Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016) is Werner Herzog's documentary about the internet, available to watch online on iFILM. Herzog starts in the corridor at UCLA's Network Systems Lab where Leonard Kleinrock sent the first ARPANET message in 1969 — just two letters before the system crashed — and works outward from there across ten chapters.

The conversations he finds are not the obvious ones. A family describes how crash-scene photographs of their daughter spread across online forums without consent and destroyed them. A community of people with electromagnetic sensitivity lives in a radio-quiet valley in West Virginia, cut off from all wireless signals. Elon Musk talks about putting the internet on Mars. Bob Kahn, one of the protocol's architects, sits in an office and explains calmly that he has no social media accounts. Herzog asks each of them questions that would sound absurd from a journalist and profound from him.

The film doesn't argue a thesis. It watches. For a documentary about a subject this vast and this contested, that restraint turns out to be the right call. Stream Lo and Behold (2016) online on iFILM.