Movie Script

In the movie The Lives of Others, we follow a spy in 1984 East Berlin, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover. The feeling I retain from the movie—since I’ve forgotten many plot details—is one of loneliness, misery, and how this surveillance mechanism affects someone’s perception of the world and social life in general. It’s really hard to imagine anyone wanting to live in a society like that.

Reading Robert Mindell’s book, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy, and especially the eye-opening war chapter, which delves into the details and intricacies of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPAs), and more importantly, the host of different supportive personnel, networks, and operators involved, made me wonder how our societies have become surveillance societies to an unprecedented degree.

There are already generations of workers whose daily jobs involve active spying, either via remote camera systems or by overseeing automated systems that detect anomalies in scanning devices, thermal cameras, or surveillance systems in general. Engineers and developers fine-tune surveillance systems. Data analysts extract patterns from raw data. Security and military personnel daily use and monitor such systems, and in the context of immigration policies, border controls—both at sea, in the air, and on land—use advanced survailance technologies and among others the aforementioned RPAs to locate, push back, or even lead migrants to their deaths.

There’s no way all those working in such positions, or their peers and family members who live with them, are not impacted. Perhaps we have already become part of another - a future, similarly themed - movie script.