Latest Werner Herzog documentary

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (2016) / Werner Herzog (2016). Excellent thought-provoking history of the Internet and its effect on the modern world. There is a room in a science building at UCLA that claims to be where the Internet was invented. The original equipment is still there. That first day in 1969, the UCLA computer was to make contact with another computer at Stanford U. As one person typed, another was on the phone with Stanford. They began by starting the word “login.” The operator typed “L.” The phone guys asks, “Did you receive the L?” Stanford replies, “Yes.” The operator typed “O.” “Did you receive the O?” “Yes.” Then the system crashed. Thus the first word sent over the Internet was “lo” – as in Lo and Behold. The film consists of ten “Chapters” with titles like “The Wonders of Technology,” “The Dark Side,” and “The Internet on Mars.” Herzog doesn’t attempt a through line of history or its interpretation. He sort of hits all over the place, giving us a patchwork quilt, but at the end you feel it is all of one piece like a quilt would be. We see some of the marvels that the new technology has wrought as well as the bad things like cyberbullying, gaming addiction, and people who are forced to live off the grid because of sensitive skin allergies caused by the huge amounts of electromagnetic waves that are given off in a typical day’s course. A riveting survey.

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Trust me. I’m The Doctor.