Leonard Kleinrock
Joydeep Biswas
Sebastian Thrun
Elon Musk
Danny Hillis
Lucianne Walkowicz
LO AND BEHOLD, REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD B
USA (98 mi) 2016
d: Werner Herzog Official
site
No one ever gets the
future right.
—Lawrence Krauss, cosmologist and theoretical physicist
I worry -- I worry
that this excitement about colonizing Mars and other planets carries with it a
long, dark shadow: the implication and belief by some that Mars will be there
to save us from the self-inflicted destruction of the only truly habitable
planet we know of, the Earth. As much as
I love interplanetary exploration, I deeply disagree with this idea. There are many excellent reasons to go to
Mars, but for anyone to tell you that Mars will be there to back up humanity is
like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening
later on the lifeboats.
—Lucianne Walkowicz, astrophysicist at Chicago’s Adler
Planetarium
Much as he did in his voyage to Antarctica in ENCOUNTERS AT
THE END OF THE WORLD (2007), Herzog seems to delight in the company of
distinguished scientists, actually joking with them from time to time as he
offers a meditative essay on the origins and ramifications of the
Internet. Broken down into ten titled
sections, Herzog covers a lot of ground in relatively short order, perhaps
designed to spark questions by viewers about the vast implications of a world
addicted to technology, where by this time there’s simply no turning back as
we’ve crossed the threshold past the point of no return into unchartered
territory. One of the better arguments
made is that one can trace the origins of government, as there are letters and
historical documents describing the mindset of the individuals in the room who
happened to sign the Declaration of Independence, but the same cannot be said
about the originators of the Internet, yet both events are described by Herzog
as among the most significant revolutions effecting human life on the
planet. Herzog himself does not have a
smartphone and uses his cellphone only in emergencies, spending little of his
lingering time scouring the Internet other than a search through personal emails
and simple navigation, once describing social media as a “massive, naked
onslaught of stupidity,” suggesting he may not be the most impartial observer
on this issue, as until now he’s never expressed much interest in the Internet
and has even been described as a Luddite, something he has in common with the
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. While much of
his own input often feels intentionally tongue-in-cheek, like occasionally
asking oddball questions, as Herzog has always concerned himself with abnormal human
behavior, making this one of his slighter, least probing, but more entertaining
Herzog documentaries, perhaps because the film is conceived and developed by a
modern advertising agency, NetScout, whose chief marketing officer Jim McNeil hired
the director to play to their brand (How
A Brand And Ad Agency Made Werner Herzog's New Hit ...). It’s remarkably clear throughout that Herzog
would rather be reading a book, yet this film attempts to offer a philosophic
glimpse into a future that consists of robotics, artificial intelligence, and
virtual reality connecting humans to satellites, each other, and the distant
universe. Having made over 60 feature
films, the common element in all of them is Herzog himself, where there is a
certain recognizable gravitas in his voice that is unmistakable, where one
can’t forget the comical effect put to use in Harmony Korine’s JULIEN
DONKEY-BOY (1999), yet almost always he’s investigating harsh conditions or extreme
environments that lend themselves to dark narratives or bleak outlooks, whether
it is trudging through the Peruvian rain forest in FITZCARRALDO (1982), “Taking
a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and
collective murder,” or his harsh perspective on a man being devoured by a grizzly
bear at the end of GRIZZLY MAN (2005), “I discover no kinship, no
understanding, no mercy. I can see only
the overwhelming indifference of nature,” or his musings on climate change at
McMurdo Station in Antarctica from ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (2007), “Human
life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes, the demise of the dinosaurs
being just one of these events. We seem
to be next.”
I have a mobile device only for
emergencies, and when I turned it on recently it stated to flash at me angrily
that this device hadn’t been used for 52 weeks.
Which is fine. I am still doing
well. I have survived these 52 weeks
without a cell phone magnificently.
