When reading an article on io9 about a notable new comic, I found the series from Image called Analog. It is about a post-post-apocalypse where cloud storage became open to the public showing the secrets of people’s online activity. It reminded me about a comic with a similar premise, The Private Eye. Then there’s the bigger question; which is more valuable, privacy or transparency?
The Private Eye: Is Privacy Just A Story?
Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s The Private Eye won the 2015 Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Digital/Online/Web Comics Work. How? By exploring how much people value their privacy. When the cloud servers are suddenly available to the public, some compromising secrets are revealed. People lose their jobs, relationships crumble, and in reaction the internet is permanently unplugged. Consequently, privacy is the driving force of culture; everyone wears masks and all technology is analog.
But it’s no paradise; trust has become even more of a hoarded resource. As such, some people have lost touch with one another, even old friends and lovers. Even worse, law enforcement is intertwined with news programs, telling people what they want rather than what they need. While people like the title character’s grandfather yearns for the good old days, the villain is obsessed with creating a new internet to bring networking back into the fold.
Analog: Transparency, Trivia, and Government Privacy
Meanwhile, Gerry Duggan, David O’Sullivan and Jordie Bellaire’s Analog tells the opposite story. Despite everyone’s dirty secrets coming out in the “Great Doxing”, only a fringe of people have had their lives ruined. The younger generation have essentially just went with the flow and become internet celebrities, not unlike the Logan Brothers. Governments on the other hand prefer to keep political information in paper form. So couriers called “Ledger Men” transport them to whatever clients are willing to pay. But the story really doesn’t take itself that seriously, it just makes content like its status quo.
Neo-Neo Noir
It’s pretty interesting to see these titles be detective series, almost like being an anti-cyberpunk genre. We’ve got the noir-style investigators who are products of their time. Both of them are at odds with the status quo.
So Jack “Human Punching-Bag” McGinnis from Analog is the one who caused the “Great Doxing”. After losing his old job in the NSA and his vigilante girlfriend hunting cyber Nazis, he lacks direction. While it can be said he’s taking responsibility for the new world, he isn’t very good at his new job. He’s willing to sabotage all of his clients regardless of collateral damage if he believes they’re not righteous enough. If anything, Jack’s a self-righteous drunk.
Compare Jack to the Private Eye himself. He’s unlicensed, but he’s very good at what he does. Despite his lack of social skills, he genuinely cares about people who went through loss. It’s why he goes through the trouble of trying to connect people to what they need for closure. Because in a world where the truth can easily be manipulated for the sake of an engaging story, someone’s gotta try.
What To Take Away?
Analog essentially has no direction, not even with its satire. Yet I can’t help but feel an accidental Aesop. When transparency mixes with oversaturation, when does it become content or clickbait? What’s the point of information being out in the open if people just get tired of it? An AI was ready to leave Earth because it couldn’t take anymore of us.
In The Private Eye meanwhile, there’s the question of how much privacy should there be. The villain of the story was certainly in the wrong; his obsessions drove not just to murder but also willing to trigger a culture’s trauma. He wanted to bring back the internet but with no privacy failsafes at all in act of outrage. His reasons were because people cut themselves off from the world completely; shallow relationships, fake news, and quick fix climate change solutions dominate everyone’s lives. With how the authorities want to take over this plan for national security, the moral decay is evident.
Overall Idea of Analog and The Private Eye
Between Analog and The Private Eye, this accidental genre asks important questions. What is the balance between privacy and transparency? In an age where people put their mental health at risk through live-streaming; where does it end? Do we just crawl into a corner waiting for the world to revolve around us? Or do we stop caring about the influx of intel altogether? Is our society going to be built around selling and hoarding trust; more than it already is?
Thanks for coming to the end, and as always remember to look between the panels.