Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

There are very important, tough questions that need to be asked about where technology is leading us. "Does the internet dream of itself?" is not one of them. This effort from Herzog is a major disappointment but not a surprise, partly because it started out as a corporate promotional video. Also because most of his docs are ostensibly on subjects that aren't that interesting or important on the surface, but he makes them riveting. Here, he's tackling a subject about which everything that can be said, has already been said, except for the hard questions. Is the internet even a net positive thing? Why bother going to Mars? It's getting harder and harder "to make a contribution" (to science, or to society), so what does that mean for us? Soon enough robots will beat Messi at football -- will anyone want to watch that? These questions don't get asked. And these are easy ones that came up anyway.

Herzog, who is a known non-tech guy, just seems ignorant and uninterested in technology, both the good and the bad of it. And we need him to pry forcefully into the moral morass that it's dragging us into. But he can't. He's just a baby boomer who is completely immersed in his real- world occupation that doesn't involve surfing the internet. He doesn't know, doesn't care. So unfortunately, he has gathered the most maddeningly thick-headed "scientific experts" to make bland, vapid observations about how amazing it all is. This is a huge disappointment. Werner is just not the man for this job -- so he's moved on to something more up his alley; volcanoes...