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Lo and Behold

Werner Herzog reflects on the reveries of the connected world. There’s a lot of short sequences here, but not much tying it together.

We start in the building with the ugly hallways at UCLA where the first internet connection was established. The first message transmitted was supposed to be “login”, but the machine crashed after “lo”. Lo and behold.

The inventor of cut and paste doesn’t like what’s been done to it.

The law of large numbers means that the bigger the internet gets, the more efficient it becomes. Everybody talking to everybody averages out. I’m not sure how this theoretical result squares with the reality that Netflix is 33% of traffic.

The internet (or perhaps just computers, the movie is somewhat fluid about the internet and networks and computers in general) drives cars, folds genes, and plays soccer.

The internet also sends a father pictures of his decapitated daughter. Coincidentally, Time’s cover story is How Trolls are ruining the Internet.

We travel to the woods to meet people with electromagnetic sensitivities. One woman sleeps on the floor because the earth’s natural frequency is 7.83 Hz. There’s also some fiddling.

People are addicted to the internet and play games while their children starve.

In 1859 there was a huge solar flare, known as the Carrington Event. If it happens again, billions of people will die.

If humans colonize Mars, we’ll communicate with them using the internet.

Kevin Mitnick is the most famous hacker at Defcon. He tells a pretty good story about a time he tried to get somebody at Motorola to upload their source code to his server, but she couldn’t because it wasn’t to a recognized IP on their network. So she talked the security officer into letting her use a proxy and complete the transfer. Humans are always the weakest link.

We talk about not talking about cyberwar. “Nod your head if you’ve heard the phrase Titan Rain.”

What does the internet dream about?

The internet of things seems unnecessary.

The robot AIpocalypse is coming.

Young people don’t think these days. They just look at numbers from a computer.

Posted 25 Aug 2016 01:00 by tedu Updated: 25 Aug 2016 18:04
Tagged: moviereview network web