The best docs on the internet
...were not made by the culture that birthed the internet?
All the good documentary films about the internet were not made by people of America, the society that created this parasitic communications technology. They were made by Europeans — specifically: a man from England, a man from Germany, and a woman from the Netherlands.
The first is, of course, Adam Curtis and his All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The second is Lutz Dammbeck and The Net: The Unabomber, LSD, and the Internet. The third is Marije Meerman and her Cybertopia. The first two are my favorites. The third is a bit on the TV doc side but still great, as it gets into the ridiculous ideology underpinning the whole thing. These are three that come to mind. Maybe there are others?
Why aren’t Americans making docs about the internet? Maybe it’s a lack of distance? Maybe it’s the fact that Europeans (and the rest of the world) had the internet forced on them by an outside power — that this technology came from alien culture and language? Imagine if, for instance, a Russian version of the internet had won the world and Americans suddenly had to use the Russian alphabet for everything associated with it in their daily lives — letters like щ and й and э and ю and ж in their own URLs and then all the little words and terms that came with this technology? Maybe that’s why foreigners have been critical for longer? (At least some foreigners — one supposedly great Russian doc I saw on the internet just repeated the Silicon Valley myth.) That could be it. But I think it mainly comes down to money. Europe has a lot more public support and financing for films and the arts, while in America everything is privately financed — everything depends on the whims of “philanthropists.” That kind of direct oligarchic control affects the cultural market in not-so-subtle ways.
The moral here? You should give me as much money as you possibly can so I can make a real Made in America film about the internet. Vampire Valley. I wasn’t born in America. But I live in America and so have to beg on OnlyFa— I mean, GoFundMe.
And after giving me as much money as you can handle, please enjoy these three fine documentaries below. They are all great in their own way. But they are now ten to twenty years old and I think none of them captures our current moment — why everything feels so shitty and the internet’s role in the polycrisis. The Adam Curtis film comes close, though.
—Yasha Levine
PS: Maybe I’m not aware of other great docs about the internet. Know of any? Drop them in the comments!