Enlarge / Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is a co-creator of ARPANET, the direct ancestor of the Internet. (credit: Magnolia Pictures)
Hackers? Check. Driverless cars? Check. SpaceX? Check. Robots? Check. Elon Musk? Check. ARPANET? Check. Video game addicts? Check. Brainscans? Check. Internet of Things? Check. All we’re missing is a Fitbit review. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is practically Ars Technica: The Movie, with Werner Herzog as our guide.
You know about filmmaker Werner Herzog, right? He’s famous not just for making movies but for being a lunatic. Starting in the ‘60s, our mad Bavarian genius crazied his way into our hearts by stealing equipment, forging permits, getting shot during an interview, regularly endangering his cast and crew, and dragging a 19th-century riverboat over a mountain. Even if you’ve never seen any of Herzog’s films, chances are you’ve heard someone parody him by calmly and precisely intoning how the universe is chaos, penguins go insane, and forests are full of misery. And Herzog’s not above making fun of his own image, as his appearances on The Simpsons, American Dad, Rick and Morty (NSFW), and The Boondocks (NSFW) can attest.
Herzog tends to make documentaries about weirdos that he views with equal parts admiration and bafflement. The title character of Grizzly Man thought he could live with bears, while My Best Fiend is about actor Klaus Kinski, who starred in five of Herzog’s most critically-acclaimed films, even though Herzog thought he was a “pestilence” who should have been murdered. Through interviews and archival footage, Lo and Behold sticks to this template, and it confronts the weirdest weirdo of them all: the Internet. Herzog never anthropomorphizes the Internet, but sees it instead as capable of one day becoming... well, something. I can’t seem to finish that sentence without trivializing the thing that is the Internet’s potential.
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