Werner Herzog marvels at the internet

By N.D.

IF someone were to burn onto CDs the data transmitted worldwide on any given day, and then stack them up, the pile would stretch to Mars and back. The character and meaning of this astonishing output—and its bearing on humankind—is the subject of Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World”.

To contend with a phenomenon as astounding as the internet, the director starts at the beginning. As the camera roves around the “repulsive” corridors of a UCLA campus, Mr Herzog’s distinctive voice-over explains that here, sequestered in a humdrum side office, is “some sort of shrine”: the wardrobe-sized computer that sent the first digital message in 1969. The message was just two letters—“lo”—as the full and rather more banal instruction (“login”) did not get through because the receiving computer in Stanford crashed. From these humble origins, Mr Herzog explains, came one of the biggest revolutions in human history: the digital age.

Now aged 74, Mr Herzog has directed more than 70 feature films, documentaries and shorts, including “Fitzcarraldo”, “Grizzly Man” and “Encounters at the End of the World”. He is not a director who dwells on the prosaic. “Lo and Behold” is structured in ten chapters, each addressing a different facet of the worldwide web, from cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence to the internet of me (the film is backed by cyber-security firm NetScout and was originally envisaged as a collection of shorts). Since 1969 the technology underlying the internet has scaled by a factor of a million in terms of computational speed, bandwidth and storage capacity. Our connected world can be both magnificent and terrible. It is this dichotomy—and not the internet-enabled fornication tools such as Tinder—that interests Mr Herzog.

In one chapter, “The Glory of the Net”, the director probes some of the quixotic visionaries driving the digital revolution forward. Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist who led the development of Google’s self-driving car, talks about the capacity of networked vehicles to learn from each other’s errors, a feat elusive to humans locked as we are in our isolated brains. We also meet an earnest young programmer who is creating a fleet of football-playing robots that he predicts will be able to defeat any World Cup winners by 2050. In another chapter, SpaceX founder Elon Musk talks about his mission to colonise Mars. Mr Herzog interrupts him, exclaiming: “I’d come along!” The director’s unmasked enthusiasm and boyish inquisitiveness draws his subjects out of themselves. The chapter ends with Mr Musk confessing that he does not remember dreams: “the only ones I remember are the nightmares”.

“Lo and Behold” is a film about dreamers, yet the reveries of the title mean something more. Amid the pursuit of connectedness and the explosion of communication technology we may, conversely, be entering an age of profound isolation. The film is intended as a creative companion to “Land of Silence and Darkness” (1971), a documentary about people who are both deaf and blind that Mr Herzog has described as “probably the deepest film I’ve ever made”. A recovering internet addict in “Lo and Behold” explains that the danger of gaming is when the virtual becomes more appealing than the real. In another scene the camera lingers on a group of orange-robed monks on the shore of Lake Michigan. They are all on their smartphones. “Have the monks stopped meditating?” asks Mr Herzog. “Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.”

Though “Lo and Behold” has moments of revelation and whimsy, the film is not a comprehensive assessment of all that the internet is or could be (though undoubtedly such a thing would be difficult in 90 minutes). Mr Herzog admits that he uses the internet sparingly and mostly for the practicality of email. Social media—and its impact on how we relate to one another—receive only fleeting attention. Digital surveillance is not given due examination. Pornography is left unexplored.

Mr Herzog approaches the subject with an outsider’s curiosity. He is, as ever, particularly interested in charismatic outliers; in this case, the techie fantasists creating tomorrow’s world. But even for viewers familiar with the many marvels and perils of the digital age, “Lo and Behold” brims with an infectious wonder. As Mr Herzog’s own mother once said: “Everything goes into him. If it comes out, it comes out transformed.”

"Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World" is screening in cinemas across America and Britain