‘Watch Dogs 2’ Embraces San Francisco’s Long, Weird History as a Hacker’s Paradise

Released back in 2014, Watch Dogs never quite lived up to its own premise. And the game promised a lot: an open world of hacktivist mayhem where you play as cyber vigilante Aiden Pearce, who actually turns out to be quite boring and also representative of a bunch of dull stereotypes. Picture a trench coat.

Fast forward to 2016, and I'm sitting at a lavish international press launch for Watch Dogs 2, a sequel that is distancing itself as far away from its predecessor as possible. We're in downtown San Francisco, sitting in the distinctly dungeon-like chambers of the city's historic Old Mint building. They've been decked out with computer screens and seedy couches. A pretty good simulation of the hacker spaces in the game, which are in turn pretty good simulations of those found in dank basements all over the country.

Journalists from around the world have been flown to this precise location for a purpose. Not only to hear developers talk about level design, but to experience a few days in the city that has been—in loving, gorgeous detail—recreated in the game. It's worth noting that Twitter's global headquarters are a 15 minute walk from here. A train ride away is Palo Alto, the beating heart of Silicon Valley, home to the headquarters of Apple, Facebook, and Google—but also thousands of wannabe start-ups. And all of this is integral to Watch Dogs 2, a game obsessed with technology and its potential for both harm and good.

We're given plenty of game time at the launch, and my first impression is that…Watch Dogs 2 is fun. An early mission sees you hack into a cell phone and steal millions of dollars by tricking a Martin Shkreli-esque character into buying a fake unreleased hip hop album. I love that. But what more immediately intrigues me is how political the ethos behind this game is, and how San Francisco's backstory fits into that so well.

In stark contrast to the dreary Chicago cityscape of its predecessor, the Bay Area of Watch Dogs 2 is a colourful, pretty world to drive around and explore. But that's not the only reason Ubisoft chose it. San Francisco has a long, weird history—not only as a tech colony but also as a subversive, counter cultural anomaly. Which makes it perfect for a game like this, where you play as Marcus Holloway, a member of millennial hacker collective DedSec.

Dedsec aim to disrupt the status quo by throwing around lines of code. Far from perpetuating stereotypes, they're a diverse bunch of

smart, loveable misfits who seem right at home in San Francisco. In a panel discussion at the launch with Watch Dogs content director Thomas Geffroyd, cyber security expert and Bay Area native Violet Blue talks passionately describes the Bay Area's quirky history as a paradise both for computer nerds and other kinds of weirdos.

"This is a city that has attracted outsiders for a very long time, Blue says. "It has a status as a sanctuary city due to our LGBT population, and as a city we've learned how to take care of ourselves and became a place where people can come if they're unaccepted by their communities."

Glue all of these things together, and you've got a rich incubator for hacker culture. Some of the biggest hacks you've ever heard of have come out of San Francisco: parking meter hacks, passport cloning, ATM jackpotting. "If you think of hacking as a body, then Germany is the brain and San Francisco is the heart," Blue says.

By Germany, she's referring to the Chaos Computer Club, founded 35 years ago in Berlin. The epicentre of European hacking, CCC has been responsible for poking holes in the security of major banks and breaking into US government computers. But what they basically do is use hacking for good: they're passionate about the protection of citizen data, they've publicly demonstrated against e-passports. They betray system vulnerabilities in order to highlight them.

San Francisco's own computer counterculture emerged in the mid-1970s, when members of the Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club essentially invented the personal computer—in the ultimate example of a group of nerds congregating in a mythical garage setting. Members included Steve Wozniak and phone phreaker John Draper, among dozens of others who went on to prototype cartridge-based video game systems, touch screens, and microcomputers. All of them had a stick-it-to-the-big-guy hacker mentality, later immortalised in Steven Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and films like Jobs.

What Watch Dogs 2 wants you to know is that this same hacker ethic is still alive and well in San Francisco. The city is home to massive hacker groups like Noisebridge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but it's Silicon Valley that most fascinated developers.

"All our phones and apps come from Silicon Valley," Geffroyd says. "Steve Jobs and Woz, they were originally hackers. Freaks! Mark Zuckerberg too. So that spirit of hacking is with us everywhere—the way we communicate, social media, our phones, all have been shaped by this mentality of disruption. It's basically embedded in the applications we use. It's really interesting to see Silicon Valley as the source of our digital life right now, and how the hacker way of thinking has shaped everything we do."

So where does the game slot into all this? Well, it may feature millennials with 3D printers and iPhones instead of 70s baby boomers with microcomputers, but the mentality is the same. Marcus and DedSec are disruptors, and they're angry ones at that. At the launch, Blue and Geffroyd explain how the game's hero, a young African American from Oakland, is a victim of racial profiling computer algorithms that have framed him for a crime he didn't commit. Your first mission is to erase his incriminating file from a protected database.

If you're white, this might sound far fetched. But predictive policing is a very real threat both in the game and out of it, especially to racial minorities and disadvantaged communities. Similar to redlining, where major banks illegally refused loans to people based on their postal codes, computer algorithms profile people as criminal threats based on statistics rather than real life.

"This is core to the reality of the United States right now," Geffroyd says. "A lot of applications are being sold right now to police services to optimise their duties. And it means they're disproportionately surveilling areas of people who aren't even suspects. And we hope that by playing Watch Dogs, players will understand that."

It should be noted that the physical act of hacking is kind of boring—which is why you don't have to learn code to play Watch Dogs 2. But the outcome of a hack can be both thrilling and terrifying, and that's the emphasis here. In an age where leaked emails can tilt a presidential election, where a major motion picture distribution company can become the laughing stock of the world when its private conversations make headlines, a group of cyber hooligans hacking into the tech capital of the world may very well be the heroes we need.

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