"Most Science-fiction missed the most important thing in the world, which is the internet itself. They had flying cars. They had rocket ships. None of that exists..."

"... but the internet governs our lives today. It used to be that when you communicated with someone, the person you were communicating with was as important as the information; Now on the internet, the person is unimportant at all. Becoming your own filter will be the challenge of the future. Will our children's children's children need the companionship of humans - or will they have evolved in a world where that's not important? It sounds awful doesn't it? But maybe it will be fine, and the companionship of robots and an intelligent internet will be sufficient. Who am I to say?"

Says Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist, at the end of the Werner Herzog documentary, "Lo and Behold/Reveries of a Connected World."

These are the last spoken words in the film, which then ends with some scientists outdoors playing guitar/banjo/fiddle and singing the old song "Salty Dog." I can see there's a Johnny Cash version of this song and a Flatt & Scruggs, but the version I've known for half a century is by Mississippi John Hurt.

Flatt & Scruggs sing, "Let me be your salty dog or I won't be your man at all," and so does Johnny Cash, but Mississippi John Hurt sings "Let me be your salty dog/I don't want to be your man at all." It makes a difference! Ah, here's the whole script for the movie, and it gives the lyrics: "Let me be your salty dog/I won't be your man at all." That makes a difference too — a difference that affects what I want to say. But let me try anyway.

The movie not only talks about the loss of humanity on the internet (as the last spoken words show), it includes the famous cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" (showing an actual dog using the internet). You see where I'm going with this. The film ends with the spoken idea that maybe in the future people won't need the companionship of another human, and then you get the sung lyric of an offer of companionship that excludes being an man. The singer wants to be your dog and not your man. In one way, very literally, it reinforces the Krauss + New Yorker cartoon idea of evolving away from real touch with another person.

But because of the way we suddenly see and hear live human beings together playing and singing, we are roused into feeling that nothing could be more important than getting together with other people in the flesh. It's the very last thing in the movie, number one. Secondly, these men are obviously vitally alive and enjoying their immediately company. Thirdly, they are singing an enthusiastic plea for physical love from the "you" whose salty dog they are begging to be. I feel certain the film's final send off is a message to hold onto your humanity.

And yet that message is complicated by the old line about not wanting to be a man at all. Even before we got abstracted into the bodiless world of the internet, there were songs expressing an intense desire to escape being a man. But that was in the opposite direction from abstraction and into the role of dog. It was a desire to be even more intensely in the fleshly, embodied world.

"Salty Dog" is an old song, not to be confused with "Salty Dog" by Procol Harum (which is about sailors). The idea of being your dog has been around for a long time. Here's "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges:



Also, for those who've followed the story of Althouse and Meade, there's the line "We want to BE your dog."