps more in line with darker chapters of Berlin’s history. Wide-ranging risks of uberveillance relate to privacy, security, human rights, or even potential enslavement.[4] The converging veillances present a beehive of networks creating fractals at border crossings, further alienating people and the integrity of the context.[5]

The Berlin of Wings of Desire is also overshadowed by the still-intact Berlin Wall that stood from 1961 to 1989. In the world of the film, the Berlin Wall and dark and violent periods of German history also combine with something sublime. We are left with an atmosphere that combines great sorrow, beauty, and sometimes humor. In Wings of Desire, these qualities are soulfully embodied by Peter Falk, who plays himself, as the Columbo actor, star of a film within the film, a detective movie being shot in Berlin, set in 1945.

In Wings of Desire, angels are differentiated from humans in that angels are disembodied beings and humans have physical embodiment; angels have wings to fly and humans are grounded to the earth; angels can apparently walk through walls while humans must walk through doors; angels do not bruise or bleed while humans experience pain and hunger. One of the greatest distinctions is in their point of view: angels appear to have a “God view”—i.e., an aerial perspective, and are omniscient in terms of being able to hear human thoughts—while humans live with a “street view.” Despite their less elevated vantage point, humans are able to make sense of the immediate space around them. In effect, the human gaze is camera-like; with “photographs” stored in memories that can be recollected on demand.[6]

Listening to and observing humans and their innermost thoughts— their deepest fears and pain, and their joys—some angels in Wings of Desire sense they are missing something profound, and finally cannot resist the pull of human life and experience.[7] So they elect to surrender their wings and take on human form. Their bodies, once free, become captive to the flesh, exposed to bruising, flesh wounds—and pain. Angels who once could not touch, or fall, are immediately exposed to the realities of life in an urban city. They sell their “armor” to pawn shops for money to buy food because they learn what it is like to experience hunger and thirst. Angels who renounce their “angelic state” can no longer fly high above the city, looking down at the city’s landscape at one moment, and then zoom down to a person view to experience micro-level details at the next moment. On the ground as humans, with no wings, and with troubles, anxieties, and suffering, a living being can lose perspective of the angels’ wider view. The former angels have now joined the mass of humanity, where they find themselves in complex situations, with highs and lows, ebbs and flows, peaks and troughs. The now-human angels had previously listened to humans’ innermost thoughts, to their questions about the point of it all: Is this as “good as it gets”? Why is there suffering?

What Is All of This For?

An answer that suffuses Wings of Desire seems to be: because there is love. With love and kindness as balm—with young children at a circus or on the street who are the only humans able to see and smile at the angels— and with grateful adults also sensing the presence of a nearby loving force—both Wings of Desire and the detective film within the film continue to grapple with the existential questions: What is all of this for? What is the worth of a life? Why are we all fighting and divided? Is peace only available to angels? Why can’t or won’t the divine intervene?[8] Must the angels come down among us, with the knowledge of their past, to bring us closer to the meaning of life?

And yet, even the experiences of the former angels do not seem to save humans or the former angels themselves. Despite knowing abstractly what “life on earth would be like,” angels making the transition must become human to truly understand. They largely know what they are signing up for when they decide to become human, and still choose to take the risk, at the cost of immortality. Yet what motivates the angels to become human continues to evade many humans—sensuality, to feel intimacy, and to love a human form unconditionally.

Points of View and Proximity

Through the detective film storyline, Wim Wenders is able to let us see life, before intense twenty-first century technology dependence, both in the late twentieth century just before the Berlin Wall fell, and also among the utter hopelessness of old Berlin, revealed in the 1945 set of the detective film. Wings of Desire is filmed such that it conveys both planetary scale and intimate detail within a matter of moments. No sooner do we see the angels standing on top of the world than we see them proximately close and whispering into the ear of a human being. The point of view moves as the gaze of the angel changes, constantly tilting from looking down, to looking straight ahead to looking up at the heavens for answers and, perhaps, even intercession. The angels interact with each other but only indirectly with humans, and are portrayed as sitting on the ledge of a great building, on a chair in a magnificent library, or in a car or house of one who is in crisis.

In today’s world, we seem to be trying to replicate the ability of angels portrayed in Wings of Desire, through the use of surveillance technologies. These surveillance technologies vary dramatically in design and use, from satellites in the heavens and drones in the skies, to the surveillance cameras that are bolted on buildings to record passers-by in the event of theft, to in-building technologies watching citizens for safety reasons, to in-car data recorders in or on vehicles (e.g., Google’s Streetview), and smartphones used to record ground-level interactions (e.g., Periscope), to body-worn devices that inversely record the world around them (sousveillance), to in-body technologies like biomedical and nonmedical devices that measure physiological characteristics (uberveillance).[9] We watch the output of these views through online maps, social media platforms, and wearable gadgetry. We even have tools to monitor words, pictures, and videos now, without a “human in the loop.” These autonomous systems (AS) are said to be artificially intelligent, and are therefore deemed better at detecting humans in trouble. Like a scene out of Minority Report, which portrays a world where people are arrested ahead of time for crimes they have not yet committed (but it is predicted they will commit), we are expected as citizens to buy into the technocratic mantra, that all evil can be eradicated, if at all times someone or something is watching.[10]

What Is Coming?

