Werner Herzog v. the Internet
A long conversation on the web, the future of humanity and almost everything in between
In the summer of 2016 I went and visit Werner Herzog at his home, in Los Angeles. He had just released Lo and Behold, a strange documentary on our relationship with the digital technologies. He was extremely kind and generous with his time. On top you find a video of our chat. Below my article.
LOS ANGELES. In the monumental Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, the nearly nine-hundred-page tome that in the charismatic German director's fan consortium goes by the name of "the Scripture," the biographer says two things about journalism. The first: "Interviews make very little sense," judge the works rather. The second: "Journalists who rely on a tape recorder inevitably tell the story badly." With this viaticum, in addition to the more or less apocryphal chronicles of the time he disdainfully threw into the trash a biography that the young Emmanuel Carrère, not exactly a scarce one, presented to him as a tribute or the time he challenged Enrico Ghezzi to a duel over a wrong adjective, I am about to ring the director's bell for Fitzcarraldo and another sixty or so memorable, unclassifiable, extreme films. The lush bougainvillea of a location I am bound not to reveal ("There are a lot of crazy people stalking me") contrasts with the famously anxious photo of him with the grizzly bear breathing down his neck. The man who opens the gate, despite his grandeur and legendary cavernous voice, ends up agreeing with the flowers. Beyond the room where long Indian arrows, an elaborate sextant and Lena, the beloved Siberian wife who is completing a photographic installation for the British Museum, stand the small garden where we settle in. The topic is Lo and behold. Reveries of the connected world, the film just released in the United States and in our theaters from October 6. For once the indefatigable 73-year-old has apparently kept his Fernweh, the desire for faraway lands, which from Antarctica to the Peruvian Andes has guided him in previous film choices, at bay. The Internet, the subject of his investigation, was born in these parts, and the departures were all from domestic terminals. He has also contravened a maxim of Hölderlin's that he holds dear and reads, "Man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects." Only partially, however, because Herzog is more interested in suggestions than explanations. As when he leaves two neuroscientists baffled by asking them "whether the Internet, as von Clausewitz said of war, dreams itself" ("I know no one can give me the answer, but it's important to ask broad questions") or engages with Ted Nelson, the hypertext theorist, in an exchange with a hermetic outcome ("I wasn't interested in the details, but he's a fascinating person"). Questions follow the documentary's ten-chapter scan.
Why an Internet film now, a full generation after its birth?
"Because it is an epochal phenomenon, the full extent of which we have not yet understood, of a size comparable to the introduction of electricity."
Of the subset that goes by the name of social networking he once said that it is a "massive, naked assault of stupidity" and that the only social network he recognizes is his dining table of up to six. Has he revised his judgment?
"I maintain a fair amount of caution. On average it is a manifestation of stupidity, or rather banality that pervades everything. But of course life is composed of chains of trivialities."
Last night in central Pershing Square there was a Pokemon Go-themed party with dozens of adults among the attendees. Two days ago in Japan, a man behind the wheel got distracted while playing and hit a passerby, killing him. What's going on?
"I remember the days when everyone had to have a hula hoop or know how to dance the twist. I think this is, again, an ephemeral phenomenon. What is new, compared to other video games, is that it provides interaction with the reality around you. But important things happen elsewhere. Fifty years from now there will be no trace of it."
The film starts from the early days of the web. Do you think that, compared to the expectations of that time, some promises have been betrayed?
"I believe that the real pioneers like Leonard Kleinrock, who sent the first message (the word to be transmitted was Login, but the system crashed after two letters, hence the first part of the title, whose idiomatic form also translates as "by surprise"), had no idea of the revolution they were starting. It was not until twenty years later that they went to the basement to retrieve some furniture to rearrange the room at Stanford containing the casket, the server from which the original message originated. Even science fiction had no idea: it had imagined flying saucers, but not the Internet."
You talk about '69, I talk about the 1990s when the Web was born. Back then "all the world's information at your fingertips" was a classic in newspapers. The suggestion was that everyone could have access to any data.
"I never believed that. Today there are about three and a half billion camera phones around: have they created billions of filmmakers or had a significant impact on photography? I wouldn't say so. Amateurs will not prevail because, in addition to the technical tool, you need a vision, the ability to tell stories, critical thinking. To the students in my Rogue School I repeat one thing: read, read, read."
You interview Sebastian Thrun, the engineer behind Google's driverless car as well as an online teaching super-star. He boasts of a virtual class with 160,000 students, compared to the 200 he had at Stanford. The question he doesn't ask himself, and which economists sum up in the formula the winner takes all, is what will happen to all the other non-star profs?
