Werner Herzog’s meditations on a connected world

From online gamers solving genetic puzzles that have stumped the worlds greatest super computers to the mind-reading potential of the most refined MRIs, these are a few of the innovations that most impressed director Werner Herzog as he explored the potential of the Internet in his new film “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.”

Premiering August 19, the new Herzog documentary (and one of several feature films the prolific director will be releasing in 2016) presents a meditation on one of the 20th century’s most profound inventions through a series of interviews with some of the Internet’s most innovative minds — and some of its more mischievous malcontents (a segment with self-proclaimed “World’s Most Famous Hacker,” Kevin Mitnick, has the former felon gleefully recounting a run-in with the FBI).

In our interview Herzog touches on the power and perils of this interconnectivity, but ultimately, it’s not the technology that’s the problem, it’s how the technology is used. “The internet is not good or evil, dark or light. It’s humans,” says Herzog, that determine what the technology does (at least for now).

And no matter how reliant we are on these technologies, Herzog says the film’s ultimate message is that there has to be appropriate filters on how we use the tools we’ve created — or we’ll begin to abuse them.

You can watch the trailer for the film here: