The Internet was modest, even naïve, in the beginning.

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the

Connected World, Werner Herzog’s documentary meditation on the web’s birth, evolution,
and possible future, establishes this from the opening moments of the first of its 10 chapters,
each of which serves as a vignette about a different vision of the past or future. One of the
first attempts to transmit data was a simple “Login” command between two California
universities. It stalled after those first two letters, but as one of the original programmers
posits, “Lo” couldn’t be a more accurate way to start what became the modern Internet. It
served as a proclamation, a “lo and behold” inviting all to marvel at what man had made.

Whether this was the best or worst thing to happen in human history is relative, a fact that
makes Herzog a filmmaker uniquely suited for an exploration of this nature. The moral
relativity of his best documentary work is on display here, and if Lo and Behold is more just
a collection of interviews on a series of themes than a cohesive piece of storytelling, it’s still
a fascinating endeavor into how the Internet went from personal to unimaginably broad and
how it could either continue to expand or perhaps even return to that infant phase again.
When talking about those first, massive computers, one of its creators marvels at the odor of
it, the perfect build of it. People don’t have these thoughts about their laptops these days, but
Herzog does.
He also has no shortage of ideas about what the Internet has done to us. Some of the darker
vignettes delve into the more sordid sides of our lives moving online, as in one case where he
speaks with a Washington rehab center that specializes in helping those with Internet or
gaming addictions; the stories of lives, jobs, and relationships lost to hyper-addictive online
gaming would feel like an older generation’s moralistic hand-wringing if they weren’t so
completely plausible. Although Herzog only spends an extremely brief time investigating
Internet harassment, there’s one heartbreaking story about a family who lost one of their
daughters to a brutal car wreck, only to have anonymous trolls email pictures of her
dismembered body to the family. Her mother suggests that the Internet “is the spirit of evil,
and I feel that it is running through people.” The internet is a tool, only as good as those
wielding it, and even Herzog refrains from reiterating the cruelties of that hate mail in the
film outright.

He also sees its glories and potential dangers alike on a much broader level. One chapter
explores solar flares, and how the kind of cataclysmic event that could destroy satellites or fry
entire networks is not just frightening, but ultimately inevitable, and completely beyond
human control. This idea is central to Lo and Behold; Herzog sees the rapid evolution of
technology as both beautiful and disquieting and understands that a human dependence on it
is unavoidable but nevertheless worrisome. After all, if all it takes to upend human existence
is a solar flare, or even something as simple as the human element being the greatest flaw in
even the most well-maintained network security, how can people go about their lives so
complacently when it could all collapse at any moment? The answer is simple: anything can
end the world at any second, so there’s no point living in any more fear of it than is
necessary. The Internet was human-made, and humanity is chaos by its very nature.
Yet there are moments that imagine an even braver future. Herzog talks with those
developing more advanced self-driving cars and discusses with them how such a machine is
perfect because each mistake can be amended by every other car in the world instantly,
something humanity simply cannot match. He spends some time with Elon Musk discussing
the Space-X program and the possibilities of human civilization being divided by planets.
(“Who would tell them about the winner of the World Series?” Herzog dryly wonders of
potential Mars colonizers.) And yet, there is a reality that is at once disturbing and completely
accurate to even the most noble human endeavors imaginable. One scientist asserts that “If
the Internet shuts down, people wouldn’t be able to remember how they lived before.” And
it’s true. Lo and Behold lingers throughout on the idea that already there are generations who
know no world without the Internet and how this is at once a miracle of human creation and
something worth being nostalgic and sad about.
But Lo and Behold is no Luddite’s screed. With Herzog’s signature mix of dry humor,
searching interviews, and clean, clear assemblage, he simply takes our world at face value
and uses the Internet to investigate the imperfections of the people who created it, innovate
within it, and live it. And it’s telling that the film ends not on any of its bleak predictions, but
on an American colony of people with severe radiation sensitivities who can no longer live in
a world packed with smartphones. Their condition is tragic, but in a glen where no phones are
allowed within a 10-mile radius because of the deep-space research happening there, the
afflicted have a chance to live a life that the world has largely abandoned. They know their
neighbors. They play bluegrass music together sometimes. And in a world both never more
connected and never more distant, they continue to live as we always have.

In Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Herzog tackles the complex,
controversial, and mysterious Internet. He refers to this technological tool as "one of the
greatest revolutions" in human history. This bold and multidimensional film is divided into
10 chapters:
 The Early Days
 The Glory of the Net
 The Dark Side
 Life without the Net
 The End of the Net
 Earthly Invaders
 Internet on Mars
 Artificial Intelligence
 The Internet of Me
 The Future
Here you will discover a breadth of material that ranges from the very serious to the
extremely quirky and odd. Herzog begins with a terse history of the Internet's beginnings at
U.C.L.A. during the 1960s. Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science, takes us into
the "holy room" where the first Internet computer remains. He recalls his feelings when a
message was transmitted from this computer to the Stanford Research Institute on October
29, 1969. Programmers were on the phone confirming that the login was happening. Stanford
replied that they had received the "L" and the "o." Then its computer crashed. So the first
Internet message was "Lo." This documentary chronicles what happened beyond that.
Danny Hillis, another scientist, reminisces about a time when all the users of this technology
could be identified in one directory. Now, he states, the global directory would be 72 miles
thick. Another statistic which stands out is: "Today, about 3.2 billion people use the internet
around the world." Herzog chimes in that CDs containing a single day's worth of global data
would stretch "to Mars and back."
Here are some observations made in interviews with computer and robot specialists, hackers,
technicians, programmers, gamers, and professors.
 Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind Telsa, is now interested in colonizing Mars; he
also reflects on cyberwarfare or other earth catastrophes.
 Kevin Mitnick, a legendary hacker, reveals the mayhem and the mischief that can take
place by those who can get into large computer systems; cyberwarfare now puts
smaller states on the same level as larger ones.
 Joydeep Biswas, an engineer who has put together a robotic soccer team, shows how
they work together and even reveals his favorite robot player.
 Sebastian Thrun, an online-learning pioneer, notes that self-driving cars can all learn
from the collective experiences of other cars and their mistakes, unlike human drivers.

Also included is an account of abusive cyber behavior ending with a mother calling the
Internet "a work of the Devil" after pictures of her dead child were widely circulated online.
Herzog talks with several persons who are sensitive to electromagnetic waves and get
radiation sickness; they now live in an isolated area totally off the grid. A segment on video-
game addicts reveals that many of them have completely stopped being present to the real
world; some have developed blood clots in their legs after sitting so long at their computers.
Astronomers explain that a large solar flare, which has not happened in many years, could
disrupt Internet communication worldwide, affecting all the food supply, water and other
systems supporting modern life.
In a telling scene, we see a group of Buddhist monks standing in front of a city skyline and
the question is posed, "Have the monks stopped meditating?" We see that they are not
bowing their heads in prayer or meditation. All of them are totally focused on their cell
phones. Herzog quotes a startling statistic: There will be 31 billion devices connected to the
Internet by 2020.
A famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner shows two dogs by a computer. The caption
reads: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It's good for a laugh, and it's also a
reminder that Internet technology is raising many spiritual questions. Who are you? Where do
you really live? And who are your companions? Don't miss this thought-provoking
documentary!

