(There are spoilers in this article, so please read with caution from friends who have not yet passed the customs.) ）
I have witnessed the fall of London.
Now that I have been in the wind for many years, I have witnessed the ebb and flow of a century. However, in my short and long life, the fall of London has brought me the most memories.
I will never forget the night when London was swept away by an unprecedented terrorist attack, littered with fire, smoke, glass slag and passers-by who looked either frightened or wooden.
The Big Bang in London
Londoners after World War II have never seen an attack of this magnitude. London was in chaos, the government was shut down, the Police Department was helpless, and the army was in chaos. After leaving the European Union, britain has become an island in the Atlantic, and no country or international organization is willing to provide assistance to britain at this time.
Alarmed, the citizens of London chose the Albion Company as their protector, the Albion Company, a notorious mercenary organization in a Third World country. Overnight, the streets of London were occupied by mercenaries. They patrol the streets with weapons and arrest all suspicious elements. Far more drones than ever before hovered in the air, checkpoints erected at important intersections. The relaxed old days were gone, replaced by a military junta rule by mercenary organizations.
No one knows exactly who made that terrible night. Albion's leader, Keith, accused on television every day of a hacking group called "DedSec" that orchestrated the Big Bang in London. However, we all know that it is nothing more than a hacking group that claims to be a "watchdog", and they have no reason to create a terrible bombing. These are just excuses.
London at night
<h3>Those in power</h3>
As long as Albion can provide the stability, order, and security that Londoners imagine, then even if their behavior is a little out of line - such as the mysterious disappearance of some familiar but unfamiliar people at both ends of the three days, or the random surveillance and interrogation, the Londoners can pinch their noses and accept. London is so big that every citizen is nothing more than a speck of dust floating in the air or a potato in a sack. Will there be a close connection between the floating dust? Will the potatoes in the sack care that there is one less potato next to it? The answer, of course, is no.
This is London, a cosmopolitan city, and "a place that can only be reached by motor vehicle". Friends, there are no friends here. It's a society of strangers. You get out of your house every morning, take the subway on the same line, get off at the same platform, and walk through the doors of the same company. But is it the same every time you wait for the car? Crowding around you every day are different faces. You might say hello on a long commute and exchange names, occupations, and opinions about the weather. Then you get off at the station, run your own things, and you may never meet each other again in your life.
Soldiers facing a crowd of demonstrators
To the inhabitant of London, the other was nothing more than a vaguely veiled individual, a name, a profession, a view of the weather, a presence that he looked familiar but not familiar with when he saw him every day. He doesn't really care more than himself, maybe his family, nothing more.
How many people are there in Albion? 10,000? 50,000? Or by the standards of a modern military... Incredible 100,000? But it easily took control of London. It is not confronted with thousands of citizens who stand up for the public good, but 14 million potatoes of fear.
When other people in the city treat you with nothing more than a name, a profession, and a perception of the weather, will you stand up for them? No, you only care about yourself, or the little circle you're in. As long as drones don't hover over your head, as long as gunmen don't break into your home and arrest your family and friends, you won't do anything. You may feel angry, feel dismissive, and yell at the mercenary's head Keith after getting drunk in a bar, but you won't act. You'll only wake up the next day and get on the commuter train again.
Albion's head, Keith
This is the root cause of Albion's ability to establish authoritarian rule in London of 14 million people. In a city where there are only private connections between people, and no strong bonds between real social relations and the public interest, Albion is faced with nothing more than a pile of potatoes in a sack, each so fragile that nothing unites them to fight together.
In a world where people see only themselves as real people, not "names, occupations, and opinions about the weather," people certainly only care about themselves. Maybe a few people really have enthusiasm, but when they shout in bars and streets, they will only respond to him with silence. Why would others risk their lives for a "name, occupation, and perception of the weather"?
Both Leviathan-style states and night watchman-style states were theoretical inventions by the British. But in my opinion, these two types of countries are ostensibly opposite, but in essence they are the same. They exist for the sake of personal welfare, and ultimately for their own sake, but the means are different. The Night's Watch and Leviathan are just a line apart, just as it was overnight from the capital of freedom to the junta dictatorship.
Leviathan
<h3>Rebels</h3>
London thus fell into the hands of Albion. Or rather, it was the townspeople who handed over the keys to London to Albion. As long as Albion can guarantee that there will be no more earth-shattering explosions in London, and that citizens can take the subway to work normally every day, and that the daily wages are quite large, then the citizens can also tolerate mysterious disappearances from time to time, overwhelming publicity, and all-round monitoring from the human and electronic eyes.
But not everyone can tolerate all this, they can't tolerate all-round surveillance, they can't tolerate Albion's custodial management, they can't tolerate the slave market and organ trade that flood with Albion's connivance, they can't stand the inhumane attempts of tech companies that conspire with Albion to upload living people as artificial intelligence.
