This is the “internet of things” that networks every element of Watch Dogs 2‘s fictional San Francisco together. Lucky for Dedsec, they’ve got a big, bright avatar of injustice to funnel their anger towards in the form of ctOS. Not to mention it make it awfully convenient for Ubisoft to justify Watch Dogs 3, 4, Brotherhood, Primal, and so on. Knowing that their job of taking down CEOs, and shadowy government agencies will never be done makes Dedsec seems smarter than their goofy collection of memes and hacker slang. The fictional Uber app is called Driver: San Francisco, of all things. The game itself follows suit with plenty of inside jokes about Ubisoft games. They even try to keep a sense of humor about it. They’re fighting “the system,” not an enemy that can be as easily identified as… Well, most video game antagonists. Their mandate, then, is to keep on sticking it to corporations, again and again, until the small changes add up to something big. The San Francisco cell of the hacker group known as Dedsec has seen single CEOs take the fall for entire companies, and watched the public move on from one scandal to the next Hollywood blockbuster before. It very often is, but Watch Dogs 2 smartly walks a line between having its cast seem optimistic and naive.
This unabashed passion for taking on The Man - using memes, fan fiction, and graffiti -may seem trite.
They also throw around a lot of token hacker, and Cool Teen Terms. I mean, they do that, too, but the protagonists of Watch Dogs 2 are more about fighting systemic injustice. If you haven’t been tuned into the “dark web,” you might not be “woke” enough to know these aren’t just some “skiddies” here to pass out “Zero Days,” and tap into ATMs. Hackin’ in is what’s happenin’ in San Francisco, thanks to those knuckleheads at Dedsec.