"I don't think the kid from Bangladesh or Kenya who followed him cared much about whether he was a star or not. He cared that he explained well. Even if he had been a college student with the same talent, he would have followed him anyway. What is more interesting is something else. That is, at the end of the course, in the ranking of the best students, the first one from Stanford came only 413th. It means that there are 412 out there, with less resources and luck, better than him. And today they have a place to cultivate their talent."
At one point you ask Joydeep Biswas, the Carnegie Mellon Indian who is betting to create a robot team by 2050 that can beat the World Cup champions, if he loves his robo-cannon. He candidly answers yes. Could you love a replicant of Messi or Ronaldo?
"I rule it out. But I do register the fact that robotics is going more and more in the direction of anthropomorphism. I have seen soft automatons with big, expressive eyes at MIT, reacting to the emotions of the interlocutor. Giving evidence of total reliability, superior to that of dogs and immeasurable compared to that of other humans. For me, however, nothing will replace a real chat, a glass of wine or a plate of pasta (he says it in Italian) with a human being."
From the dark side reposts the story of Nikki Catsouras, the little girl decapitated in a car accident, whose photos were posted online and laced with chilling comments. Her mother has since called the web "the manifestation of the antichrist." Is it just our mirror or does it disable our Super-Ego?
"Good or bad are not right categories for technology to which speed or bandwidth pertain instead. Humans are either good or bad. Yet there persists an obsession, especially on the part of the media, to ascribe to it this moral characterization, this primitive Western-movie sense of justice in the absence of which the public seems to remain dissatisfied. No one would question whether electricity is bad, except at the moment they were sitting in the electric chair (here, and in at least one other passage about squirrels, Herzog contradicts himself when he declares that he "does not possess the sensory organ for irony"). As for Nikki, the parents made me read comments so debased, so depraved, that I could not report them. It is disconcerting to see how anonymity reveals the worst in us."
At one point he visits the area around the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, which discovered the first black hole in our galaxy. Cell phones and other electromagnetic waves are banned there so as not to interfere with the readings. Happily disconnected people meet live and play banjo and fiddle. Does he regret the good old days?
"The good old days are an imposture. Life is here and now and we would do well to open our eyes wide in its presence. I tell, however, of some electrosensitives, a scientifically controversial condition, who came here to shelter from the waves. Refugees fleeing technology whose suffering, if only psychosomatic, seemed authentic to me."
You also meets kids in detox from video games. You often cite the epistemological value of walking to understand the world. What kind of experience do people who spend entire days in front of a screen have of it?
"Very different from those with whom I spend my days and nights. To those who want to make films I say that traveling 3,000 kilometers on foot will teach them more than 2-3 years of schooling. However, I was fascinated to talk to young people who collapsed after 60 hours in front of the video. Do you know that they wear diapers so they don't have to interrupt a game? I wanted to visit a re-education camp in China of which I only saw one video with a young boy crying and begging his parents to pick him up. For them the virtual dimension is like heroin. They have lost the connection with real life."
Is this an audience you have given up on?
"Not at all. In a world where everyone gives an embellished, stylized representation of themselves on Facebook, there is a great demand for authenticity. And I'm someone who literally hoisted a ship over a mountain, pulled Joaquin Phoenix out of the carcass of his car, who was shot during an interview (by a madman with a pellet rifle, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrRNM9cMBDk). So there are teenagers as young as 15 or even 12 with whom I have a growing correspondence. They perceive me as a real person."
In the fifth chapter he imagines a technological blackout from a sudden solar flare. In the next one he talks about cyberattacks. Can we defend ourselves?
Solar flares are rare eventualities. On the other hand, my wife was in New York during the days of Hurricane Sandy. It wasn't just telephones or electricity blown, but people trapped on the 30th floor and others who no longer had a working flush. The Internet is fragile and our infrastructure is overly dependent on it. Can we go back to hunting? Manhattan has squirrels in the parks, but gone are those? Only the Amish and Inuit are realistically in a position to survive in the absence of a network. We can only improve contingency planning. As for hackers, thousands of breaches will be underway as we speak. Billions of dollars of information stolen every year, from China, certainly, as well as others. I find excessive the demonization of Putin's Moscow, which could instead be a useful ally. To recent allegations of intrusions into Clinton's emails by Russian pirates the NSA and other specialized agencies have commented with eloquent silence."
Is it Mars, as entrepreneur Elon Musk tells her, Earth's plan b?
