Review of Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016) by V H — 03 Sep 2016

"Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World", Werner Herzog's new documentary about the internet, starts at the very beginning, a small room on the UCLA campus, where in 1969, the first ever message was sent from one computer to another. The student sending the message - one letter at a time - had intended to type "LOGIN", but after sending the first two letters, the receiving computer crashed, making "LO" the first official communique. Kind of like when Marge Simpson caught Bart in the midst of getting a heart-shaped "Mother" tattoo, leaving him with just the word "Moth", except not as funny. In fact, Herzog doesn't think it's funny at all. He thinks it's quite fitting. "Lo and behold, the internet was born!" Whatever you say, Werner.

"Lo" is divided into ten segments, each touching on a different topic. Several highlight the internet's dark side. One features this dour-looking family standing around a table covered with plates of baked goods. The mother does most of the talking, relating how after her 18-year-old daughter crashed the family Porsche into a toll booth, gruesome post-crash pictures propagated all over the internet and were even anonymously emailed directly to the grieving family. The mother declares the internet to be evil, the work of the antichrist. The other family members nod in silent agreement. No one touches the muffins.

There's another segment about people who claim to be extremely sensitive to radio waves, prompting them to move to a Wi-Fi-free zone around a research center in rural West Virginia for health reasons. They tearfully describe the horrible symptoms they experienced while living elsewhere, one having spent her days inside some sort of protective box. They plead desperately for the medical community to take their condition seriously. I'm no doctor, but color me skeptical.

Many of the segments are an unsatisfying combination of superficial and over my head, with scientists just scratching the surface of topics that seem like they would be interesting if I could only understand what the hell they were talking about. In one, some old dude is at a blackboard writing long complicated equations and reading them aloud: "...and then you take rho over the sum of the square root..." And then his chalk snaps and I and everyone around me laughs, I think because it's the only part of the scene we're smart enough to understand.

There are also some cool soccer-playing robots and a human-like robot that takes about ten minutes to pour a glass of orange juice and a discussion of self-driving cars and then Elon Musk talks about colonizing Mars and is taken aback when Herzog volunteers to go on the first mission. Some of this stuff seems less about living in a "connected world" and more just about technology in general.

Herzog asks virtually every scientist in the movie this question: "Does the internet dream of itself?" He seems quite pleased with himself for having posed it and I felt almost embarrassed for the scientists who had to try to indulge his little philosophical thought experiment without blatantly insulting him. Surprisingly, they all said things like "wow, that's a really good question" before tripping all over themselves trying to contort the definition of the word "dream" to prevent it from sounding like an idiotic question, which of course it is.

Despite having grown up in the pre-internet age (for the masses, I mean), or perhaps because of it, my love for the internet is undiminished by any of its perceived downsides. Sure there are scams and spam and gaming addictions and hackers, but do you know what people did 25 years ago when they wanted to know the indecipherable lyrics to a song they heard on the radio? Nothing! They were forced to make up their own words or sing "blah blah blah" when they got to that part. The ability to google song lyrics alone outweighs all of the negatives combined.

Which makes it all the more frightening when a tattooed astronomer tells us that one day there will be a big solar storm that could wipe out the entire internet, just like in 1859 when solar flares caused telegraph machines to catch on fire. And then we'll all die because our food distribution systems are internet- based, so once the supermarket shelves are panic-emptied like when they forecast those big east coast snowstorms that rarely materialize, they'll just stay that way. And as we all slowly die of starvation (except for the survivalists who, ironically, we used to use the internet to mock), we won't even be able to google song lyrics.

Pretty much everything Werner Herzog says is unintentionally funny, in part because of his accent and in part because of his odd phrasing and extreme earnestness. While he touches on a lot of interesting subjects, it would be a much better documentary if it was more narrowly focused and if Herzog just kept his mouth shut.