The internet profoundly influenced daily life even more than we realize. Frankly, it is hard to remember how we engaged in piracy, anonymous slander, and bullying before it existed. Yet, we could lose all these advances in one Carrington Event. Werner Herzog takes stock of our digital condition in “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.”
You need not explain the perils of the internet to Hillary Clinton. Nobody is more secretive when it comes to hiding email archives, yet the personal data of her donors has still been splashed all over cyberspace. That is not exactly what Dr. Leonard Kleinrock had in mind when he collaborated on the internet’s creation.
Like all good things, the internet does not lack competing creation stories, but a strong case can be make for the team of scientists assembled in UCLA’s Boelter Hall, feverishly working to send a digital message up the road to Stanford. That is where Herzog begins his ten-part meditation, finding Kleinrock to be figure of appropriately Herzogian enthusiasm.
The connected world also used to be a small world. One early pioneer still has the slim volume of all the collected email addresses of the entire connected world (sorted twice). In fact, early protocols were intended for that sort of tight little community and lagged behind the exponential growth that began in the mid-1990s. As a result, it is not long before Herzog stares into the abyss of the internet’s dark side.
Nobody better understands the anonymous malice the internet unleashes than Catsouras family. When their teen daughter Nikki was tragically killed in a car wreck, scores of trolls bombarded them with a gory leaked photo of the accident scene, along with their callous commentary. (Frankly, since Catsouras was driving a sports car, this could also be considered as part of the ugly Occupy Decency-class warfare movement, but Herzog maintains a rigidly narrow focus during this section.)
Ironically, tight focus is generally the one thing this far-ranging kitchen sink survey lacks. Herzog touches on just about everything, including internet security (with the help of in/famous hacker Kevin Mitnick) and our increasing dependency on the net for just about everything.
