Lo And Behold is the documentary of the great German director on the Net. That starts from the beginning and puts on the table the issues heavy as a boulder
The first frames of Lo And Behold, Internet: the future is now feeling the voiceover by Werner Herzog and comes to your mind by Giorgio Moroder of random access memories. The English with a strong German accent, with his 74 years - two fewer than Moroder - convey a calm authority of one who has the answers but he has passed the age they are considered absolute truths.
Lo And Behold is a 98-minute documentary produced by the great German observer with the support of the computer company NetScout, where the Internet is not the main protagonist and the Net is not the only film studio. Indeed, to think well, the protagonist is the man, and turns on the Earth, and its surroundings.
Because Herzog ? Well, who better than an eye morbidly curious affection by some Luddites, you turn on your smartphone when to call, use your email only to communicate with Germany and is not on the company?
Herzog does what where is master, with extreme simplicity of means and techniques: opening a chasm in our thinking and, as always, does not pretend to close it again, leaving us the choice to decode the signals, putting on the table the question- boulder Internet dreams himself? Where resumes, not surprisingly, a statement in which the subject was the war, referring to the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz , author of military strategy treatise On War .
It is good to clarify, then, that Lo And Behold is not a historical documentary on the evolution of the Internet, but rather a set of ten pages of notes, like the ten chapters of the shot, the result of free conversations with illustrious interlocutors to think about maybe before opening Facebook .
Ten chapters that summarize ten things we learned seeing Lo And Behold premiere - the film by October 6.
1. Quality pays . On 1 July 1980 he left the first online news service. Through CompuServe, one of the first internet providers, the Columbus Dispatch begins sending its news to subscribers' computers. The service cost $ 5 per hour, 500 people suffered abbonarono, a hit when compared to the number of surfers. Then the Web became synonymous with free.
2. The phone directory . The 1982 edition of the Arpanet directory is a list of all the people connected to the first computer network. He had 560 pages and in each there were about 20 entries, without regard to the index pages we come barely ten thousand people. Today, after 34 years, more than 3 billion people use the Internet.
3. The ethics of the link . Herzog goes to see Ted Nelson in his boat, which is also his home. Nelson has figured out how to build a first navigation between texts in a journey of discovery through the link. Tim Berners-Lee took advantage of the idea, however, distorting the original objective of link pages without losing the path zero. So today we share the dubious links considering them authoritative.
4. The useful game . Adrien Treuille can be considered one of the inventors of gamification: use the video game for non recreational purposes. Eternal is the Treuille project which, thanks to the involvement of thousands of players around the world, has allowed us to create endless combinations of RNA molecules ( ribonucleic acid) to the basis of all known life forms. A job that would take powerful and expensive computers for years, thanks to the Eternal and the Internet is a game in which everyone can participate.
5. Bravin the number 8 . At Carnegie Mellon University have a dream: to organize a match between the best soccer players in the world and a team of autonomous robot soccer players, not remotely controlled. And in 2050 they think they can win. The coach of the team, Joydeep Biswaas, argues that the number robot 8 will drink Messi in two fake. The difference between men and robots? One: the robots learn and share the errors, they are not at all touchy.
6. The origin of evil . It was October 31, 2006 - ten years before the suicide of Tiziana Canton - when Nikki Catsouras loses his life following a car accident. Photos of Nikki's mangled body are published on the Internet and, we would say today, become viral. Nikki's family is put to shame by the people's court of the Network. Today parents and sisters Nikki talk about the Internet as the antichrist, populated by people without dignity or respect and, after six years of legal struggles, have had compensation damages of 2.37 million dollars.
7. Via the Internet . There is a place, in West Virginia, where the astronomer Jay Lockman has placed a telescope with the aim of intercepting radio signals coming from elsewhere. The valley in which is positioned the telescope is free from all working radio signal to Earth. Therefore, in addition to protect from interference the work of Lockman, the place has become spontaneous home to a very particular community, the (alleged) people with electromagnetic hypersensitivity. For conventional medicine it is not a disease, for now, but, meanwhile, the fifty refugee in Green Bank willingly surrender to smartphones, PCs, TV and microwave rather than having to stay in bed all day with migraine or pass the life in a car, the most common Faraday cage.
8. The end of the world is near . I would like to be together all'astronoma Lucianne Walkowicz when will his premonition: sooner or later, a solar storm will send (again) haywire all communications on Earth. I want to shake her and pray that the storm damage is not irreversible because Lucianne has a charm that arise. It is certain that an event like the one observed Carrington September 1, 1859 comes up again to more or less damaging intensity. And, from what we say scientists interviewed by Herzog, we are not at all prepared.
9. How much naivete . Internet was born in a pure environment, the university, where by nature itself of the protagonists, trust reigned supreme at the point that the hacking of systems was for a good purpose. Kevin Mitnick, the last of hackers, thought to be one of the reasons that makes the network vulnerable by definition. Now that the data circulating on the network may depend on the joys and sorrows of the world economy and governments the problem is serious. The only hope is that the Net regulate itself, and to do it without human intervention.
10. Other than Mars . In the offices of SpaceX , the company founded by Elon Musk, that of Tesla, is fantastic interplanetary travel and new artificial life forms in space. But it warns scientist Danny Hillis: colonize Mars will come to nothing, it is on Earth that we must find a way to save us from our own creation, or we can avoid worry about.
Source: GQ Italia
