杏吧原创

Werner Herzog鈥檚 latest documentary is not a treatise on religion. Maybe.

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the connected world opens with a tour of the pale green room at the University of California, Los Angeles, where the internet was invented. This is a 鈥渉oly place鈥�, says our guide, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, and the first message sent from the computer here was 鈥減rophetic鈥�. In 1969, while trying to send the word 鈥渓og鈥� to a sister computer over at Stanford, it crashed after the second letter. 鈥淟o鈥�, it wrote. And you know the rest.

It鈥檚 not hard to see why Herzog turns to religious imagery to describe our relationship with the internet. The machines we created to connect us now pervade and influence so much of our lives that they have recreated us, requiring a new way of thinking about ourselves and our future. The internet fundamentally changes how we relate to one another, how we solve difficult problems, how we imagine how things could one day be. It calls for a theological reckoning.

Mixing theology with the internet usually summons up the Singularitarians, the quixotic group that thinks that someday (soon) man and machine will merge to create an immortal superintelligence that will no longer be recognisably human.

But giving something the theological treatment doesn鈥檛 have to be about constructing elaborate fairy tales; really, it鈥檚 about thinking deeply about something that has seeped into every corner of modern civilisation.

鈥淭he machines we created to connect us now pervade and influence so much of our lives that they have recreated us鈥�

And so for 98 minutes, Herzog鈥檚 treatise wends its way through a loosely organised spate of topics that includes ARPANET, self-driving cars, internet addiction, protein-folding, cyberattacks, Blade Runner and space travel. Everything is fair game, because of the internet鈥檚 near-ubiquity. Herzog sees it as a force of life itself, a spirit that can be as difficult to describe as consciousness or chaos. At one point, an engineer admits to 鈥渁 certain reverence鈥� for one of his robots. Another demonstrates his ideas with text from the Bible. Over and over again, technology is described as powerful, invisible, and 鈥� most commonly 鈥� beautiful.

Until it isn鈥檛. About a third of the way through the film, we meet the family of Nikki Catsouras, a California girl who died in a car accident in 2006. Gruesome photos of the scene were spread online; strangers taunted her family with them. One of her sisters withdrew from school, and the rest of the family withdrew from the internet. As they look into Herzog鈥檚 camera now, years later, their grief is palpable. The girl鈥檚 mother remarks evenly that she sees the internet as the 鈥渋ncarnation of the Antichrist鈥�. It鈥檚 the 鈥渟pirit of evil鈥�, she tells Herzog, 鈥渁nd I feel like it鈥檚 running through everybody on earth and it鈥檚 claiming its victories in those people who are also evil.鈥�

Dead zone

Little wonder then, that there are places like Green Bank, West Virginia, the site of one of the world鈥檚 largest radio telescopes and so maintained as a dead zone for Wi-Fi and mobile phones. This feature has attracted a community of people seeking refuge from the internet, many of whom tell Herzog they suffer from a physical sensitivity to its signals.

What you make of their plight is up to you 鈥� Herzog doesn鈥檛 ask a doctor or researcher for comment 鈥� but I suspect it won鈥檛 sit well with some technophiles. I caught the movie at a theatre just a few blocks from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of Green Bank鈥檚 residents pleaded tearfully for doctors to recognise her condition, I noticed a man in my row clap his hand over his mouth, trying and failing to cover the sound of his laughter.

Herzog isn鈥檛 the first to try to take the measure of the internet and describe What It All Means. 鈥淭he Internet has a logic, a tempo, an idiom, a color scheme, a politics, and an emotional sensitivity of all its own,鈥� writes Virginia Heffernan in Magic and Loss: The Internet as art. 鈥淭entatively, avidly, or kicking and screaming, nearly 2 billion of us have taken up residence on the Internet, and we鈥檙e still adjusting to it.鈥� And we are moving rapidly into a reality where we are no longer permitted to live outside its influence.

Near the end, Lo and Behold starts to get a bit lost in a sea of unanswerable questions. Herzog returns to the same interviewees repeatedly, peppering them with new queries. Will we one day be closer to robots than to other humans? How could a cyberattack rend the fabric of society? Could civilisation survive if the internet suddenly disappeared? Does the internet dream of itself? Who knows? And so what if it did? I kept thinking the movie was over, and then it wasn鈥檛.

That isn鈥檛 to say the questions aren鈥檛 worth asking. We need more people thinking seriously about what it all means. Maybe it鈥檚 time for a theologian of the internet.