In 2016, Werner Herzog—a man who once ate his own shoe and famously survived being shot during a BBC interview—turned his idiosyncratic gaze toward the internet. The result was Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. It wasn’t your typical talking-head documentary. Honestly, it felt more like a fever dream about fiber optics. Herzog didn't just want to explain how routers work; he wanted to know if the internet dreams of itself.
If you watch it now, a decade later, the movie hits differently. It’s eerie.
We live in a world where AI is basically breathing down our necks and "the cloud" is less a metaphor and more a massive physical infrastructure consuming terrifying amounts of electricity. Herzog saw it coming. He didn't focus on the "cool" apps or the stock prices. Instead, he sat down with the pioneers like Bob Kahn and Leonard Kleinrock—the guys who actually built the plumbing of the digital age—and asked them philosophical questions that made them visibly uncomfortable.
The Birth of the Lo and Behold Movie and the "Message"
The title itself comes from a technical glitch. When the first message was sent from UCLA to SRI International in 1969, the system crashed. They tried to type "LOGIN." The "L" went through. The "O" went through. Then the whole thing folded. Lo. It’s a bit on the nose, isn't it? The first word ever spoken by the internet was a cosmic "behold."
Herzog structures the film into ten distinct chapters, but they aren't neat or orderly. They bleed into each other. He starts at the "holy ground"—the room at UCLA where the first IMP (Interface Message Processor) sits like a gray, metal refrigerator. Kleinrock describes it with the reverence of a priest. But Herzog quickly pivots. He’s not interested in a history lesson for long. He wants to know about the dark side.
Why Herzog is the Only Person Who Could Make This
Anyone else would have made a boring corporate film sponsored by NetScout (who, funnily enough, did finance the project). Herzog, however, treats the internet like a wild jungle or a cave in prehistoric France. He’s obsessed with the human element. He talks to Elon Musk about going to Mars, not because he thinks it's a great business move, but because he’s fascinated by the idea of human existential loneliness.
Musk looks young in this film. He talks about the necessity of becoming a multi-planetary species, and Herzog, in his signature deadpan narration, suggests that he would be happy to go on a one-way ticket. It’s a moment of bizarre sincerity. It reminds us that the Lo and Behold movie isn't really about technology; it's about our desire to transcend our own physical limits.
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The Horror of the Invisible
One of the most haunting segments of the film deals with a family who suffered a horrific tragedy. After their daughter died in a car accident, photos of the scene were leaked and emailed to them by anonymous trolls. It’s a brutal look at the dehumanization the internet facilitates. The mother describes the internet as a manifestation of the "Antichrist."
It’s heavy stuff.
Herzog doesn't shy away from this. He contrasts the high-minded dreams of the scientists with the lived reality of people whose lives have been ruined by digital cruelty. He also visits a community in Green Bank, West Virginia, where people live in a "radio quiet zone." They claim to suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Whether you believe the science behind their condition or not, the visual of people hiding in Faraday cages to escape the invisible waves that power our Instagram feeds is striking. It’s a literal retreat from the modern world.
Is the Internet Capable of Love?
This is a real question Herzog asks. He asks it of researchers working on companion robots and scientists studying the brain.
He meets with Sebastian Thrun, a pioneer in self-driving cars and online education. He visits Carnegie Mellon where researchers are teaching robots to play soccer. The robots are clumsy. They fall over. But Herzog watches them with a sort of pitying curiosity. He’s looking for the ghost in the machine.
The experts he interviews are some of the smartest people on the planet:
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- Danny Hillis, who built supercomputers and a 10,000-year clock.
- Kevin Mitnick, once the world's most wanted hacker, who explains how the weakest link in security is always the human being, not the code.
- Lucianne Walkowicz, an astronomer who warns about the "Carrington Event"—a massive solar flare that could fry our entire global grid.
Imagine it. No phones. No banking. No GPS. Just billions of people staring at black screens. Herzog seems almost excited by the prospect of such a total collapse. It would be the ultimate "Lo and Behold" moment.
The Problem with "Connectivity"
We’re more "connected" than ever, but are we more together? The film suggests the opposite. There’s a scene where a group of monks in a monastery are all looking at their phones. It’s a quiet, devastating image. Even the most ancient traditions aren't immune to the pull of the screen.
Herzog’s skepticism is his greatest asset here. He isn't a luddite, but he isn't a fanboy either. He sees the internet as a new layer of the Earth’s atmosphere—a "noosphere," as Teilhard de Chardin called it. It’s a collective human consciousness that is increasingly autonomous.
The film spends a lot of time on the fragility of our systems. We’ve built our entire civilization on a foundation of sand. If the internet goes down, the food supply chain breaks within days. Most people don't know how to do anything without a digital assist. We’ve outsourced our memory to Google and our sense of direction to Waze.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Film
Often, people think Lo and Behold is a critique of technology. That’s too simple. Herzog loves the absurdity of it. He loves that we’ve created this god-like entity out of wires and binary code.
What he’s actually doing is asking if we are still "human" when we are so deeply integrated with our tools. He wonders if the future of the internet is a world where we don't need to speak anymore because we can just transmit thoughts. He asks if that’s a utopia or a nightmare. Most of the scientists seem to think it’s inevitable. Herzog just sounds worried about whether we’ll still tell good stories in that world.
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Real-World Implications Ten Years Later
If you look at the rise of generative AI today, the conversations in the Lo and Behold movie seem incredibly prescient. When Herzog asks if the internet can "dream of itself," he’s basically predicting the hallucinations of LLMs. We are now at a point where the internet is generating more content than humans are. The "reveries" are becoming reality.
We are seeing:
- The total erosion of privacy that Mitnick warned about.
- The psychological toll of constant connection seen in the Green Bank residents.
- The potential for catastrophic systemic failure as our infrastructure becomes more complex and less understood by any single person.
The Actionable Insight: How to Survive the Connected World
You don't have to move to West Virginia and live in a tin shack to protect yourself. But you should probably take Herzog’s warnings to heart. The internet is a tool, a weapon, and a dream all at once.
Audit your digital dependence. If the "Carrington Event" happened tomorrow, do you have a paper map? Do you have physical copies of your most important photos? Do you know the phone numbers of your loved ones by heart? These seem like "prepper" questions, but they are actually about maintaining a tether to the physical world.
Practice intentional disconnection. The people in the film who seemed the most at peace were those who had a clear boundary between themselves and the machine. Herzog himself famously doesn't use a cell phone (or at least he didn't for a long time). You don't have to go that far, but turning off notifications isn't just a productivity hack—it's a way to reclaim your sovereignty.
Value the "clumsy" human moments. In the film, the robots playing soccer are interesting because they fail. The human family grieving their daughter is heartbreaking because they feel. Don't let the polished, algorithmic version of life replace the messy, analog reality.
The Lo and Behold movie ends not with a solution, but with a question mark. It leaves you feeling a bit small, a bit vulnerable, and very much aware of the glowing rectangle in your pocket. Herzog doesn't want to fix the internet for you. He just wants you to look at it—really look at it—and realize that we have conjured a demon that we don't quite know how to settle.
Take a moment today to put the phone down. Go outside. Look at a tree. Not to take a photo of it, but just to see it. That might be the most radical thing you can do in a connected world. If you want to dive deeper, watch the film and pay attention to the silences between the interviews; that’s where Herzog hides the real truth.