About the Film
If you’re old enough, you probably remember the optimistic 90s commercials promising that the internet would bring happiness and utopia — an easy world of abundance and personal liberation where oppressive governments and massive corporations no longer had any power. Posted online today, these old ads generate millions of views and tens of thousands of comments. Not because people are psyched at how accurate these predictions turned out to be — but by how starkly wrong they were.
Yes, we have all the knowledge at our fingertips and can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. But something isn’t right. Along with the benefits, the internet created a shadow world -- a world of mass surveillance, addiction, loneliness, algorithmic manipulation, AI-assisted teen suicides, attention span annihilation, dropping literacy rates, centralization of corporate power, monster data centers, robotic weapons, pollution, war by remote control…It seems that these are not just small problems at the fringes, but appear to be central to the technology itself.
The question is: What happened?
It’s a question on everyone’s mind. And it is one that VAMPIRE VALLEY will seek to answer.
The documentary will be partially based on Yasha Levine’s groundbreaking book SURVEILLANCE VALLEY.
His book traced the forgotten origins of the internet to a Cold War technological project that sought world peace through social and political control. The film will trace this forgotten history and look at how it influences our world today.