Herzog suggests it all began in a tiny basement room in a
large nondescript engineering building on the sprawling UCLA campus,
specifically Room 3420 in Boelter Hall. “The
corridors here look repulsive, and yet this one leads to some sort of a shrine,
ground zero of one of the biggest revolutions we as humans are experiencing.” Set to the momentous sounds of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Das
Rheingold Act 1: Prelude-Part I ... YouTube (6:38), the same music that
inspired the magnificent opening of Malick’s The New
World (2005), it was here on October 29, 1969, shortly after the “Miracle”
Mets, the first team with a winning record in their team history, upset the
much favored Baltimore Orioles in five games to become the first expansion team
to win the World Series, that a team of computer engineers, led by Leonard
Kleinrock, who would have been age 35 at the time, initiated the first Internet
message to a similar team of experts at Stanford Research Institute, a distance
of about 350 miles away, intending to send LOGIN, but the system crashed after
just two letters, sending the message “lo,” as in lo and behold, which has now
been forever enshrined in the history of Internet lore. An hour later they tried again and it
worked. Kleinrock shows us the original machine
which has remained intact, describing it with “This machine is so ugly that
it's beautiful,” opening it up, marveling at the “delicious old odor”
associated with the extensive internal electronic circuitry. Within weeks, a more permanent network was
established, eventually linking other universities around the country. By 1975, there was a directory listing only
57 hosts, by 1981 there were 213, while today there 3.2 billion Internet users
around the globe. Still, according to
various experts interviewed, including Silicon Valley mathematician, inventor,
and science guru Danny Hillis, we are probably living in “the digital Dark
Age.” We meet the self-promoting
Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Lab, praising the merits of self-driving cars, while Herzog considers insurance
liability, “Who is going to be liable in case of an accident? The onboard computer? Its designer? The GPS system? The Internet? Or the driver who eats his breakfast?” And perhaps the geekiest guy in the film is Joydeep
Biswas, the designer of robot soccer, claiming the sophistication of his mobile
robots will one day (target date 2050) outplay the heralded Brazilian team on
the field, who seems to hold a special fascination for his lead striker,
confessing openly to Herzog’s personal inquiry that he does indeed love Robot
8. Yes, but can the robot love him
back? Despite the many wonders
affiliated with the changing look of the modern world, there are also
accompanying drawbacks, including electro-magnetic hypersensitivity, where we
meet several patients inflicted by the radiation of a debilitating condition so
rare that it’s not even recognized by medical science, where people have become
bedridden with severe headaches, dizziness, joint pains, and nausea, where they
are forced to insulate themselves, living in specially created safe zones to
protect themselves, like Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes’ SAFE (1995), but the
only known cure has been to live in the remote, rural environment in Green
Bank, West Virginia (population 147), a 13,000-square mile area that is
radiation free, home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory that bans all radio
and TV broadcasts, Wi-Fi networks, cell signals, Bluetooth, and other signals
used by virtually every other wireless device, as the region was specifically
designed to avoid the reach of all cell towers, where cell phones won’t work
and you can spin the dial on your car radio but won’t find any stations. Currently, 36 people (nearly 25% of the
town’s population) have settled in and around the tiny town to escape radiation.
In another instance in 2006, Herzog describes the horrific
Internet response to the tragedy of a young teenage girl with mental health
problems, Nikki Catsouras, who was crushed and nearly decapitated in a car
accident speeding over 100 miles per hour while driving her father’s Porsche, a
car she wasn’t allowed to drive. The
accident was so gruesome the coroner wouldn’t allow the family to identify the
body, even Herzog refuses a look, yet photographs on the scene were taken by
the California Highway Patrol (following agency protocol) who sent them to their
dispatchers. The photos were leaked to
the public and soon found their way to the Internet, including a fake MySpace
page for Nikki, along with a barrage of hideous online harassment messages
directed at the Catsouras family with the photos attached, one claiming “Woohoo
Daddy! Hey Daddy, I’m still alive!” Herzog suggests this is “unspeakably evil,”
while this led the family to ban the Internet in their own home, removing their
youngest daughter from school where she is now homeschooled, with Nikki’s
mother describing the Internet as “the manifestation of the anti-Christ.” Under the guise of anonymity, the Internet
gives people the means to express hatred with impunity. The anonymity aspect was set up that way by
design, as if the home address was known for each user, what would stop authoritarian
governments from initiating raids to prevent free expression of speech? Information technology expert Ted Nelson, who
coined the term hypertext in the 1960’s,
has been disappointed that the science of the Internet has been so restrictive,
and hasn’t come closer to approaching spiritual realms, literally transforming
humanity, where his concept of the web comes from an organic understanding of a
natural flowing of water, suggesting all things are interconnected, claiming he
dislikes all computer markup language in programming communication, considering
it a gross oversimplification. While his
ideas of an interconnected system of links was never used and have largely been
discredited by others in his field, in typical Herzog fashion, he proclaims
“You are the sanest person I’ve ever met!” generating hearty smiles and mutual
photographs. Herzog also visits a
Washington state rehab center for Internet addicts, though in reality they
appear to be gaming addicts that refuse to move or leave their chairs for fear
of losing precious points, including South Korean marathon gamers who wear
diapers to avoid having to go to the bathroom.