What is coming? It is Big Brother on the inside looking out.[11] It is the application of camera technology that is always with you 24 × 7. It is your alibi. It is your own personal Jiminy Cricket.[12] It is your Final Cut—the sci-fi film wherein people are given brain implants at birth that record their lives without their explicit consent.[13] It may well take the form of a sensor placed in the translucent layer of the skin, perhaps the third eye just above the brows. Or it may well be an on-body device, permanently printed on the skin—an electronic small-scale 3-D printed pinhole camera that might be tethered to a body area network (BAN) hub-like device.[14] And if we believe Google, the camera may well sit on a removable contact lens just over the eye.[15] In effect, we will have the human camera (the eye), overridden and overwritten and overshadowed by the artificial eye, a techno-human melding of sorts with a distorted view of dynamic proceedings.[16] As the screens and gazes come into conflict with one another, while they filter and augment the reality before them, the immersive experience is confused. What is real? Is it the view from the artificial lens, the view from the biological eye, or the view from the all-seeing eye? Some even speak of having many eyes watching in concert the 360-degree view, assuming that more data is a closer approximation of “the truth” than a single vantage point.[17] The risks of uberveillance, then, become insurmountable, and points of view depend on the vehicle of trust used to audit digital reality.

Uberveillance becomes at once both the mechanism toward healing when adopted for prosthesis but also the avenue for the unrelentless monitoring of the individual in the guise of care; control as the underlying driver.[18] Uberveillance, “artificial” omnipresence, suffers from well-known pitfalls: information manipulation, misrepresentation, and misinterpretation of data.[19] Technology can come close to mimicking angel-like uber-view abilities portrayed in Wings of Desire, but it can never attain the infallible characteristic of omniscience, of knowing everything all at once.[20] The state of knowing “everything” and “all at once” cannot be comprehended or experienced by humans on earth, even if every single thing was to be tagged with a camera, every single person could transmit their gaze, and a smart environment could grant us collective awareness of crime hot spots and near misses.[21] There will always be “something” missing. A theologian might say that only the Creator who is above and beyond all temporal dimension is able to know the absolute context and what is predestined (Is. 55:8–9; Ps. 139:1–6).

In an Attempt to Artificially Mimic Divine Powers

Are we seeking powers that we do not possess as humans, and can never possess? Are we trying to circumvent the divine and achieve our own “God-view”? What is it that we are trying to achieve in this fallen world? Are we in some metaphorical sense former angels trying to reclaim that which is “not of this world”? In that same sense, are we choosing to ignore angels in their plight as they come from above to console us, building instead, our own techno-utopian ideal? We cannot get through to the angels, so instead, let us seek to construct and acquire their qualities by brute force? The community of the Old Testament sought to do this with the Tower of Babel—the tower, though stretching way up into the clouds, could not reach heaven (Gen. 11:1–9). Similarly, are we investing in the digital as a “way” to dig ourselves out of the woes of the twenty-first century—climate change, poverty cycles, and world conflict—and are we placing our hopes in the tangible and temporal to ensure the long, if not eternal, life of our extended intelligent selves?

The makers of these modern all-invasive surveillance technologies seem to be double playing their dreams. On the one hand, they spread messages of equality: flying into remote areas of India to spread technology, promising one laptop per child, or promoting Facebook access via mobile phones for social entrepreneurship to “make the world a better place.” They also spread their own global distribution supply chains worldwide, ostensibly to foster worldwide opportunity and economic development, but instead we find we are confronted with slave labor, unethically low wages that cannot sustain families, and poor working conditions.[22] Another negative effect of all of this rapid commercial and technological advancement is that little children are now addicted and strapped to screens, from movie platforms, internet-enabled television sets, gaming consoles, tablets, smartphones, to reality TV shows, and even online gambling.[23] The very same creators of these tools neglect to tell us publicly that they know how addictive their technological marvels can be—preventing their own children from adopting screens and other addictive technologies too early. The late Steve Jobs was quoted as saying about his own kids and home rules: “Actually we don’t allow the iPad in the home. We think it’s too dangerous for them in effect.”[24]

In the 2018 animated film, Incredibles 2, the villain Screenslaver has a hypnotic power on the viewing audience where they quickly become transfixed to the signals. There is no other life, so long as you are wearing the goggles transmitting Screenslaver’s message. Moreover, viewers implicitly believe what they see, regardless of its relationship to reality. This dramatic climax of Incredibles 2 is not so far removed from our current screen-centric reality. While wearing the rose-colored glasses of addictive screens, our angels cannot be felt or seen, even by the little children who are able to perceive them in Wings of Desire. The little children are our hope. But hope is lost, if all children see are nonorganic visions of the world. They lose the ability to perceive the nondigital world. They cannot see justice. They may lose the ability to differentiate expressions on faces. They may become dull and apathetic. All that starts to matter is that they become like the reality TV stars that they watch on You-Tube.[25] YouTubers whose videos have gone viral are omnipresent with near real-time daily uploads. They are everywhere—but they are not angelic. They spend their time trying to perfect product placements, acting as ill-behaved and spoiled mischiefs with loud intonations and screams and fake laughter, demanding our children “click and subscribe,” to help the YouTuber become wealthier with more and more “followers.”

