Lo and Behold - Internet: il futuro è oggi

I have seen Werner's name and jumped on it. Wow! Must see it.

Minute after minute it becomes more painful. An exercise in ignorance, a glorification of stupidity. Back in the late 1970s there was no Internet, only ArpaNET. Yet the director and his ignorant crowd find the Internet in 1969! And what a wonderful thing! When all your life you have used pen and paper and now, an old man, someone shows you the magic of Skype, sure, it looks magical. But when you look at the protocols of the Internet, how they were built, how they were simply a way some bearded geeks made computers actually talk in English words between them, it becomes scary. No encryption. No privacy. Not because the ones designing the internet ever cared about privacy. That was way beyond their ability. The broken email protocol in which anybody can inject emails and pretend to be someone else. All the identifying bits. The lack of certification, because they all knew each other. A mess. A disgusting mess that even today seems impossible to fix. Yet it remains the only option simply because nobody has the resources to start a second project.

And all are competing in who can be more ignorant. Did you know that on the Space Station one module communicates with another module on the Space Station through the Internet? The people inside might suffocate because some security cameras are trying to download the latest Xmen movie. Lawrence Krauss, the specialist into the Origins of the Universe. Actually a clown specializing in talking for big sums of money. Did he program something for the Internet? He is a physicist. Was Internet started in his University lab? Nothing at all. He is there to talk about "will it have its own consciousness?" He has no idea. But he has enough fans that he was inserted to help the box office.

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

This documentary promises to shed light on the history of the internet, especially the time before the invention of the World Wide Web, in 1990. What we get instead is a procession of middle aged kooks pontificating randomly on AI takeover, sun spot events and the end of the world, and the internet being embedded into walls.

The framing of most of the interviews is quite flippant. Normally a WH documentary is irreverent, but fond. Here though the viewer feels like an intruder into the world of a series of out-of-step eccentrics, whom the internet had long since left behind and taken on a life of its own - this being brought painfully into view when the question "does the internet dream of itself"? is raised.

It seems what was intended to be a film about the, mostly undocumented, innocent history of the pre www internet, took on a life of its own as the subjects started rambling about other things. It ended up showing only the wide-eyed naiievety of both Herzog and the interviewees, as they wandered away from their areas of expertise and into what is essentially uninformed futurology.

There was a veteran "Hacker", who "hacked" into this and that, we're told. That he'd done 99% of his "hacking" by calling companies and pretending to be a manager wasn't made clear. A bizarrely posed family who'd had a picture of their daughter that had fatally crashed on a joyride in the father's Porsche published online, told us the devil was in the internet, listing some nasty things that had been emailed to them about their daughter and her death. In the same vein, an apocalyptic prediction by three fervent geeks, who think we're on the edge of a societal collapse caused by solar flares.

All in all, the film misses the mark. If it had been presented a bit differently, I think it would have been a more worthwhile watch, but as it is, it comes across as nothing more than the poking of some Silicon Valley eccentrics with a stick, and seeing what they do.

The internet is only a small subject for those that (like me) see it in the simple terms of what I know I do on it – check emails, read information, etc. However with such an expansive subject it was a good thing that the curious mind of Herzog was given the project of examining it in this film. I have read some people complain about the weakness of this film as a 'documentary', with comments about how key players such as Mark Zuckerberg and others are not included; the answer to such criticism is in the title, because this is not a documentary so much as it is a reverie, which is to say a musing and free-floating daydream through the subject.

In the editing suite this was obviously reined in somewhat because the film is structured into broad chapters. This helps the film be watchable, but importantly does not lose the sense of drifting through the subject with plenty to think about but nothing too solid that would break the state of reverie. Whether or not this works for you will depend on the individual, but Herzog's style made it work for me because he drives this approach with his angles and his line of thought (although he often seems less present than in some other of his films). It doesn't all fit together neatly of course, and at times tonally it is uneven, but mostly it is a quite fascinating wander through the ideas and connections of the internet, and is well worth seeing for what it leaves you with as much as what it offers directly.

There are very important, tough questions that need to be asked about where technology is leading us. "Does the internet dream of itself?" is not one of them. This effort from Herzog is a major disappointment but not a surprise, partly because it started out as a corporate promotional video. Also because most of his docs are ostensibly on subjects that aren't that interesting or important on the surface, but he makes them riveting. Here, he's tackling a subject about which everything that can be said, has already been said, except for the hard questions. Is the internet even a net positive thing? Why bother going to Mars? It's getting harder and harder "to make a contribution" (to science, or to society), so what does that mean for us? Soon enough robots will beat Messi at football -- will anyone want to watch that? These questions don't get asked. And these are easy ones that came up anyway.

Herzog, who is a known non-tech guy, just seems ignorant and uninterested in technology, both the good and the bad of it. And we need him to pry forcefully into the moral morass that it's dragging us into. But he can't. He's just a baby boomer who is completely immersed in his real- world occupation that doesn't involve surfing the internet. He doesn't know, doesn't care. So unfortunately, he has gathered the most maddeningly thick-headed "scientific experts" to make bland, vapid observations about how amazing it all is. This is a huge disappointment. Werner is just not the man for this job -- so he's moved on to something more up his alley; volcanoes...

I was lucky to see this at Sundance with one of the best audiences.

Somehow, even after Werner's extensive resume, this was his most immersive and informative documentary yet.

The film doesn't just touch on the basic history and fundamentals of the Internet, but provides such a deep understanding of its past, present, and future. It dives into the wonders of what is possible while carefully reminding us about its dangers, all while Werner gives a very comedic voice-over.

It's a shame that Roger Ebert isn't around to view this film. I know he would've been proud of his friend for creating such an accomplishment in documentary filmmaking.