Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World
Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic documentary on what the internet has become: chapters on origins, online culture, the dark side, AI, the future of the species — each told as Herzog tells everything, with restless curiosity and zero pretense.
- Directors
- Werner Herzog
- Released
- 2016
- Writers
- Werner Herzog
- Runtime
- 98 min
- Language
- English
Available on
Watch this if
Anyone who wants a non-practitioner reflection on what we've built. Herzog's outsider eye on internet culture — the chapter on Carnegie Mellon's first ARPANET node, the chapter on people who suffer EM-radiation sensitivity, the chapter on space weather — is the film's gift.
Skip this if
Viewers wanting a tightly argued thesis. The chapters are loosely connected and the film coheres through tone, not argument. Practitioners may find specific chapters thin; that's the trade-off for the film's range.
Key takeaways
- Herzog's outsider questions ("Does the internet dream of itself?") produce more interesting answers than insider questions usually do.
- The chapter on the 2003 Northeast blackout and the speculation about what a coordinated attack could mean is the closest the film gets to recognizable cybersecurity content.
- The film's enduring image is the room of self-driving-car researchers at Carnegie Mellon describing failure modes; if Herzog had filmed nothing else, that scene alone would justify the project.
Notes
Pair with Tubes (Andrew Blum) for the physical-infrastructure literature and with Click Here to Kill Everybody (Schneier) for the cyber-physical-risk argument the film gestures at. Best watched in chapters, not a single sitting; Herzog's pacing rewards reflection. A useful gift to non-technical relatives who keep asking what your job is.