In Wings of Desire, the angels follow the people. They follow them, not because they are curious, but because they feel for them desperately. In the contemporary world, why do we follow? We could say that our digital screens are mostly meant to make the rich more powerful, as they mesmerize, seduce, and enslave users.[26] Telegeographic maps demonstrating incoming and outgoing data traffic patterns show the richest countries in the world with the biggest arrows; the same could be denoted for the biggest online celebrities.[27] We are being sold the message that screens and surveillance will bring prosperity and solve the problems of the world, but for many people, screens have hijacked their very existence and sucked them into a vacuum, stymied by the number of incoming instant messages, texts, voicemails and emails. We have no time to live with profundity, because we now exist within a collapsed time-space.[28] We think we are building sustainable communities, but all we are doing is gazing like zombies unable to effect change—reduced to finger punching automatons, locked in to a virtual world that goes round and round and never changes. Next, next, click, send. Next, next, click, send. Next, next, . . . The business world is losing trillions annually to our dull state, and yet their meme is “We don’t want to be typecast with negative messages of moral panic,” so life goes on and nothing is said and on it goes. We might be painting a broad landscape here, but already we feel it is breath heavy on our necks.

The Worth of Life

How are we to celebrate our humanity? How do we tame the tools we have created? What will happen when the machines begin to self-replicate? Nick Bostrom set out his simulation argument in 2003. He posited: “If there were a substantial chance that our civilization will ever get to the posthuman stage and run many ancestor-simulations, then how come you are not living in such a simulation?” Books on super intelligence and more have followed, alongside questions arising from other futurologists on whether today’s humans are stuck in some kind of video game. Science fiction, including books like Ender’s Game and This Perfect Day, propagate this myth. Bostrom writes:

“In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent” in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are “omniscient” in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens.”[29]

Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire presents us with a manner in which to see the world around us that does not align in any way with Bostrom’s notions of a simulated life overseen by omnipotent and omniscient posthumans. While Bostrom is quick to argue that the belief in a simulated life is no different than that of a religious position using the bland principle of indifference (i.e., the rule that says that “in the absence of any relevant evidence, a rational agent will distribute . . . degrees of belief equally amongst the possible outcomes under consideration” [30]), Wim Wenders reminds us that there is more to life than just a game. If for some, it was just all a big game, or might well be so in a posthuman world, then really it is all for naught, and the worth of life, as depicted in scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life, reminiscent of themes shown in Wings of Desire, would be for naught. Our struggles, our suffering, our hopes, our dreams, they would all be reduced to naught, and exiting “the game by default” time after time, would make us run into an endless loop. Scenes of suicidal contemplation in Wings of Desire and It’s a Wonderful Life, would thus be meaningless, and the individuals depicted considering whether life was worth living, would faster jump off the building top or bridge than face their insecurities and darkness. The other option for someone like Albert Camus is to embrace “meaninglessness,” to accept that life is absurd and to move on. In Wings of Desire, we hear a despairing man thinking, “I don’t care. All these thoughts. I’d rather not think anymore. I go. But why?” As the man leaps to his death unable to consider a more feasible option, the Angel nearest him turns away in agony, letting out a scream of “Nein!” from the deepest place in his Angelhood.

If we believe in Bostrom’s posthuman simulation argument, then it might well begin with “jacking-in” à la William Gibson’s Neuromancer,[31] and end in one big Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson):[32] the tangibility of life at least in its most visceral dimensions would be lost, as would the reason the angels in Wings of Desire seek to shed their wings for earthen encounters. The potentiality for some transhumanists, whose imaginaries are inclusive of brain implants and even doing away with a body that decays, is that our very minds might well be uploaded into “the Simulation.” And thus, we may have eternity to explore one another’s simulations, but there would still be some point in the future when all would be virtually experienced and consumed (likely in quantum speed), and then what? When we exhaust all living beings’ lives and we live virtually, then we effectively put an end to endings.

