The Net

About the Film

“Where is reality? Can you show it to me?”

- asks the late physicist Heinz von Foerster. This is just one of many questions Lutz Dammbeck explores in his film THE NET. When he first began work on the film, Dammbeck’s aim was to investigate various world views and concepts for clues about the novel relationship our society has with computers and technology, a relationship that modern artists have also grappled with since the 1960’s. THE NET searches for the connections between art, mathematics and the internet. In the film, Dammbeck travels the United States in search of these clues. He talks to numerous “players”, such as editor/publisher John Brockman, who was active in the 1960's New York multimedia scene; author Stewart Brand, who had contacts to Timothy Leary; engineer Robert Taylor, one of the inventors of internet precursor ARPANet; also David Gelernter from Yale University, one of the Unabomber’s victims; and two of Kaczynski’s neighbors, both of whom reportedly played a crucial role in the arrest. Director Lutz Dammbeck

However, the essence of the film

centers on the letter correspondence between Dammbeck and Ted Kaczynski, the suspected Unabomber, who between 1985 and 1995 was purportedly responsible for 16 letter bomb attacks. While most of Dammbeck’s interviewees don't question Kaczynski’s guilt - Kaczynski was indeed convicted of the crimes - the film casts doubt on who the Unabomber really was. But Dammbeck is concerned less with Ted Kaczynski’s innocence or guilt than with Kaczynski’s concerns about what he considers the inhuman utopia of our technology-ridden world.

This dystopia seems to spread via a network

whose central node might well have been the Macy Conferences (1946-1953), during which the foundations of cybernetics were laid. The “incompleteness theorems” written by Kurt Gödel, a mathematician who proved that every formal system of logic contains problems that are both unsolvable and undecidable, serves as a supporting framework for the film. Again and again, Dammbeck allows the accused to interrupt the interviews and other presentation of case facts by editing in Kaczynski’s correspondence. The letters reflect a fear of random unpredictability that is inherent to the open, complex systems into whose clutches humanity more or less willingly marches. Mysterious connections Kaczynski chose to create and enact a counter model, a retreat from the modern world and a return to nature. Highly intelligent with an IQ of 170 and a former professor of mathematics at Berkeley, Kaczynsky forsook a high-profile career to live in a small hut in the Montana wilderness. He criticized the emerging network system and possibly drafted the Unabomber manifesto, which Lutz Dammbeck published to accompany the German version of the film. Ultimately, in 1996, Kaczynski was captured by FBI agents. He was coerced into a plea bargain which prevented him from representing himself in the trial. His case was never heard in court and he was sentenced to life in prision. In a collage of media reports we learn that “paranoid delusions controlled Mr. Kaczynski’s life” and “if he is declared insane, then his actions are of no political consequence and are meaningless to society.” Dammbeck takes Kaczynski and his theories seriously. He treats the other interviewees similarly, giving them the opportunity to express their own views on technological developments in the modern age.