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Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
2016 · Film · documentary · 99 min
Directed by Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog's exploration of the Internet and the connected world.
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13 comments on Hacker News
Small recommendation here which I saw recently is Werner Herzog's 2016 film Lo and Behold, which features Musk and all his mars stuff quite a lot! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World
Which movies? The only one I didn’t like was the one about the internet, Lo and Behold. I feel like maybe he was just from too many eras ago to understand how full of shit all the people he was interviewing were. All the rest of his movies always make me understand the world and humans on a deeper level than I did before. Happy People, Into the Inferno, Grizzly Man, the one about the cave paintings, the one about the South Pole.
I really like Werner Herzog. Too many good ones to list them all here. He brings in a lot of social implications of whatever subject he covers. A lot of randomness as well which is often quite funny. E.g. Encounters at the end of the world or Lo and behold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World
Petter Mettler is a great film maker imo, e.g. Picture of Light, due to the poetic and philosophical elements mixed in with actual documentation. Visually very appealing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_of_Light
Another favorite film maker is Stanislav Mucha who covers a lot of European topics and in particular German. Very ironic and partly sarcastic. Favs are Absolute Warhola, a film about Andy Warhol's extended family in Slovakia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolut_Warhola
Also, The Truth about Dracula is very interesting and funny: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1621024/
Into the Inferno - Werner Herzog. Documentary on volcanoes where the director allows the filming locations to bring other topics to the forefront.
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World - Werner Herzog. Film about the internet.
The Thin Blue Line - Erol Morris. Film about a murder of a police officer that comes to a different conclusion than the court did about who the murderer is and led to the release of an innocent man and the incarceration of the guilty one.
The Civil War - Ken Burns. There's a reason it's a classic!
Good Intentions - Walter Williams. Film about how economic policies that sound good often have the reverse effects that they intend to have.
I recommend this documentary "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World" from Werner Herzog.
There is a brief but touching interview with Ted Nelson.
I just watched Werner Herzog's latest documentary (with vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer) Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds[0] (2020) about asteroids, meteorites, comets etc and their impact on the Earth and human cultures past, present and possible future. Most of it consist of interviews with experts in the subject from around the world, showing them at work, e.g. with the Hawaiians that look out for asteroids on a collision path with Earth, and found ʻOumuamua. They go to the site of the Yucatan meteorite that killed the dinosaurs, go hunting meteorites in Antarctica etc. Maybe the most amazing bit was a sequence of photographs of micro-meteorites found in Norway. I thought it was great, highly recommended!
New to Herzog? Most of the user reviews on IMDb are complaining it's not the usual impersonal science program they'd evidently expected, so please don't make that mistake. There are a few segments about meteorites in myths/religions. Herzog's documentaries all kind of feel like anthropology, no matter the topic. He's fascinated in people, and celebrates us in all our weirdness. e.g. His 2016 documentary about the internet, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World[1], was one of the best things on the subject I'd seen.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9203832
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828
Knowing nothing about this (I'd never heard of Xanadu before), it honestly sounds really sad.
Maybe this guy really is passionate and he's obviously driven, but based on my cursory skimming he seems a combination of depressed, stubborn, and delusional.
> In 2016, Nelson was interviewed by Werner Herzog in his documentary, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World. "By some, he was labeled insane for clinging on," Herzog said. "To us, you appear to be the only one who is clinically sane."[12] Nelson was delighted by the praise. "No one has ever said that before!" said Nelson. "Usually it's the other way around."
I am not commenting on whether or not he is working on something important. It just seems after so many decades of...very little, you may be so deep into the sunk cost fallacy that it's almost a miniature mental illness.
I wish him all the best, but this sounds like one of those really sad stories that you'll read 50 years after he's dead and just feel bad for the guy.
It's a great story!
btw, "Lo and Behold (Reveries of the Connected World)" is the name of a documentary by Werner Herzog about the history of the Internet. "LO" was the first text sent on UCLA's Internet test. They probably intended to enter "LOGIN" but the network crashed. :)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lo_and_behold_reveries_of_the_connected_world
My read was similar, I also couldn’t get through Lo and Behold which set off bullshit alarms [0] and just gave me the impression of confidence being used in the place of actual explanation.
It feels like an emperor has no clothes situation. For some reason people think it signals high status or intellectualism to like Herzog so they say they do.
I haven’t watched all of his movies so this may be unfairly harsh, but that was my initial impression.
Portal podcast also came across that way to me. First interview with Thiel was interesting, but I stopped somewhere after the next couple.
Too much “the media doesn’t want us to talk about this” and “the Clintons are a globalist conspiracy against the people”.
If you have real arguments then make them.
Don’t just confidently state things as fact without backing them up.
Thankfully when Sam Harris was on he at least pushed back on some of the bullshit.
[0]: https://youtu.be/Bqx6li5dbEY
If you have Netflix, the segment in “Lo and Behold” with Leonard Kleinrock is worth watching just to see his energy and excitement. The whole documentary is a little overwhelming though.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80097363
and for a solid documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World
Here is an interview in which Ted Nelson explains his vision to Werner Herzog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqx6li5dbEY The interview is included in 'Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World' documentary. The whole documentary is rather critical of the impact the Internet revolution had on our society, but Herzog seemed to really admire Ted Nelson's alternative vision for the global network.
Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/