Healing, Reunification, and Togetherness

For Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire was his way of going against a “no future” ideological hopeless existence following a half-century of war and destruction. Wings of Desire was about reclaiming our innocence, becoming like “little children” again, and believing that the aftermath of World War II in Berlin would not be forever. And in fact, the Wall that visually features so prominently in the film, dividing Berliners to East and West, came crumbling down not more than two years after the release of Wenders’ film. And like the crumbling of the Wall, so too the division between angels and humans becomes blurred, and Damiel (the angel) and woman (a human) are also united, accepting their mortality. The setting represents the need for healing, reunification, and togetherness. There can be no divisions between heaven and earth. Curt Bois,[33] who in Wings of Desire plays someone named Homer, living in a library, “was neither man nor angel but both at once because he’s as old as cinema itself.”[34] In a 2016 interview, when asked about the posthuman, former Oxford lecturer of Eastern Orthodox Studies, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, answered:

I do not know exactly what is meant by posthumanism. I see the human person as the crown and fulfilment of God’s creation. Humans have uniqueness because they alone are made in the image and likeness of God. Could there be a further development in the process of evolution, whereby some living being would come into existence, that was created but on a higher level than us humans? This is a question that we cannot really answer. But from the religious point of view, speaking in terms of my faith as a Christian, I find it difficult to accept the idea that human beings might be transcended by some new kind of living creature. . . . I see the incarnation as a kind of limit that we cannot surpass and that will not be superseded. And so I do not find it helpful to speculate about anything beyond our human life as we have it now. But we are not omniscient. All I would say is that it will get us nowhere if we try to speculate about something that would transcend human nature. The only way we can transcend human nature is by entering ever more fully into communion with God, but we do not thereby cease to be human. Whether God has further plans of which we know nothing, we cannot say. I can only say that, within the perspective of human life as we know it, I cannot see the possibility of going beyond the incarnation of Christ.[35]

Of philosophical scenarios like “Brain in a Vat,”[36] which interrogates the “realness” and “humanness” of a scenario in which a human brain outside of a complete human body is connected to a supercomputer that interprets its neural impulses, Ware further notes: “I become deeply uneasy when such things are suggested, basically because it undermines the fullness of our personhood. Anything that degrades living persons into impersonal machines is surely to be rejected and opposed.”[37] Here, C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength comes to mind; in it, a brain that lives bodiless wreaks havoc with an almost godly strength.[38] A life simulated degrades not only the role of angels but also the intense power of love. The tangibility and physicality of movement that can only come from a process of interaction between two people who are breathing, cannot be felt in fullness if “indirect” or “inanimate.” Love, in short, is dynamic and spontaneous and should never have to do with simulated experiences that are reminiscent of deep fakes. The fullness of love can only be experienced in authentic contexts. Some might also claim that a lot of people are already living a “simulated life” as they go from one screen to the next, unable to disengage from Wi-Fi. The unifying theme here between these two states of “disembodied” existence is disengagement from reality.

Mixed Reality

Mixed reality goggles and gaming platforms will further distort “the real.” Emergent games like Pokémon GO superimpose the virtual in a physical setting, motivating subscribers to walk or drive to popular locations. Many players are unaware or have simply given up caring that their every move is being microanalyzed due to tracking fatigue and trying to figure out where their data is ending up, as big data is sold on the market for a hefty price. The geek economy continues to spur disruptive processes and technologies that disturb traditional practices. Amazon may have started out selling books and Uber might have been perceived as a taxi company though it declared it was a tech company, but both companies rely on data, recommender systems, and uberveillant systems to make big profits. In contrast, the angels do not profit from knowing everything there is to know about the humans they are guarding. They act as hidden witnesses to the lonely population. While the angels look at the audience in their direct gaze, the humans they are closest to do not see them visibly unless they are children. The angels know the innermost thoughts of the people they guard, and would never disclose these details. The interior voices of humans can be heard by the angels; oftentimes these are things that cannot or would not be talked about in public or in private but just reflected upon. The angels do not spy, they are not curious creatures for the sake of it, they do not gossip, they have nothing to gain by listening save to emanate empathic intelligence. They have true compassion. At times they ache for the human condition and how humans behave, and at other times they see the joyful sorrow of being a human. This is in contrast to the “electronic gulags” we are building today, that seek to predict and profile your next purchase based on patterns of life movements and transaction-based engagements.

We are being told that kiosks that utilize facial recognition in fast-food stores in the future will be able not only to authenticate us but to predict what we will order. In fact, personality tests like those conducted by Cambridge Analytica using Michal Kosinski’s OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) approach,[39] claim to know us not only better than our parent or partner, but even better than ourselves.[40] Soon these algorithms that we are, often unknowingly, subjected to in every facet of life will be claiming our decision-making power, telling us that “big data” knows best for us and the world around us.[41] What will we do as humans when we lose our autonomy-freedom-power to make decisions for ourselves? Is this not what the control-obsessed Hitler achieved, to send Berlin spiralling backwards during World War II? The Nazi concentration camps housed those that did not fit the mold; a Hollerith machine was used to identify persons of Jewish or Roma background, people with mental and physical disabilities, and many more.[42] As George Orwell wrote in his prescient book 1984, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”[43] And yes in a world of absolute uberveillance, these few cubic centimeters will also be usurped by the beasts in the machine. There is nowhere to hide. Today the ability to extract ECGs and EEGs along with other physiological data points on the face,[44] can infer someone’s neurological activity, but with significant error rates and variability. Algorithms are not foolproof and if anything can be very misleading.[45] Errors will happen, and they will not only be asymmetric for individuals, but potentially catastrophic. Instead of angels being the ones who know the private thoughts of humans, it is a human creation, the machine, that now takes the place of the angels.

