View of the Unreal World
LO and BEHOLD
Reveries of the Connected World
Directed by Werner Herzog
On October 29, 1969, the first message was sent on what is now called the Internet. The message, from scientists at UCLA to scientists at The Stanford Research Lab some 400 miles away, was to be the words “LOG IN.” The Stanford computer crashed after the letters “LO” were sent and “Lo and Behold” computer-to-computer communication began, as does the documentary film by Werner Herzog of the same name. The film is an interesting view of the development of the Internet and associated technology over these past 47 years. Herzog, whose disembodied voice is often heard off camera, is interacting and to some extent interviewing people. What we hear is a voice that is at times earnest and reverential, and at others raspy and breathless. Herzog has divided the documentary into ten chapters, beginning with Part I The Early Years and ending with Part X The Future. The ten chapters can be loosely grouped into three general areas. The first several chapters regard the founding and development of the Internet. The next chapters deal with problems and potential problems; the dark side, life without the Internet, early invaders, hackers and cyber warfare, and the end of the Internet. The last chapters look at the Internet on Mars, artificial intelligence, man’s interaction and the future.
Though the film can be classified as a documentary, it is a rather unconventional one. It seems to follow Herzog’s interests and is an engaging, though far from a definitive view of the Internet (almost nothing on social media), with a smattering of other related technologies. And while he is interested in the subject matter, there is a sense that he is also very interested, likely more so, in the people who have been a part of what has arisen and is now manifest in the world. Indeed, on the cover poster the film is promoted as “The Human Side of the Digital Revolution.” People are given the opportunity to just talk; occasionally, Herzog’s voice comes into the scene with a question, comment or redirection. The images on the screen are often just of people with a tiny amount of background. There is a bit of deep science and math, but this is not Herzog’s focus. Primarily, we see people affecting and affected by a phenomena that began slowly and has grown to encompass a world of digitized data really beyond almost anyone’s imagination. At one point, we are told that the amount of data being sent in one day, should it be downloaded to CDs and stacked, would reach to Mars and back. This factoid seems almost insanely overblown, but the point is made.
Regarding the first area, founding and development, it is not clear in the film that this was to a large degree a directed development. In the film a collaborative effort of experimentation is implied. But is that what happened? Though barely and only indirectly mentioned in the film, the U.S. Government, primarily the Defense Department through grants, birthed the Internet by directly and indirectly funding the development of ARPANET over which the “LO” message was sent; through government funding it grew, at some point achieving its own momentum, and a private sector driven velocity developed. The film implies a more organic development and, indeed, at some point escape velocity was achieved and it all just happened. It is still just happening. Little control other than market forces, which means if it is profitable, potentially profitable or pushes a point of view, it is on the Net. There are multiple interviews with people directly involved in this time period of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and many are brought back to comment on the issues that later arise in the film.
The second grouping of chapters contains content of what might be called the underbelly of the Internet, and is presented by people affected negatively, as well as others who were used by, and or have been using, the Internet for their own purposes. These interviews are the strongest and broadest part of the film. Initially, we are shown what can be described as a family in shock—a family whose daughter’s suicide was graphically portrayed on the Internet. The lack of compassion and just plain cruelty an anonymous medium affords is on full display as the devastated family tells their story. The mother and father, in palpable grief, speak of the experience of being sent pictures of their daughter’s nearly decapitated body. As the interview is ending, the mother, her blue eyes set in a black shroud of mascara, states that the Internet itself is the Anti-Christ. It is an entity whose tentacles move through people until finding the evil within and releasing it upon the world. The film continues in an isolated area of the West Virginia Mountains, a community of people with little technology available. A no-cell phone area was created by the need for an electromagnetic pollution free zone. Within a 10-mile radius of a radio telescope, people operate in a pre-cell phone world. This area has attracted a number of people so sensitive to electromagnetic “pollution” that they can exist without trauma and pain and outside of their Faraday cages only in such a place. Then we have kids suffering from Internet addiction interviewed at a rehab facility, where the separation of Internet reality and the existing world has been blurred. This is followed by a tattooed woman scientist explaining the pending destruction of the Internet by a solar flare—everyone (who survives) back to 1900 in one day, with the associated mass loss of billions of people. Such events are thought to occur every two or three hundred years. A famous hacker followed by a security expert explains that technology itself is not the problem. It is the people using the technology and that it is their inherent weakness, exploited by other humans, that is the source of the difficulties in securing and keeping the technology as a positive thing for mankind.
