Cyber Security Articles & News

Review: Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

Werner Herzog's latest documentary, "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World" should have been a documentary series, and may have started with that structure in mind. Presented by Netscout, the film offers a survey of the internet, its implications, and the questions surrounding it, utilizing interviews with various experts, probed by Herzog and emitting the wonder and enthusiasm his interviewees are apt to give themselves over to. Illuminating the humanity among internet afficionados may be the film's greatest strength, as its coverage winds up being uneven and at times only skims the surface.

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What Werner Herzog’s new film ‘Lo and Behold’ reveals about the internet

As the internet makes its way into more aspects of our everyday lives, Werner Herzog takes a closer look at the ethics of information flows in a new documentary. Alexander Nazaryan meets the German filmmaker  
    
Do not look at the photos of the Nikki Catsouras car crash that remain on the internet, lingering there maliciously despite the efforts of her parents to scrub them through ReputationDefender and, more simply, pleas to human decency. Look at pictures of Rollerblading dachshunds, click through a BuzzFeed quiz about Full House, read an article about Donald Trump’s grooming habits. Take a walk, for God’s sake. The photos of Catsouras’s mangled body hanging out of a car, head split open – as well as the story of how those photos ended up being disseminated on the internet – represent the most debased instincts of humanity. I gave in and looked, thinking they couldn’t be that bad. I was wrong.

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Werner Herzog Hacks the Horrors of Connectivity in ‘Lo and Behold

Only a filmmaker like Werner Herzog could make a documentary about the internet and articulate the same existential angst he vehemently expressed over 30 years ago about nature. In what would become the documentary Burden of Dreams, about the making of the feature film Fitzcarraldo (both from 1982), Herzog rants in the middle of the Peruvian jungle: "Nature here is vile and base [...] The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain."

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Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

Rating: *****
Werner Herzog brings his dour brand of whimsy to LO AND BEHOLD, REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD, his consideration of cyberspace. The result is a thought-provoking piece that brings up little-known issues and implications, placing them side by side with the more conventional topics of security and dependence.  Indeed, the most arresting moment in the documentary isn’t a security analyst explaining that if were presently engaged in a cyberwar, we would not necessarily know it. Rather, it’s a computer scientist blithely musing on another potential blind spot. That would be the idea that if artificial intelligence arose on the internet, and became self-aware, he didn’t see any reason why it would let us know it’s there, much less consult us about anything it might want to do.  It’s as revelatory as it is disconcerting.

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