The machines are able to make near continuous logs of sensor information and allegedly present us with qualitative insights, a type of predicated situational awareness. This quantified self movement can tell you how many steps you walked, how many words you uttered, and your corresponding stress levels. It can turn your speech to text because of IOT hub devices listening from smoke detectors, dropcams, active toasters, and toilet rolls. They can also tell employers whether you would be a good fit for the organization, whether you might end up costing the health insurance industry a lot of money through illness, or that you are just altogether bad news for society given your DNA link to popular minority groups engaged in crime. There is little the machine cannot do, discriminating and typecasting on little pieces of bits and bytes, the digital chronicles and footprints you don’t even realize you leave behind.[46]

“I can’t see you, but I know you are here . . .”

Time is a central element that runs through Wings of Desire. Zeno’s Paradox comes to mind here—the futility of halving a distance, and halving it again, and again and again, never quite reaching the destination point. The pressing weight of movement unsatisfied. We’re more preoccupied with slicing time over and over again. A scene from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, describing a pending execution, portrays what our time on earth is really like as “the idiot” himself recounts the final moments of the accused, condensed as a flashback lasting only a few minutes. Sometimes it seems as though our lives are all but a split-second recording, recollected with regrets and with moments that could never be described in their totality. But the former angel in Wings of Desire, now human, played by Peter Falk, puts it in perspective when he speaks with an angel who is considering the transition:

“I can’t see you, but I know you are here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face. Just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something. See that’s cold. That feels good. Here. To smoke, to have coffee. And if you do it together, it’s fantastic. . . . Or when you’re cold you rub your hands together. That feels good. There’s so many good things. But you’re not here. I’m here. I wish you were here. I wish you could talk to me because I’m a friend. Compañiero.”

Of Falk, Wim Wenders wanted so much for the viewer to have that special aha moment: “Oh, so he’s an angel too!”[47] Falk, we realize quite quickly, is an angel who has already chosen to stay on earth and encourages other former angels. “How long have you been here?” he asks an angel who has just landed on earth. The newly descended angel replies, “A few minutes, an hour, a day, a week, a month,” and then laughs with reference to his watch and time. As it happens, Falk, who is famous as an American actor in real life and in Wings of Desire for his role as Colombo, also made one of the earliest television references to an embedded surveillance biomedical device used in a court of law to convict someone of a crime.[48] As seen in a 1974 episode of Colombo titled, “How to Dial a Murder” (Season 7, Episode 4). Columbo says to the suspected murderer:

You claim that you were at the physicians getting your heart examined . . . which was true [Colombo unravels a roll of ECG readings] . . . the electrocardiogram, Sir. Just before 3 o’clock your physician left you alone for a resting trace. At that moment you were lying down in a restful position and your heart showed a calm, slow, easy beat [pointing to the ECG read-out]. Look at this part, right here [Colombo points to the reading], lots of sudden stress, lots of excitement, right here at 3 o’clock, your heart beating like a hammer just before the dogs attacked. . . . Oh you killed him with a phone call, Sir. . . . I’ll bet my life on it. Very simple case. Not that I’m particularly bright, Sir . . . I must say, I found you disappointing, I mean your incompetence, you left enough clues to sink a ship. Motive. Opportunity. And for a man of your intelligence Sir, you got caught on a lot of stupid lies. A lot. The retrospective use of embedded biomedical devices, wearable fitness trackers, and even transport contactless cards, demonstrates that the law is ready to use any capability to help gather evidence toward an arrest and conviction.[12]

Control versus Care: Event Data Recorders and the Blockchain

So how do we juxtapose this quite hopeful movie of angels’ ability to sense our every thought and move, with the pessimistic prospect of uberveillance? The primary difference is that uberveillance, even when it is claimed to be used for “good” (care and convenience) will undeniably be used to “control.”[49] The camera will “tell all’’ and will be used and believed—without human perspective as context—in place of eyewitness accounts and interpretations. What are the limits of watching by machine? What are the costs? How will open registers such as blockchain and fintech propel us closer to the realization of uberveillance? Will advancements lead to tiny microcircuitry or nanotechnology embedded in the human body for surveillance?

M.G. Michael has previously described such an application of uberveillance as a “blackbox beneath the skin.”[50] The word “blackbox” here has two distinct meanings. The first is that mechanics of embedded technology beneath the skin are a mystery, and will likely remain that way for many lay users. We as a public will not know how “it” works precisely, for reasons of personal, organizational, and national security. The second reason is that the blackbox will act like a blackbox flight recorder.[51] In contrast to what the angels see in “black and white,” the uberveillant blackbox will capture full color, audio, and video. Video files captured will be streamed to the Cloud and calibrated with points of view from the sky, sea, ground, buildings, and infrastructure (e.g., poles, traffic lights). They will be “geographically registered,” “time stamped,” and “altitude based.” It will be an indisputable record of a cross-section of the world in any given moment. Various operational scenarios will depict their “audited version of events that is not contestable.” Judgments will be made about you based on your social networks and their overlaid evidence of your life. Points will be garnered from trusted sources, so that the higher your rank, the less likely you will be judged to be a criminal, mentally ill, or simply a misfit, and the more likely you are to have wealth, a good job, community standing, and reputational power.