And, finally, there is the future; accordingly and appropriately Elon Musk is interviewed. Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame and PayPal money, is a man that has no trouble making and betting his money on predictions of the future. He explains the ease of which the Internet could reach a colony on Mars. Musk is the very definition of a man who believes that science and technology are the way of man’s evolution and that we should colonize Mars to avoid an extinction event, man-made or otherwise. Next, a robotics scientist reassures us robots have a long long way to go to reach the level of a cockroach, but then we see a pretty white robot pushing a cart, pouring a glass of juice and nicely handing it to a woman, who mouths the words “thank you.” Robot meets mechanical man. Can the Internet become conscious artificial intelligence? Has it already spawned its own consciousness? Where is the future? The human Internet interface, telepathically sending a “tweet,” and on we go into the realm of “plausible” speculation. And then there was this from one of the more grounded scientists, “That anyone who claims to know what is going to happen on the Internet is not worth listening to.” In all the science fiction written with flying cars and androids, no one wrote about the Internet and the level of importance it has taken. The film ends with the West Virginians playing bluegrass music in the outdoor lushness of an Appalachian evening.
So what is being presented here? After the underbelly is gazed upon, the film presents lots of questions and opinions by very intelligent people who try to explain what is happening—what they, in some instances, have taken part in creating. They pose as many questions as answers. Does this just come down to an old question with different players? Do the negatives of the Internet and its offspring that everyone acknowledges have occurred, and will continue to occur, along with those that we fear may happen, come from the technology itself? Or rather, is the technology a neutral medium—that it is what it is? And what is it? Is it simply material components assembled in such a way as to operate as an extension of man’s own functioning? Simply a tool, at base not any different than a rock picked up to break open a nut found during man’s hunter-gatherer period. A question arises in the film, and it is Herzog’s question: does the Internet dream [of “electric sheep” or otherwise], in other words, does it have consciousness? Put another way, can the Internet’s digital “brains” be animated by consciousness? They currently are animated by electricity, which is not consciousness, so it seems doubtful that without a direct human interface, it cannot be even semi-conscious. And so to answer the question posed in the film, it cannot dream, though our suggestibility might make us believe it can. Humans can absorb information and our attention can be absorbed by what is available from the Internet, but the human Internet connection can only go so far, for now.
The rock picked up and used as a tool that allows a man to eat a nut also could be used as a weapon to kill. It is rather hard to make a case that a rock is the Anti-Christ, though for a Neanderthal being bashed by a Homo sapien’s stone axe, there might have been a primitive religious dimension. Is today’s technology any different? Can it be “evil”? Religions and social movements have often seen it as such. Just keep things as they are within a framework that can control or limit the functioning of the body/mind and consensus reality will be maintained. The future will be in heaven or in a utopian life for our progeny and ourselves. Mr. Gurdjieff said, “A subjective man can have no general conception of good and evil. For a subjective man evil is opposed to his desires or interests or to his conception of good.” He goes on to say, “…that evil does not exist for a subjective man at all, that there exist only different conceptions of good.” The factual information aside, that there are “different conceptions of good” is what the film does not say. Technology unfolding and becoming more and more complex in the hands of subjective humans cannot be predicted or controlled—it will just happen.
—Richard Myers— http://www.growingchoongary.com
Notes
1. Electric Sheep. Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A book briefly mentioned in the film, and upon which the movie Blade Runner was loosely based, is set in a post apocalyptic world of, yes, flying cars and androids, but no Internet. A world where the most precious possessions are living animals, most which have been destroyed, and where the less well off humans must settle for electric versions.
2. A subjective man. P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), p.158.
Open to Openness 