Attending a Las Vegas hacker’s convention, Herzog meets Greg Mitnick,
jailed for 5 years in 1995 for hacking, allowing him to illegally copy software
and produce false identification, now working as a security consultant. The man was renowned for avoiding capture by
hacking into the FBI’s cell phones, so he remained cognizant of their
whereabouts at all times. Mitnick spent
more than four years in solitary confinement “before” his trial because the government
was convinced he had the capacity to hack into the NORAD system through a
payphone from prison and potentially launch nuclear missiles by whistling. Revealing a perpetual vulnerability to
cyber-attack, Mitnick describes the weakest link in any security network is the
human element, describing how he managed to obtain secret computer codes simply
by talking to people over the phone, making it sound like he was a professional
colleague.
While the film never gets into a deep analytical study of
the problem at hand, Herzog does a good job of exploring all the bases, where
through the course of the film he covers an astonishing amount of territory,
often treading into murky philosophical waters.
One of the most intriguing subjects is Lucianne Walkowicz, a kind of
punk astrophysicist at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, revealing a Chauvet
cave animal painting tattoo on her arm, a tribute to Herzog’s Cave
of Forgotten Dreams 3D (2010). She
insists we should concentrate more on the conservation of our own planet rather
than on space exploration. This from a
scientist that analyzes data dumps from NASA’s 2009 Kepler mission to discover
planets with atmospheric compositions similar to Earth that could potentially
host life (NASA
Finds 1,284 Alien Planets, Biggest Haul Yet, with Kepler Space ...). She worked on the construction of the Hubble
Space Telescope while a Johns Hopkins undergrad, but she’s also an expert on
solar flares, something that routinely happens all the time, but occasionally
flare up to gigantic proportions, suggesting our entire Internet infrastructure
could be wiped out from one oversized, catastrophic event, literally destroying
satellites and power grids. An
overreliance on computer technology may lead to an apocalyptic future, where
according to another scientist, few survivors “would even remember how we lived
before everything got wired,” recalling the blackouts in the aftermath of
Hurricane Sandy in New York City when the entire city shut down. Imagine if that happened on a worldwide
scale. Herzog’s bemusing response: “Our sun: the giver of life. At the same time, it is hostile, destructive. Protuberances unimaginable in size are being
hurled into the universe. These flares
may become the undoing of modern civilization.”
Much of this speculation is what led PayPal and Tessla billionaire Elon
Musk to consider building trips to Mars, including building a human colony on
the planet, a project Herzog immediately volunteers for, even if it’s only a
one-way ticket. Herzog curiously asks if
the Internet would exist on Mars, with Musk optimistically affirming that only
a few satellites would be needed to make that a reality. Herzog also asks provocative, yet unanswerable
questions, taking us back to the science fiction era of Philip K. Dick,
pondering “Does the Internet dream of itself?”
Mostly this question generated befuddled smiles, as how do
technologically advanced scientists answer a question like that? We visit the robotics labs at Carnegie Mellon
Institute in Pittsburgh, considered the best robotics research facility in the
world, where robots (as we’re discovering lately in police work) can enter
dangerous, high risk, and potentially deadly areas that humans can’t go. It is suggested that the 2011 Fukushima
Daiichi nuclear disaster might have been minimized had robots been trained to
shut off the leaking valves in areas considered too dangerous for humans, as
that might have prevented the release of radioactive material, though Herzog
gets one expert to acknowledge that the binary intelligence of a robot is less
advanced than a pesky cockroach. At one
point Herzog cuts to an empty Chicago skyline, and to the sounds of Elvis, Elvis Presley Are You
Lonesome Tonight Fantastic Video - YouTube (3:18), we see a group of
orange-clad Tibetan monks rooted to their cellphones. An astounded Herzog wonders, as if the world
has come to an end, “Have the monks stopped meditating? Have they stopped praying? They all seem to be tweeting.” So much for dreams and artificial
intelligence. While there’s little doubt
that the world has developed an excessive dependency on computer technology,
where there’s a major shift of humans that might prefer the company of their
mobile devices over human contact, but before we get sidetracked by
technophobia, until the population in technologically advanced nations trends
downward from sexual disinterest, who are we really fooling? It’s still humans driving the acceleration of
knowledge in the pursuit of newfound discoveries that can hopefully have a
beneficial effect on all human existence. As always, the future is still ours to
achieve. The question is how we get
there. This film examines that development
on multiple fronts.
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