A surprisingly worthwhile film that manages to transcend the documentary genre and Herzog's own idiosyncrasies to achieve a truly poetic statement on the Internet.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

With all due respect, Werner Herzo really seems like a nasty little man, always condescending, arrogant, and judgmental from his mental perch or through the lens of his camera, with his clear pretension to be a kind of filmic philosopher. He seems to revel in petty self-satisfaction as his camera-crew records his interviewee's embarrassing, inarticulate moments of thought or confusion when confronted with one of his mean-spirited little comments meant to totally undermine whatever that person is saying (in this film, for instance, there is the interview with a robotics researcher in Pittsburgh where, after showing Herzog the capabilities of his new robot, explaining its genesis in the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Herzog asks him 'do you think its as smart as a cockroach?'; or the moment where, after a family has described the photos anonymously emailed to them and the tweets they received after their daughter was beheaded in a car accident, Herzog leaves the camera running with their shifting emotions and uncertain body movements as the camera judges the authenticity of what its been told, looking, prying for a moment of revelation to undermine them and cast them as contrived). And, were it not for those with whom he spoke in this film and the genuine interest they have for their topic and for the Internet and technology, its beyond dispute that all that we'd have been left with in this documentary would have been 80+ minutes of the vacant-eyed psychopathic film director confronting luminaries with their own absurdity at every opportunity. Surprisingly though, what we get is something else, something perhaps even transcendent, and certainly worth considering.

If films express thought themselves, if they allow us to catch sight of the moment of the process of the emergence of thought, allow us to see, through the choices of editing, narrative, what is said, how it is said, to see a film become aware of itself in a moment of self-justification, then we can say that the moment where Herzog asks two of his interviewers (neuroscience researchers Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell who discuss the possibility of direct brain-technology connectivity) whether the internet dreams of itself is the defining reflective moment of the film that brings its entirety into some kind of coherent sensibility. Rather than providing the sort of casual, superficial answer Herzog is without a doubt cynically searching for to a question that is, at the moment it is asked, clearly laughable (one where, as usual it is unclear if Herzog is the idiot or its that he thinks the recipients of his question are), his interviewee's collect their own amusement and deliver to Herzog the meaning for his entire film. They tell us deliberately and thoughtfully that if we consider dreams as something other than the awareness one has when they wake up and know they were previously just dreaming, but in the sense of something that emerges as a result of being exposed to 'unpredictable patterns', then, they continue, to the extent that the internet is a technology within which individual actions become collective movements, and these movements themselves form unpredictable patterns and unstoppable processes, then, in fact, it could be said that the Internet does dream. At this point in the film, what had appeared up until this point as a becoming-tedious assemblage of disconnected parts with black-screen titles captioned with Roman numerals, takes on new significance, as it becomes apparent that the film's structure itself might mirror that of a dream sequence, that there might actually be some subtly intelligent logic to it.

If the entire film itself is a dream (of the Internet), then what is its dream? It is a dream of cyber-warfare, hackers and new forms of nation-state diplomacy; of visions for the future settlement of the solar system and universe, of new forms of communication to bridge those distances; it is the dream of the disappearance of the distinction between technology and person as technology enables brain-to-brain communication; the possibility of thermonuclear war, the wiping-out of the species, and those who survive off-planet; a dream of technology becoming intelligent and preventing disaster. But it is also a dream of potential destruction, of an Internet and people left behind, of those unable to live with the radio frequencies that make internet communication possible and of those whose vision for the internet lost-out and who sit in a psycho-bubble endlessly repeating the same idea, hoping for things to change, that they're ideas and vision for the internet will one day be vindicated.

At its core, the film is a dream of the irreconcilability of the present moment populated by such an endless diversity of things made possible by and through the Internet along-side those things that are not, or cannot participate in the futures bound-up with the Internet. When the film ends around the campfire of those living in a radio-frequency free area of Appalachia to the sound of human-played banjo's, guitars, singing and laughing, we catch a glimpse of this distance that separates what one might call an 'internet reality' from a more (primitive perhaps) 'human reality'. Certainly, this is the stuff Herzog lives for, to contrive these sorts of situations of obvious contradiction; but this time, it isn't hollow or laughably depthless: in this campfire scene, something resonates about the distinction between an Internet-enabled world and one without it, something that cannot precisely be articulated, not because it is imprecisely formulated, perhaps, but, rather, because it has to do with the way in which a dream manifests itself to us in waking life. It is in this sense that the structure of Herzog's film works to express the peculiarity of the moment of technological transformation that defines our present reality: by being constituted as an assemblage of seemingly disconnected segments whose individual parts begin to resonate with one another as they arise, watching the film takes on the character of the act of being caught in a dream where one is faced with an unpredictable and somewhat nonsensical sequence of images that defy or seem to have no precise logic ordering their sequence of presentation. Rather than being what it appears to be as a documentary of talking heads fulfilling its role to provide clear information and argument to help shape public opinion, the power of this documentary lies in its more filmic communication, and the way in which it assembles incomplete parts to evoke the partiality and contingency of the present moment that refuses to precipitate into one state of matter or another. Here, partial statements on the internet that intermingle to evoke a dream-state sensibility also work to produce a perception of the particularity of the Internet through an awareness of the dreams tied specifically to it. Which is to say that, reality becomes all the more real when it is doubled-over by its dreams, rather than artificially contrived to be simply dry, factual information. Like a Hong Sang-soo film, it is never purely the rational or the emotional that defines a moment of the present, but their inextricable co-presence. In much the same way, the reality of the Internet isn't 'complete' when only its rational, objective characteristics are considered; the physical instantiation of the Internet is itself a product of human endeavor and dreams, and it is the co-presence of this objective reality with the dreams that produce it, and are produced and modified by it as it evolves, that constitute its full vitality.

Finally, it could also be argued that the documentary has to do with the peculiarity of communication with/through/produced by the Internet. As one interviewee (Ted Nelson) tells us, early in the film, the Internet raises the issue of the conflict between the endless differentiation allowed by internet communication (its fragmentation into diverse elements) and the difficulty or impossibility for continuous, coherent narrative¹. This is related to a theme raised elsewhere (for instance, in Frontline's 'Generation Like'²) that explores how an over-reliance on technology leads to an inability for independent and critical thought and problems formulating complex ideas and narratives and expressing them argumentatively: which is the decline of rhetoric. The internet allows one to 'look up' the solution to whatever one is faced with, allows one to find a ready-made understanding that prevents one from having to endure any kind of difficult thought or uncertain reflection on the world. In this sense, the film could be viewed as an invitation to think this tension itself, to think of the Internet as a kind of dream-simulacrum within which humanity has become entrapped in a kind of hive-mind swarm-like reality as it unthinkingly cuts-and-pastes, multi-tasking its way to its demise while comforting itself with a poignant thought of the past it is in the process of losing. Perhaps it is true that today, above all else, what is most important to consider are the most basic of questions about what it means for our thought and for our ability to think. However, while Herzog deserves credit for transcending the documentary genre to create an irrational filmic dream-state experience, the film does also seem to fall victim to precisely what it studies: evoking the endless multiplicity and contingency of decision and thought today is almost too easy—its really quite obvious: its clear that the Internet has been associated with an explosion of choice and the multiplication of information³. Today, in 2016, to make a film whose purpose is to portray this most obvious of aspects of the Internet, to make it the central structural principle of a film whose purpose is to poetically express that multiplicity seems a bit naive, like a Terrence Malick anachronism⁴.

Footnotes