Three Hot Docs films explore digital hubris
Humans and the Internet have been failing to communicate since the very first online message was sent in 1969.
It happened on Oct. 29 of that year, as Werner Herzog shows in his new film Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, a Sundance hit receiving its Canadian premiere Thursday and Friday at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival (until Wednesday, details at hotdocs.ca).
On that momentous day nearly 47 years ago, UCLA computer professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student programmers sent history’s first Internet message to a computer at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., a distance of nearly 600 kilometres. The intent was to send the computer greeting “LOGIN,” but only “LO” came through before the system crashed. How poetic it was, as Herzog and Kleinrock remark, that the first word on the Internet would be an exclamation of wonder or surprise.
And how appropriate that this first brief message would be an unintended communication, the consequence of people thinking they knew exactly what they were doing and saying with their machines. The medium is the message, as Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan famously observed of mankind’s technological extensions, but the hubris is entirely human.
The folly of digital arrogance is shot through the cautionary tale that is Lo and Behold and two other Sundance films making their Canadian debut at Hot Docs: Weiner and Tickled. The message in all three films is that the human capacity to create marvellous machines is surpassed only by the human tendency to use them incorrectly, even to the point of evil. Often it’s the result of people not understanding the ramifications of the Internet’s incredible reach and permanent record.
The Internet pioneers interviewed in Lo and Behold talk about how the Net was conceived as a worldwide community of helpful people, not a minefield of anonymous antagonists, so security precautions weren’t adequately baked into its design.
Herzog visits a California family who sadly understand this all too well: the parents and siblings of Nicole (Nikki) Catsouras, 18, who died in a crash while driving her father’s Porsche on Oct. 31, 2006. One of the first responders, an investigator for the California Highway Patrol (CHP), took a photo of Nikki’s body and nearly severed head. It was later illegally uploaded to the Internet, for reasons that could range from simple misjudgment to sick sport to pure malevolence. The grisly image went viral, and online trolls from around the world began relentlessly taunting the Catsouras family. Nikki’s mother, Lesli, says she now considers the Internet “the spirit of evil” and adds, “I didn’t know such depravity existed in humans.” (The family successfully sued the CHP, winning nearly $2.4 million (U.S.) in courtawarded damages.)
Digital hubris is also evident in Weiner, by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, which began as a redemptive chronicle of disgraced former Democratic congressman Anthony D. Weiner. He’s known worldwide for the “Weinergate” scandal of 2011, when he admitted tweeting sexually explicit photos of himself to young women he’d met online.
Weiner figured he’d never be caught — one of his aliases was Carlos Danger — but he also admits he didn’t fully understand what he was doing. He also lied about ceasing his “sexting” habits, which caught up to him when ran for mayor of New York City in 2013.
The camera catches the shock and paralyzing fear of Weiner, and the anger and dismay of his wife Huma Abedin and campaign staffers, as an online gossip site reveals the candidate is still sexting women, at least one of whom is seeking some kind of vengeance. Weiner rails against “the technology that undid me,” yet he’s the author of his own misfortune. The narcissistic politician is so wrapped up in his own bubble — and his pathetic need for recognition — he allows the astonished Kriegman and Steinberg to continue filming him.
New Zealand doc Tickled is in many ways the most disturbing of the three films in its depiction of widespread digital hubris. Directors David Farrier and Dylan Reeve begin their film as a humorous report on a bizarre yet apparently harmless pastime called “competitive endurance tickling.” Their investigation leads down a rabbit hole of Internet links involving cyberbullying, identity fraud, online shaming and extortion. Not much should be said about the film going in — it proceeds like a thriller — but it’s no spoiler to say that anyone who has seen the 2010 doc Catfish will recognize how deception is now very much a part of online activities.
I contacted Farrier by email and he said he’s heard the Catfish comparison, including from some of his sources in the doc who feared being “catfished” themselves. The Internet is now part of the daily lives of many people, Farrier wrote, “but I think there is still a huge portion of society that’s naive to the dangers of the online world. People still click on terrible scam emails. People trust that the person they’re chatting to on Tinder is a real person and not a bot, or a person with ulterior motives . . .
“The Internet is a great tool but, where there are humans involved, there’s always someone who will be using it to be a little naughty. Or a lot naughty.” Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column appears Friday.
The medium is the message, as Toronto’s Marshall McLuhan famously observed of mankind’s technological extensions, but the hubris is entirely human