"Mind you, it would be a thousand times easier to colonize the ocean floor. But it seems to me that he is interested in affirming a principle, in proving that every road is viable, even if it will not be traveled all the way in his lifetime. But rather than checking the habitability of other planets, wouldn't it be better to improve that of our own?"
Musk himself signed an open letter against the risks of out-of-control artificial intelligence. Doesn't he fear, more prosaically, that it will take out a substantial amount of workers?
"It used to be that a family of five farming the land would feed a dozen. Today five workers on Iowa's mega-farms produce food for 200,000. It is likely that a new class of people will be created who are not only unemployed but made superfluous, no longer needed. And perhaps they will band together in religious wars against robots. However much computers improve, however, they still cannot solve mysteries like deciphering the Phaestos disk and its enigmatic 241 Minoan symbols, a reproduction of which I have in the next room. That calms me down."
I am less reassured by his conversation with two Pittsburgh neuroscientists who hint at a hypothetical future in which it will be possible to tweet our thoughts and read those in others' heads, in a sort of telepathic Tinder
"If and when we get there, we will invent ways to protect ourselves from those intrusions, with a kind of jamming that radio signals are jammed with today. A functional MRI machine already today can figure out which area of your brain is activated when you think about a certain thing. Deciphering an emotion or a complex thought are different things, however, fortunately." We are not doomed, of course. After two hours of conversation, it is especially clear that Herzog is an over-the-top conversationalist and not at all smug ("I only look in the mirror so I don't cut myself when I shave, but I don't even know the color of my eyes," he confided in Scripture).
Being recruited for or against the Internet seems sesquipedal nonsense to him. The monthly magazine Wired, which must have found some of his juxtapositions disrespectful, retaliated by pointing out that the film is funded by a cybersecurity company ("True, but they are mentioned just once in the credits. It's like Fiat sponsoring La Scala."). All the sharp dichotomies must seem inadequate to him if it is true that, while he tells me that he would have liked to discuss his passion for Theodorus Siculus with engineer Kleinrock ("I noticed that he was taking notes a little notebook in ancient Greek"), he also unceremoniously confesses his curiosity about trashy television ("I used to watch wrestling, fake from head to toe, today Ultimate fighting where they really bleed and pass out from the blows. But also Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, about a five-year-old girl who enters beauty pageants. And I'll soon be diving, avidly, into the series about the Kardashians." Then again, what can scare a guy who ate a shoe as the price of a bet with fellow contestant Errol Morris? Neither is Trump, "an interesting phenomenon, which Italians should understand better thanks to Berlusconi. However, polls and actual behavior are never fully correlated, and I have faith in collective intelligence." The one that got people to vote twice for Obama, "a truly important great president, despite the flaws and limitations of the system in which he moved," with the one unforgivable sin of not being clean about pervasive wiretapping ("We don't have to like a president. Nixon was obnoxious and delinquent, however, he was good."). The real dilemma, far more arduous than the untranslatable Cretan record, remains why a man who could live anywhere-and who likes to walk-lives in Los Angeles. He explains, "When I married Lena twenty-one years ago I sold everything I had in Germany to follow her and came to America, where she had obtained citizenship because Siberia had disappeared, with only a toothbrush. So she was studying in San Francisco where, a few start-ups aside, nothing was happening. So we moved to Los Angeles which the post 9/11 psychosis gave as the next target and found a couple selling out this house at a panic price to take refuge in Utah. The truth is, beneath the veneer of Hollywood glamour and superficiality, this is a city of great substance. Video games, gay acceptance and various other things that make a society worthy, rollerblading, yoga classes and the most unlikely religious sects are all born here." I am speechless, as in the face of Ted Nelson's cryptic address. Homosexual rights aside, is he kidding me? I would say no, since he has lived there ever since. Evidently he sees things that the casual visitor is precluded from seeing. "It's true, though, that it's impossible to walk," he concedes, "Once in Bel Air, among the mansions of the stars, the police stopped me to ask me for an explanation: if you don't jog or without gardening tools you immediately become a suspect." He tells me this as he drives me back to the hotel in a large but unpretentious car, solid and lived-in, which he drives expertly, disdaining the navigator, while advising me to visit at all costs the Museum of Jurassic Technology, invented by a genial friend of his. As for walking, he does it on the hundred and more days a year that he is out and about in the world touring. The thing he really misses is another: "The Bavarian dialect. Quite different from High German, in a Sardinian-like relationship with Italian. It is a real pain not to hear it anymore." The conquest of nostalgia is a futile effort.
(Originally published here)