Bryan Appleyard

Net effect

In the end, he leaves us with the sense that all the high intelligence and ingenuity that created our digital age is leading to the termination of the human

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated.

Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys.

This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer who believes it has all gone horribly wrong. Rising and falling slowly on his houseboat, he tries, not entirely successfully, to explain why, eventually becoming uneasy with his awareness that some people think he is mad.

Herzog intervenes consolingly: ‘To us you appear to be the only one around here who is clinically sane.’ It is a shockingly explicit showing of his hand. Nelson dissolves in gratitude, takes out a little camera and photographs the film crew.

Next, there is a chapter celebrating ‘The Glory of the Net’ which becomes darker as Herzog gets on to self-driving, web-connected cars and robot football teams which, we are assured, will be better than the best human teams by 2050. Without quite saying it, Herzog is pondering the question, what, then, will happen to us?

This prepares us for the next chapter, ‘The Dark Side’. This consists of one supremely Herzogian set-up. An American family is gathered round a dining table on which are laid out neat plates of muffins and croissants, three daughters are seated and the parents are standing. The cold exactness of the scene is almost cruel — the parents talking about the death of another daughter and their subsequent torture by vicious internet trolls.

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