The film is broken into ten chapters, each annotated like sections of a book, each bearing the
sort of quasi-mystical or vaguely ominous title that you'd expect Herzog to affix: “The Glory
of the Internet,"“The Dark Side" and so on. It is essentially a promotional film, financed
mainly by the cybersecurity firm NetScout, but for all its insistence on the glory of
interconnectedness and the transformations it has inspired, Herzog pays nearly equal attention
to the downsides, particularly government and corporate surveillance and faceless cruelty.
Like a lot of stories of human-created intelligence, in its heart this one is "Frankenstein." A
scientist who is inspired or mad, depending on your point of view, creates a child of sorts,
and as the child grows into adolescence and adulthood, it starts to take on a life of its own,
unsettling and threatening its creator to the point where it eventually seems to be telling the
"parent" what to do, and even how to evolve.
The movie begins with a scientific "birth," with shots of students walking in slow motion
across the University of Southern California Los Angeles. The music is the opening of
Wagner’s Ring, the Prelude to Das Rheingold; it was memorably used in Terrence Malick's
"The New World,' but it is also associated, like all Wagner's work, with Hitler, who adored
Wagner and derived the philosophical underpinnings of Nazism from Wagner's political
writing. Many of Herzog's filmmaking choices have that kind of double-edged
appropriateness. As Herzog muses on the depressing ugliness of institutional hallways in an
academic building on campus, we see a trim older gentleman, computer science professor
Leonard Kleinrock, leading the camera through a doorway that leads to the room where the
Internet was born in 1969. As Kleinrock shows us the first node in the Internet and talks
about ARPANET, a government-supported data network that would use the technology later
known as "packet switching," Herzog doesn't interrupt his lively, polished monologue. He
seems delighted by Kleinrock's brilliance, enthusiasm and showmanship. The viewer might
expect the rest of the film to unfold in this mode, with the director interviewing various
scientific founders and technology boosters, creating a gallery of inspirational character
sketches along the way.
But two segments later, the film takes a sharp turn into despair and disgust as Herzog visits
the parents and siblings of Nikki Catsouras, who was crushed and nearly decapitated in a car
wreck in 2006. A highway patrolman at the scene took a photo of her corpse, as regulations
required, but then forwarded it to colleagues, and somehow it slipped free and circulated
everywhere, and the trolls got hold of it and immediately began tormenting her family by
emailing them the photo with snide or vile captions like "Woo hoo, daddy! I'm still alive!"
The family was so horrified that they withdrew from online life and homeschooled their
youngest daughter. Catsouras' mother flat-out tells us that she thinks the devil lives in the
Internet and is slowly but surely making all of us more like him.
Herzog lets this incident stand in for the troll culture of anonymous harassment and emotional
abuse, one of many downsides of the technology that at first was characterized as a gateway
to greater understanding. As "Lo and Behold" unfolds, he alternates hopeful and grim stories
with others in a minor key that could be taken both ways at once.
The section on driverless cars, for instance, optimistically sketches a future where a ride to
work is stress free and traffic moves with hive-mind efficiency, then raises the chilling
prospect of onboard computers having to make split-second, utilitarian life-and-death
decisions, such as whether to crash into pedestrians or property to keep a car's driver safe. An
expert insists that the computer strives to do neither because it's been programmed to adhere
to Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics—machines should never harm people or knowingly
allow them to be harmed—but like every other choice in life, this one is not entirely in the
decision maker's control. Like other segments, this one evokes Clarence Darrow's line from
"Inherit the Wind": "Mister, you may conquer the air, but the clouds will stink of gasoline
and the birds will lose their wonder."
Herzog makes a relaxed but alert guide throughout, using narration sparsely but memorably
and letting us hear his offscreen voice asking questions, some of which seem merely prankish
until you hear the answers. (When talking to a scientist who helped devise small, self-driving
robot drones that can play football in teams, he asks if the most accomplished group of
drones can out-think Brazil's team. The answer: no, not at the moment, but don't bet against
them in 2050.)
The mosaic arrangement of material ensures that no one subject can be covered in detail—the
sum total sometimes plays like a very good themed edition of "CBS News Sunday Morning"
but with a wickedly funny narrator—and a couple of segments, notably one about a rehab
clinic for gaming addicts, feel intellectually undercooked. The film is saved from mere
competence by that Herzogian feeling, at once grandiose and self-deprecating. Herzog
embodies the cliche about the performer who's so charismatic that he could read aloud from
the phone book and still be mesmerizing. An early segment informs us that during the early
days of online activity, there was a printed directory containing the names and contact
numbers of every person using the Internet. This document, we are told, is basically a phone
book. It's a good thing Herzog didn't pause the film to read aloud from it. If he had, the
Internet would have exploded.