Amendments to telecommunications legislation across the world have seen the introduction of metadata laws, which require carriers and service providers to record subscriber “content” for up to two years. Law enforcement can use these records by providing a warrant to investigate crimes. Additionally, biosurveillance laws requiring one to “check in” and :check out” using QR codes in the hope of reducing COVID-19 transmission, have now normalized such pervasive trends.[52] Uberveillance will facilitate the ultimate blockchain of every flow of information emanating from an individual to another individual via a machine. I go to the store to purchase something; the transaction becomes part of the blockchain. I go to the doctor for a check-up; the record becomes part of the blockchain. I make a phone call to a friend; that data becomes part of the blockchain. I give my child a birthday gift; that is recorded. I catch a train to work; that is part of the blockchain. There is nothing I can do today that cannot be blockchained. My choice in participating is whether I wish to remain on the grid or off the grid. Increasingly will this choice be taken away from me? Living off the grid will come with a host of consequences. It will not be for everyone. And ultimately, it will only be for the very few.

Conclusion

Wim Wenders gives us the opportunity to go from “black and white” to color, but not from color to “black and white.” And yet, a widespread hope of humans is to transcend the mortal to the immortal, to understand what it might be like to go from mortality and danger and risk, to a life where there is no danger or risk, to a life that “just is,” eternally, and simply, and incredibly perfect, not bound by time. Near the conclusion of Wings of Desire, the trapeze artist tells Damiel, the angel, who has chosen to stay behind, played so evocatively by the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz:

“You and I are time itself. Not just the city, the whole world is taking part in our decision. We’re more than just the two of us now. We embody something. We are sitting in the People’s Square . . . and it’s full of people with the same dream as ours. We define the game for all. I’m ready.”

Whether life is a “game,” the ultimate ideal is to live in love. In this twenty-first century, where the sense of touch is being slowly eroded through the touch of the machine and a pandemic virus which rightly encourages us to “physically distance” in the interim, we call on everyone to “wake up” from the screen trance we find ourselves in, and to bring back the hopes of Wings of Desire. We may not live with Walls like that of the Berlin Wall but we have built other types of walls between us. We don’t need to walk through walls, like the angels, we simply need to love and hold out our hands to break each others’ falls.

Contributor’s Details

M. G. Michael, PhD (ACU), MA (Hons) (MacqUni), MTheol (SydUni), BTheol (SCD), BA (SydUni), DipProfCouns (AIPC) is an independent researcher. He was formerly an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. Michael is a theologian and historian with cross-disciplinary qualifications in the humanities, who introduced the concept of überveillance into the privacy and bioethics literature.

Katina Michael is a professor at Arizona State University, holding a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing, Informatics and Decisions Systems Engineering. She is also the director of the Society Policy Engineering Collective (SPEC) and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. Katina is a senior member of the IEEE and a Public Interest Technology advocate who studies the social implications of technology.

Terri Bookman is an editor and journalist. She was previously Managing Editor of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine for thirty years. She is now Society Administrator for the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology.

Notes

We would like to thank Dr. Rebecca Monteleone for her critique of an early draft of this manuscript in 2018. We are appreciative of the reflections she meticulously made that helped to strengthen the underlying thesis of this paper.

References

1. David Denby, “Where Angels Long to Tread,” New York, May 9, 1988; Roger Ebert, “Wings of Desire,” RogerEbert.com, April 12, 1998, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-wings-of-desire-1988 ; Dessen Howe, “Wings of Desire,” Washington Post, July 1, 1988, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/wingsofdesirepg13howe_a0c891.htm.

2. Winner: Best Director, Cannes, 1987; Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography, Los Angeles Film Critics Association 1988; Best Feature Film, German Film Awards 1988; Best Director and Best Supporting Actor, European Film Awards 1988; Best Foreign Film, Independent Spirit Awards 1989; Best Cinematography, New York Film Critics Circle, 1989.

3. M.G. Michael, “Uberveillance: Definition,” in Fifth Edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, ed. S. Butler (Sydney: Australia’s National Dictionary, Sydney University, 2009), 1094. https://works.bepress.com/kmichael/178/.

4. Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Christine Perakslis, Roba Abbas, “Uberveillance and the Rise of Last-Mile Implantables: Past, Present and Future,” in Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, ed. Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Illiadis, 97–130 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11564.003.0007.

5. Christine Perakslis, Katina Michael, and M. G. Michael, “The Converging Veillances: Border Crossings in an Interconnected World, IEEE Potentials 35, no. 4 (September 2016): 23–25, 10.1109/MPOT.2016.2569724.

