What Comes Next Is the Future
2016 · United States
Directed by Matt Griffin
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A documentary tracing the history and future of the web — the story of Tim Berners-Lee's creation, where it has been and where it is going — told through dozens of interviews with the people who build it. Director Matt Griffin weaves voices from across web history, from the medium's origins to its open, uncertain future.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A straight documentary about the internet's history sounds like the safest possible premise, but Griffin's choice to let the web's actual architects speak—unfiltered, contradictory, uncertain about their own creation—accidentally makes a film about inevitability feel genuinely unsettled and strange.
Griffin situates this work within the long tradition of technological documentaries that interrogate progress itself, but achieves something rarer: a formally restrained oral history that trusts the density of overlapping testimony to create meaning, positioning the film as a kind of mirror of the distributed, decentralized network it documents.
The entire film hinges on Griffin's decision to let silence and the space between voices do the argumentative work—rather than smooth the contradictions between Berners-Lee's idealism and the web's actual trajectory into consensus, he lets them collide, and that structural choice transforms dozens of talking heads into something that feels almost like a living debate.