The Machine Never Blinks is out in May 2020. — **The Machine Never Blinks** is out in May 2020.

By Bruno Savill De Jong — A major and vague question is how are we to engage with the world? Do we stand upon our own principles, or negotiate compromises from living within society? Is the cost of living in a state an obedience to it? These are the dilemmas evoked by The Machine Never Blinks, an informative if dense history of societal surveillance told through graphic novel.

This book, out this year from Fantagraphics, shows both the cultural origins and technological advancements of state-sanctioned voyeurism, how methods potentially used for ‘security’ can curdle into totalitarian control. Writer Ivan Greenberg holds a PhD in American History, and overviews it as a constant struggle between the watchers and the watched. Greenberg also examines non-American culture, like biblical quotations on God’s all-seeing eye and British factory “supervisors” during the Industrial Revolution. But the bulk of The Machine Never Blinks focuses on 20th-Century America – from various ‘Red Scares’, to the FBI wiretapping and blackmailing Martin Luther King, to the NSA’s contemporary data-mining of the public’s internet history – as a society increasingly untrusting of its citizens. A pivotal concept cited is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a theoretical circular prison that allowed constant surveillance from the guard in the central tower. Philosopher Michel Foucault heavily discussed the implications of this power in Discipline and Punish, all of which is neatly explained within Greenberg’s book. So maybe the question is not how ‘we’ engage with the world, since it is engaging with ‘us’ already.

So, maybe a better (and more manageable) question is how to engage with these reflections on the world. For despite its broad research and fine presentation, something is nagging me about The Machine Never Blinks. Maybe the information is so dense and righteous it feels more like a college lecture? Maybe it undermines its own arguments by failing to properly acknowledge an ‘opposing side’? Maybe by focusing on ‘what’ government’s do with surveillance rather than ‘how’ they do it (The Machine Never Blinks giving more information on legal policy than technology) only stokes up more fear than empowerment? Or maybe these books and their concerns are so resignedly familiar. Citing 1984’s Big Brother is basically standard in this realm now, yet The Machine Never Blinks explains it like a new concept. It feels like the book believes nobody is rioting because American citizens are unaware of government surveillance, when another explanation is simpler and more concerning. They do know, and they don’t care.

I’m not fully satisfied with these explanations. Just because something is standard doesn’t make it any less true, and The Machine Never Blinks is a comprehensive discussion of the various methods surveillance is used to reinforce the status-quo. The artwork by Everett Paterson and Joseph Canlas illustrate Greenberg’s explanations with clear visual metaphors and diagrams in a clean-cut ‘educational-comics’ style. But even though I completely agree that such widespread surveillance needs restrictions, the books seems to lack complexity. It champions online anonymity, without acknowledging how such anonymity and “free speech” has left some people’s worst instincts to fester without consequences. It argues how internet surveillance can be used to curtail modern protest movements like Black Lives Matter, without understanding that such movements rely upon social media’s interconnectivity. Again, I agree with The Machine Never Blinks’ stance towards a “right to privacy”, but it’s arguments for a side I already agree with is less convincing than a more measured analysis.

Everyone knows that Facebook, Google, governments and others collect our personal data; the response to this is unclear. How can we use the internet without being used by it? To be fair, The Machine Never Blinks never pretends to have the answers. It really is a solid graphic history that likely doesn’t deserve this in-depth wrestling with it. But it’s one that left me more frustrated than empowered, even if that is only my view. Others will maybe find it more eye-opening than I did. Yet despite finding its ideas important and intriguing, the presentation felt ultimately short-sighted.

The Machine Never Blinks - REVIEW

The Machine Never Blinks
Writer: Ivan Greenberg
Artist: Everett Paterson and Joseph Canlas
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Price: $29.99
An eye-opening book about the myriad eyes on all of us. We used to call it the Information Age, an era of technological innovation that made our lives more convenient. But since the idealistic early days of the Internet, we’ve learned that seemingly benign technology, from debit cards to social media, is being used to spy on us — so now let’s call it what it is: the Surveillance Society. The roots of today’s high-tech monitoring stretch further back into the past than you might think. The Machine Never Blinks tells the story of surveillance and spying in history and legend from its earliest days to the present moment (from the fable of the Trojan Horse to the Patriot Act) to reveal how we have built a society in which your rights, privacy, dignity, and sanity are under constant threat. A comprehensive, eye-opening manifesto, this book will make you take a look around and wonder: Who’s watching you right now?
Release Date: May 2020
Buy It Digitally: Machine Never Blinks

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Bruno Savill De Jong is a recent undergraduate of English and freelance writer on films and comics, living in London. His infrequent comics-blog is Panels are Windows and semi-frequent Twitter is BrunoSavillDeJo.