6. Katina Michael and M. G. Michael, “Commentary on: Mann, Steve: Wearable Computing,” in Mads Soegaard and Rikke Friis Dam, Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, The Interaction-Design.org Foundation, http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/wearable_computing.html .

7. While the concept of angels may be understood metaphorically, itself gestured to in the credits where Wenders lists filmmakers such as Ozu, Truffaut, and Tarkovsky, who he considers to be “angels,” this is not how angels function in the plot.

8. This observation might invite discussion of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Paul Klee’s painting of the angel, but it is beyond the scope of this enquiry to deal with Benjamin’s intervention into Marxist conceptions of history and historical determinism. See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), section IX, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm.

9. M. G. Michael, Katina Michael, Christine Perakslis, “Überveillance, the Web of Things, and People: What Is the Culmination of All This Surveillance?,” IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine 4, no. 2 (April 2015): 107–13, DOI: 10.1109/MCE.2015.2393007.

10. Ben Paechter, Jeremy Pitt, Nikola Serbedzija, Katina Michael, Jennifer Willies, Ingi Helgasona, “Heaven and Hell: Visions for Pervasive Adaptation,” Procedia Computer Science: The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011, vol. 7 (2011), 81–82, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2011.12.025.

11. M. G. Michael and Katina Michael, “A Note on ‘Überveillance,’“ in The Second Workshop on the Social Implications of National Security: From Dataveillance to Uberveillance and the Realpolitik of the Transparent Society, ed. Katina Michael and M. G. Michael, 9–25 (Wollongong: University of Wollongong, 2007).

12. Katina Michael, “Implantable Medical Device Tells All: Uberveillance Gets to the Heart of the Matter,” IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine 6, no. 4 (October 2017): 107–15, DOI: 10.1109/MCE.2017.2714279.

13. Katina Michael, “The Final Cut—Tampering with Direct Evidence from Wearable Computers,” presented at the Fifth International Conference of Multimedia Information Networking and Security (MINES 2013), Beijing, China, 2013.

14. M. G. Michael and Katina Michael, “Toward a State of Überveillance,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 29, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 9–16, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2010.937024.

15. Christine Perakslis, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, “The Converging Veillances: Border Crossings in an Interconnected World,” IEEE Potentials 35, no. 5 (2016): 23–25, DOI: 10.1109/MPOT.2016.2569724.

16. Katina Michael, “Sousveillance: Implications for Privacy, Security, Trust, and the Law,” IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, 4, no. 2 (April 2015): 92–94, DOI: 10.1109/MCE.2015.2393006.

17. Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, “Computing Ethics: No Limits to Watching?” Communications of the ACM 56, no. 11 (2013): 26–28, DOI: 10.1145/2527187.

18. Amelia Masters, Katina Michael, “Humancentric Applications of RFID Implants: The Usability Contexts of Control, Convenience and Care,” The Second IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Commerce and Services, 2005, DOI: 10.1109/WMCS.2005.11.

19. M. G. Michael and Katina Michael, “Uberveillance: 24/7 x 365—People Tracking and Monitoring,” Privacy Horizons: Terra Incognita, 29th International Conference on Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (29th Conference internationale des commissaires a la protection des donnees et de la vie privee), September 25–28, 2007, Montreal, Canada, http://www.privacyconference2007.gc.ca/workbooks/pres_wrkshop1_01_michael_e.pdf (accessed October 1, 2007).

20. Katina Michael, Keith Miller, “Big Data: New Opportunities and New Challenges,” Computer 46, no. 6 (June 2013): 22–24, DOI: 10.1109/MC.2013.196.

21. Katina Michael, George Roussos, George Q. Huang, Arunabh Chattopadhyay, Rajit Gadh, B. S. Prabhu, Peter Chu, “Planetary-Scale RFID Services in an Age of Uberveillance,” Proceedings of the IEEE 98, no. 9 (September 2010): 1663–71, DOI: 10.1109/JPROC.2010.2050850.

22. See Katina Michael, “Putting Technology into Perspective in Asia,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 32, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 5–6, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2013.2276662; and Jason Sargent, Khanjan Mehta, Katina Michael, “Social and Economic Sustainability,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 34, no. 1 (March 2015): 17–18, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2015.2407072.

23. Katherine Albrecht and Katina Michael, “We Got to Do Better,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 33, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 5–7, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2014.2300948.

24. Eames Yates, “Here’s Why Steve Jobs Never Let His Kids Use an iPad,” Business Insider, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/heres-why-steve-jobs-never-let-his-kids-use-ipad-apple-social-media-2017-3?r=US&IR=T.

25. M. G. Michael, Katina Michael, “The Fallout from Emerging Technologies: Surveillance, Social networks, and Suicide,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 30, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 13–17, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2011.942312.

26. Katina Michael, “Enslaved,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 33, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 5–10, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2014.2363980. See also Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

27. Rogers, “Global Traffic Map 2010,” Telegeography, 2010, available online: https://www.telegeography.com/assets/website/images/maps/global-traffic-map-2010/global-traffic-map-2010-x.jpg.

