This guest post is written by Joe van Wonderen.
“Watch Dogs” was a warning and a guide. However suffocating our world of Orwellian tech feels, it wasn’t always like this and it doesn’t need to be.
Ubisoft’s 2014 game “Watch Dogs” is an action-adventure RPG with a heavy focus on technology. Think “GTA,” but with a hackable environment. The plot follows Aiden Pearce, a vigilante who runs, guns, and hacks his way through Chicago in pursuit of his niece’s killer. Later games in the series would touch on more political themes, but the original was important for its perhaps naive but hopeful faith in technology. The tech was there to help you, and even when the baddies tried to use it, you were only ever a skill point away from turning their toys against them.
Influential video games need to be archived for the same reason all great art does: so we can remember where we came from. That goes for “Watch Dogs” and other great games like “GTA IV.” Either Ubisoft needs to surrender a copy of the game to archivists, who can protect and maintain it for future study, or it needs to be legislated out of their cold DRM-clutching hands.
What makes video games special as a medium is that they bring the audience into their universe, films show you a story, books tell you a story, but in games you are a part of the story. A player can spend all day exploring Chicago with Aiden Pearce largely skipping or ignoring main missions. In that Chicago, you’ll find what we fear today: Invasive surveillance capitalism, sloppy digital footprints and government overreach, but you’ll also find digital trips.
Digital trips are “Watch Dogs’” silliest side quests. They let you transform into a giant spider or a mushroom-hopping loony to complete largely frivolous side missions. They recall the days of tech optimism. A safe and powerful psychedelic trip offered through your smartphone. Haven’t we all been searching for that first iPhone announcement high for almost two decades now?
“Watch Dogs” was released almost a decade after Steve Jobs announced Apple’s iPhone. The device brought together all the different gadgets that then made up modern life. In the right hands, that little device opened the door to million-dollar business ideas, digital art creation, and the Internet.
“Watch Dogs” also came out a year after the Snowden revelations. In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA contractor and honest-to-God agent of Big Brother, shattered the illusion that tech was for us. The miracle iPhone and machines like it were in the hands of the state, with all the awesome and terrible power that it wields. There truly were government spies tapping lines, easily surveilling everybody, and with tech, no one could be a nobody anymore. If any three-letter agency decided you were interesting, they could stalk you without you ever knowing.
Those contrasts make up Ubisoft’s Chicago, technology that threatened to smother you in the long arms of the law could instead be the tools you used to strike back. Personal computers and the internet evened the playing field — letting Aiden Pearce dance past any boot threatening his face. He could make the city work for him, hacking bridges and traffic lights, blowing up transformers, and blurring his face so that he was never anything more than a ghost in the machine.
Tech doesn’t feel like it works for you anymore, instead more like a supervisor. It’ll hold your hand while it shows you how to set up every minute of your life. It wants to be with you all the time, from the morning when your phone dings to wake you with a breakfast of horror stories until the blue light keeps you awake for one last doom scroll.
All the while, the algorithm learns more about you to serve up what it thinks are better ads.
Thankfully, we need not go quietly into that dark night. People are resisting, and it’s leading to real consequences for the tech oligarchs. Citizens across the U.S. destroyed so many Flock cameras that the company was forced to respond and add more robust safety measures. Good reporting by citizen and professional journalists created popular resistance to data centres, effective enough that municipalities are being proactive against AI. People are returning to outdated tech or choosing mindful alternatives in an effort to break their smartphone addictions.
That all needs to be celebrated and is an important theme of the Watch Dogs series, especially in the latter games where popular resistance was a key mechanic.
However, one of tech’s most celebrated strengths is how it can be a great equalizer. It can help a well-informed private citizen, but the odds are that if any major firm or government wants to suppress or surveil you, it would likely take a computer science degree and espionage training to shake them off. Big tech’s greatest hits include PRISM, XKeyScore, Cambridge Analytica’s deal with Facebook, and everyone’s favourite killer robot Palantir.
The collective is where digital decency is possible, governments have heard their citizens’ frustrations and are legislating limits on tech. More countries are adopting youth social media controls, and some are working to source their tech locally rather than feeding Silicon Valley. That’s not to suggest Silicon Valley is a unique hive of villainy, surveillance capitalism is a global phenomenon, but it does demonstrate that governments can use tech in co-operation with their citizens.
“Watch Dogs” needs to be in a museum so that future generations will remember resistance is possible, that tech can be wonderful, and it is so fragile, we must not forget Aiden Pearce can live in all of us.
Image Credit: “Watch Dogs”
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