Must See Movie...

A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This documentary promises to shed light on the history of the internet, especially the time before the invention of the World Wide Web, in 1990. What we get instead is a procession of middle aged kooks pontificating randomly on AI takeover, sun spot events and the end of the world, and the internet being embedded into walls.The framing of most of the interviews is quite flippant. Normally a WH documentary is irreverent, but fond. Here though the viewer feels like an intruder into the world of a series of out-of-step eccentrics, whom the internet had long since left behind and taken on a life of its own - this being brought painfully into view when the question "does the internet dream of itself"? is raised.It seems what was intended to be a film about the, mostly undocumented, innocent history of the pre www internet, took on a life of its own as the subjects started rambling about other things. It ended up showing only the wide-eyed naiievety of both Herzog and the interviewees, as they wandered away from their areas of expertise and into what is essentially uninformed futurology.There was a veteran "Hacker", who "hacked" into this and that, we're told. That he'd done 99% of his "hacking" by calling companies and pretending to be a manager wasn't made clear. A bizarrely posed family who'd had a picture of their daughter that had fatally crashed on a joyride in the father's Porsche published online, told us the devil was in the internet, listing some nasty things that had been emailed to them about their daughter and her death. In the same vein, an apocalyptic prediction by three fervent geeks, who think we're on the edge of a societal collapse caused by solar flares.All in all, the film misses the mark. If it had been presented a bit differently, I think it would have been a more worthwhile watch, but as it is, it comes across as nothing more than the poking of some Silicon Valley eccentrics with a stick, and seeing what they do.

Provocative. Terrifying. Quirkily informative. Engrossing. As always, Herzog poses questions that draw revealing responses from his interviewees—collectively a fascinating bunch of hackers sace and its distribution via networks; how it got started, where it is today, where it's going. He delves into the darkest aspects of the Internet looking at lives disconnected from nature and ruined by web addiction. Herzog also explores the immense benign and even, perhaps, spiritual possibilities of a connected globe while schooling us on the digital underpinnings we take for granted. The way the internet balances its data-flow load, for example is instructive. We learn, counter-intuitively, the larger such networks grow, the more efficient they become. Or consider that one good-sized solar flare—an event scientists deem a certainty every few hundred years—could fatally disrupt modern civilization. This is at once an inspiring and scary film. But there are moments of lightness too. A radio telescope specialist plays banjo in a bluegrass band. We learn the "Lo" of the title derives from the first word ever sent via modem —"Log." But it crashed the receiving computer after the first two letters. The ingenuity of humankind juxtaposed with humans' tendency to foul our nest has not been looked at with an eye as steely as that of Werner Herzog's. Like all the best docs, the ideas that enrich Lo and Behold will likely boil up in your consciousness many times in the days that follow your viewing.

Though the movie definitely is interesting and the story makes sense, I just had to write a review to let people know that this has to be the most cringe worthy style of interviewing people for a documentary I have ever seen. The interviewer manages to make almost all of the interviewees uncomfortable by either his camera placement or the questions he asks. It's painful to watch at some points. Apparently I didn't write enough yet so to add to this: I thought it was interesting that he also interviewed people with different views of the internet and didn't only approach the technical aspects of it. I would still recommend people to watch it as the information displayed is valuable.

There are very important, tough questions that need to be asked about where technology is leading us. "Does the internet dream of itself?" is not one of them. This effort from Herzog is a major disappointment but not a surprise, partly because it started out as a corporate promotional video. Also because most of his docs are ostensibly on subjects that aren't that interesting or important on the surface, but he makes them riveting. Here, he's tackling a subject about which everything that can be said, has already been said, except for the hard questions. Is the internet even a net positive thing? Why bother going to Mars? It's getting harder and harder "to make a contribution" (to science, or to society), so what does that mean for us? Soon enough robots will beat Messi at football -- will anyone want to watch that? These questions don't get asked. And these are easy ones that came up anyway. Herzog, who is a known non-tech guy, just seems ignorant and uninterested in technology, both the good and the bad of it. And we need him to pry forcefully into the moral morass that it's dragging us into. But he can't. He's just a baby boomer who is completely immersed in his real- world occupation that doesn't involve surfing the internet. He doesn't know, doesn't care. So unfortunately, he has gathered the most maddeningly thick-headed "scientific experts" to make bland, vapid observations about how amazing it all is. This is a huge disappointment. Werner is just not the man for this job -- so he's moved on to something more up his alley; volcanoes...