[D66] Lo and Behold!

[J.N.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/08/herz-o08.html

Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold: Reveries of The Connected World
Exploring the origins and impact of the Internet
By Kevin Reed
8 October 2016

German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s new documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries 
of The Connected World was released in August at select theatres across 
the US and for home viewing from various on-demand services. The 
movie—which examines the origins and implications of the Internet and 
related technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the 
Internet of Things and space travel—has received generally favorable 
reviews following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in late 
January.

The work is divided into ten segments with titles like “The Early Days,” 
“The Glory of the Net” and “The Future,” with Herzog serving as 
narrator. Through a series of interviews, the director stitches his 
disparate topics together to explain something about how the Internet 
and World Wide Web were created and then to paint a troubling picture of 
the globally interconnected landscape.

The movie begins with a visit to the campus of the University of 
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the birthplace—along with the Stanford 
Research Institute—of the Internet. The first interviewee is Leonard 
Kleinrock, one of the research scientists responsible for the 
development of the precursor of the Internet called ARPANET (Advanced 
Research Projects Agency Network of the US Defense Department). At age 
82, Kleinrock is obviously thrilled at the opportunity to describe how 
the first-ever electronic message was transmitted between two points on 
the network.

As he opens a cabinet of early Internet hardware called a “packet 
switch,” Kleinrock describes in detail the events of October 29, 1969 at 
10:30 pm. As the UCLA sender began typing the word “login”—and checking 
by telephone with his counterpart at Stanford University—only the first 
two characters of the message were successfully transmitted before his 
computer crashed. Despite this seemingly failed communication attempt, 
Kleinrock explains that “Lo” was an entirely appropriate word for the 
accomplishment. “It was from here,” he says, “that a revolution began.”

With Herzog occasionally interjecting off-camera during the interviews, 
the director’s goal seems clear enough. He wants the audience to share 
his sense of wonder and amazement at the transformative impact of the 
Internet. This is reinforced by equally intriguing interviews with 
several others who participated in the birth of the Net. The 
enthusiasm—and clarity on complex topics—expressed by these pioneers 
leaves one with a desire to hear more of their stories of discovery and 
progress.

As the film goes on, however, it emerges that Herzog has another plan; 
he abandons any historically logical accounting of the Internet and 
begins eclectically focusing on its various byproducts and offshoots, 
limitations and negative consequences. Herzog’s interview with Ted 
Nelson—a philosopher and sociologist credited with theoretically 
anticipating the World Wide Web and coining the terms “hypertext” and 
“hypermedia”—becomes the starting point for these wanderings.
Werner Herzog in 2007 (Photo: Erinc Salor)

As a student at Harvard University, Ted Nelson began working in 1960 on 
a computer system called Project Xanadu that he conceived of as “a 
digital repository scheme for world-wide electronic publishing.” Nelson 
also wrote an important book in 1974 entitled Computer Lib/Dream 
Machines, a kind of manifesto for hobbyists on the social and 
revolutionary implications of the personal computer.

Although it is left unexplained in the film, the Internet is the 
technical infrastructure upon which the World Wide Web was developed 
beginning in 1989. Ever since the widespread adoption of the World Wide 
Web, Nelson has been a public critic of its structure and 
implementation, especially HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). He has 
called HTML a gross oversimplification of his pioneering ideas and said 
that it “trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way, 
ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.”

Why is it that HTML and the World Wide Web emerged as the dominant 
graphical layer of the Internet as opposed to a competing set of ideas? 
Is it possible that a solution more comprehensive, expressing more 
completely the potential of the technology and more effective and useful 
could have been adopted instead?

One aspect of the rapid global adoption of the World Wide Web—originally 
created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at CERN in Switzerland—was the open 
access policy of its inventor. As Berners-Lee, who is also interviewed 
in the film, has explained, “Had the technology been proprietary, and in 
my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t 
propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep 
control of it.” However, while the non-proprietary nature of 
Berners-Lee’s creation was a significant factor in its success, it does 
not automatically follow that the core technology of the World Wide Web 
represented an advance over the ideas represented by others such as Ted 
Nelson.

These are important and complex questions that have been repeated again 
and again in the evolution of the information revolution of the past 
half-century, the further exploration of which would point to 
fundamental problems of modern technology, i.e. the contradiction 
between “what is possible” versus “what is required” within the economic 
and political framework of global capitalist society.

Showing little interest in exploring these matters more deeply, Lo and 
Beholdgoes on to present Nelson—a gifted but socially awkward man—as 
something of a high-tech Don Quixote. Herzog concludes the interview 
with the quip, “To us you appear to be the only one around who is 
clinically sane.”


Having made nearly forty documentaries in his five-decade career, Herzog 
is accomplished at gaining access to people with compelling stories to 
tell. The interview with Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, 
raises important points. A consistently outspoken opponent of artificial 
intelligence, Musk makes the following warning: “[I]f you were running a 
hedge fund or private equity fund and all I want my AI to do is maximize 
the value of my portfolio, then AI could decide to short consumer 
stocks, go long on defense stocks, and start a war. Ah, and that 
obviously would be quite bad.”

This possible scenario under capitalism is not explored any further. 
While the US military is never specifically mentioned, it is remarkable 
that the only reference to war in the course of a 98-minute critical 
look at modern technology comes from a billionaire entrepreneur. Above 
all, Musk’s comments show that the new technologies by themselves bring 
no fundamental change to the class relations within capitalist society; 
indeed the Internet and artificial intelligence in the hands of the 
ruling elite enable a further and accelerated integration of financial 
parasitism and imperialist war.

Given that Lo and Behold is sponsored by Netscout Systems, a major 
corporate supplier of networking hardware and software, it is possible 
that such topics were off limits. However, the lack of a broader or 
coherent critical perspective is not something new for Werner Herzog.

While he made some interesting and disturbing fiction films in the 1970s 
(The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Stroszek in 
particular), the end of the period of radicalization had an impact on 
Herzog, as it did on other New German Cinema directors like R. W. 
Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff. There was always an 
overwrought element in Herzog's work and an emphasis on physical or 
spiritual excess, without much reference to the content of the action.

In media interviews about his latest film, Herzog has been careful to 
explain that he does not blame technology itself for the aberrations 
depicted. “The Internet is not good or evil, dark or light hearted,” he 
says, “it is human beings” that are the problem. Following the advice of 
experts, Herzog suggests that people need some kind of “filter” to help 
them use the technology appropriately.

Leaving things so very much at the level of the individual does not 
begin to get at the source of the contradiction between the positive and 
destructive potential of modern technology. This contradiction, so 
clearly demonstrated during World War II with nuclear technology, is 
itself an expression of the alternatives facing mankind of socialism 
versus barbarism.

Lack of an understanding about—or refusal to acknowledge—the deeper 
social and class interests embedded in the forms of human technology 
leads to only two possible conclusions: (1) the utopian idea that 
technology develops automatically without wars and crisis toward the 
improvement of mankind, or (2) the dystopian belief that technological 
advancement always develops without any hope of revolutionary 
transformation of society in the direction of an existential threat to 
humanity. While Herzog and his producers believe they have provided a 
balanced perspective between these two, in the end, Lo and Behold comes 
down on the latter side.


On 02-09-16 15:37, J.N.  wrote:
> http://www.loandbeholdfilm.com/trailer
>
> On 09/02/2016 03:20 PM, J.N.  wrote:
>> Lo and Behold: Reveries
>> of the Connected World
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