Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World begins in a dingy basement at UCLA. This was the birthplace of the Internet. Our host in the lab, which has been preserved to look as it did in the 60’s, was there when the first two letters of information, “lo,” were sent over a network up to Stanford. He adopts religious language to talk about the place and the long-ago moment, calling the room “holy ground” and describing the brief connection as a serendipity. The rest of the film never reaches such religious heights again, as the other interview subjects stay away from god-language. But they still speak very highly of what technology makes possible. Self-driving cars, world-class education for everyone, artificial intelligence, even planting humanity on Mars, are all presented as progress coming soon.
The technologies on display are compelling. My favorite is the soccer-playing robots, each of which plays autonomously from the others. They know that they want to score goals and they recognize their team-mates, and they’re able to pass, block, and score. One particular robot consistently outscores the others, but the roboticists have no idea what sets it apart. Perhaps an artificial Pelé-intelligence has emerged? It’s a fascinating idea, but these scientists seem a little too excited about what it might mean. Almost all the people presented in Lo and Behold do this – over and over, scientists enthuse about best-case scenarios with little regard for other possibilities.
I live in Silicon Valley, so I’m used to seeing such faith in technology, but I’m surprised to see it coming from this director. Werner Herzog is the last filmmaker one would expect to make this movie. Herzog’s subject has always been the conflict of humanity and nature. His early masterpieces, Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, portrayed fanatics marching into the jungle in pursuit of wild dreams; his location shoots in the jungle made them seem autobiographical. In the last twenty years he has pivoted from fiction to documentary, and his best works have continued considering humans in nature. For instance, Grizzly Man won the Oscar with a story of a man trying to befriend a bear, and dying in the process. Why would an artist whose subject has always been nature “red in tooth and claw” make a movie praising the potential of technology to transcend and escape nature?
And there’s a deeper disconnect. Herzog’s films have been about individuals; Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man each show one man trying to subdue nature, denying its danger. The human world in these films is emphatically not connected. These men survive or die based on their own strength and savvy, and Herzog would seem to believe that this is true for every person. Yet, lo and behold, he’s now showing us that we can thrive together. Several of the computer scientists say that the network gains strength as more people join.
The difference between Lo and Behold and Herzog’s earlier works is so great that I wonder how seriously to take him. These people enthuse about sending a colony to Mars and robots playing soccer, but maybe Herzog intends to make fun of them? Maybe I just don’t pick up on the ridicule because I’m so used to technological boosterism? Maybe he’s being subtle like Errol Morris, the great documentarian who often shows people without any editorial comments, forcing us to judge them ourselves? (When Morris was making his first film, Herzog said that he would eat a shoe at the Cannes festival if Morris finished. Herzog ate the shoe.) But Herzog is there on screen, talking with these boosters, joining in their gee-whiz responses.
So, I am forced to conclude that he really has drunk the technology Kool-Aid and joined the computer chorus. As have most of us. We trust technology to save us from the dangers of nature, including death itself – I’m surprised Herzog didn’t include a chapter on the quest for medical immortality. But I worry that Herzog, and all of us with him, are making the same mistake as his previous characters, overestimating our control and wisdom in a dangerous situation. As Thoreau – who would seem a natural subject for Herzog – wrote in Walden, we “have become the tools of our tools.”