28. The collapse of time-space has been understood in a variety of ways. David Harvey coined the term “time-space compression” in describing communicative technologies. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberaliam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4. Paul Virilio talks of the compression of time and space through technologies of acceleration, and the way there is a flattening of experience. Adopting a pre-digital lens, Baudrillard has described a situation of hyperreal proliferations of simulations whereby concepts of origin are lost rendering us directionless and empty. More pressingly in relation to digital technology, Sean Cubitt has observed that “the shattered ego triumphs in the strategic collection of swipes, clicks, and purchases that generate more data for the mill.” Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: SAGE, 1998), 149.

29. Nick Bostrom, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?,” Philosophical Quarterly 53, no. 211 (2003): 243–55, https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html.

30. E. Benjamin, “Principals of Indifference” (preprint), philsci-archive.pitt.edu, 2019, available online: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16041/.

31. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Seattle: Ace, 1984).

32. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Boston: Bantam Spectra, 1992).

33. Wings of Desire, “Curt Bois: Homer,” IMDB (1987), https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093191/characters/nm0092290.

34. Wim Wenders, “Wim Wenders: Wings of Desire,” BBC4, Film School Through Commentaries, February 15, 2013), https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=664&v=oTaXIkfcUl8&feature=emb_logo (10–11 minutes).

35. M. G. Michael, Katina Michael, “Religion, Science, and Technology: An Interview with Metropolitan Kallistos Ware,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 36, no. 1 (March 2017): 20–26, DOI: 10.1109/MTS.2017.2654283.

36. K. D. Stephan, K. Michael, M. G. Michael, L. Jacob, and E. P. Anesta, “Social Implications of Technology: The Past, the Present, and the Future,” in Proceedings of the IEEE 100, Special Centennial Issue (May 2012): 1752–81, DOI: 10.1109/JPROC.2012.2189919.

37. Michael and Michael, “Religion, Science, and Technology.”

38. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Vol. 3 of Space Trilogy) (New York: Simon and Schuster, London, 1996).

39. https://www.michalkosinski.com/.

40. Alex Hern, “Cambridge Analytica: How Did It Turn Clicks into Votes?,” The Guardian, May 6, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/06/cambridge-analytica-how-turn-clicks-into-votes-christopher-wylie.

41. Jeremy Pitt, ed., This Pervasive Day: The Potential and Perils of Pervasive Computing (London: Imperial College Press, 2012); Jeremy Pitt, ed., The Computer After Me: Awareness and Self-Awareness in Autonomic Systems (London: Imperial College Press, 2014).

42. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (New York: Crown Books, 2001).

43. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1983), 26.

44. “Nowhere to Hide: What Machines Can Tell from Your Face,” The Economist, September 9, 2017, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/09/09/what-machines-can-tell-from-your-face.

45. Kevin W. Bowyer, Michael King, Walter Scheirer, Kushal Vangara, “The Criminality From Face Illusion,” IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 1, no. 4 (December 2020), DOI: 10.1109/TTS.2020.3032321.

46. Katina Michael, Roba Abbas, Rafael A. Calvo, George Roussos, Eusebio Scornavacca, Samuel Fosso-Wamba, “Humans in the Loop: Learning to Trust in AI but to What Extent?,” IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 1, no. 4 (December 2020): 174, DOI: 10.1109/TTS.2020.3044344.

47. Wim Wenders, “Wim Wenders: Wings of Desire,” BBC4, Film School Through Commentaries, February 15, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=664&v=oTaXIkfcUl8&feature=emb_logo (11.20 minutes).

48. Jacob Gershman, “Prosecutors Say Fitbit Device Exposed Fibbing in Rape Case, Wall Street Journal (2016, April 2021), http:// blogs.wsj.com/law/2016/04/21/prosecutors-say-fitbit-device-exposedfibbing-in-rape-case/.

49. Masters and Michael, “Humancentric Applications of RFID Implants.”

50. Katina Michael and M. G. Michael, “Implementing ‘Namebers’ Using Microchip Implants: The Black Box Beneath the Skin,” in This Pervasive Day: The Potential and Perils of Pervasive Computing, ed. Jeremy Pitt, 163–206 (London: Imperial College Press, 2012).

51. K. Michael, R. Abbas, G. Roussos, E. Scornavacca, and S. Fosso-Wamba, “Ethics in AI and Autonomous System Applications Design,” in IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 1, no. 3 (September 2020): 114–27, DOI: 10.1109/TTS.2020.3019595.

52. R. Abbas and K. Michael, “COVID-19 Contact Trace App Deployments: Learnings From Australia and Singapore,” in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, vol. 9, no. 5, pp. 65–70, 1 Sept. 2020, doi: 10.1109/MCE.2020.3002490

Citation: MG Michael, Katina Michael, Terri Bookman, 2021, “Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire: Anticipating Uberveillance”, Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, https://www.jstor.org/journal/jasiapacipopcult, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2021, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, pp. 109-135, doi: 10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.6.1.0109

Also: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.6.1.0109