Some of them are former members of Albion who have a clear conscience, some are free hackers who are obsessed with fighting crime, and some are former police inspectors who are alone in tracking down the truth... Together, they re-established DedSec, the London hacker resistance group that was almost completely destroyed in that night of blood and fire.
Or should I say, "we.".
Hacker resistance group DedSec, whose members appear on the cover of the game
Albion has tracking and identification technology from Bloom, a comprehensive citizen database of the Central Operate System (CTOS), and drones throughout the city. But we are the "watchdogs" of ctOS. We have access from the backdoor of the system, and we have the artificial intelligence "Bergley" lurking in the ctOS system. Most importantly, we are an organization.
Take control of the drone
We can be anyone, but not anyone. We all have our own professions and expertise, which makes us invincible in the face of different situations. Judging from the social state of London at that time, we were rebels and deviants. An organization of deviants is always more disciplined and cohesive than the usual organization.
It is ideals and discipline that unite us and become a legion. Using the backdoor of the ctOS system, we are able to hack and hijack all electronic devices registered in the system: automatic barricades, mobile phones, surveillance videos, electronic door locks, computers, data storage devices, circuit valves, vehicles, drones... Taking advantage of this, we have repeatedly won the cat-and-mouse game against Albion.
Seemingly harmless old ladies may also be part of DedSec
Of course, we also use some conventional weapons, such as guns and finger tigers. But we don't encourage indiscriminate killing, and guns are DedSec's last resort, and always will be. If an agent is seriously injured or arrested by the police, we will do our best to rescue them, but the danger of the mission and the strange rule that the number of people on each mission is only one person at a time still makes it possible to lose our companions from time to time.
Of course, we will also recruit new companions. In order to build trust between the two parties, we always have to do something for them. However, the imagination of the citizens of London was really limited, and later the recruitment task began to fall into boring repetition.
In this broken world, anything can happen. Agents have reported embarrassing situations of being stuck in a door and unable to move. When I walk through the streets, sometimes I see people passing through the wall or flying through the air. But the weirdest thing I've ever encountered was a sudden blackness in the middle of a mission, and when I regained consciousness, I was back to before the mission began. As far as I know, many agents have encountered this phenomenon.
Fortunately, we finally succeeded in bringing down Albion and finding out the "Zeroday" behind Albion. The truth silenced all the agents. Zeroday is not an organization, but a person— Sabine, who rebuilt DedSec and guided agents in a deadly struggle with Albion.
<h3>Destroyer</h3>
Judging from Albion's performance in Watch Dogs: Legion, he is probably a juvenile "Big Brother". The totalitarian society built by Pervasive surveillance, violence, and taming in 1984 by George Orwell seems to be moving closer to reality with the spread of smart devices. Information security became the focus of public debate, and everyone was careful to protect their "privacy" from the opportunity for the state, tech companies, or anything else to steal it.
However, the ironic nature of social life is evident in the issue of privacy. People try to defend their privacy rights before the state and businesses, seeing them as the enemy of privacy. But without the state's large-scale investigation and collection of personal information, and the planning and arrangement of residents' housing on this basis, the concept of "protecting privacy" has no place in most of society.
"Big Brother is watching you"
The collection of personal information and the custodial management of the "welfare state" of the last century are now shrouded in secrecy, but it is precisely because of them that the "right to privacy" is no longer a privilege of the rich class, but a natural right for all. To a large extent, the right to privacy, which we need to defend at all times, arises from what it opposes.
Because of this, in a society that is more transparent and has less privacy on the surface, the more secrets exist, and the stronger the concept of "privacy". The more you live in a world like Watch Dogs: Legion, the more active the secret societies become. The stronger the investigation and surveillance from all sides, the more people tend to hide their secrets and even live a double life. In Chicago, where the ctOS climate was fledgling, DedSec was still a small group of a few people, and in London under the rule of the young Big Brother, DedSec became a legion.
From this point of view, Albion and DedSec grow in the same soil, which is a different appearance of the same thing. As the writer Emmanuel Meunier put it in his Scandinavian Notes: "In the most collectivist countries – Russia, Sweden, Germany – the dwellings are the loneliest." "And vice versa.
Typical Swedish country cottage
That's why Sabine wants to "reboot" the entire city with utter destruction. In her opinion, the world was sick, and Albion and DedSec were just two fruits in the same soil. She wants to destroy it all completely, along with the entangled good and evil into nothingness. In her dream, humanity will be reborn after this "reboot."
And I ended her dream with my own hands. She deviated from DedSec's credo, not content with the idea of a "watchdog", but to overturn the entire courtyard behind her. Is she right? I do not know. In the final standoff, she sarcastically asked us what was the fundamental difference between DedSec and Albion. After so many killings, are our goals "good"?
Final standoff
Sabine is dead, and her crazy plan ultimately fails. But her questions kept lingering in my head. Is what we do just? I don't know, I just ended up with an instinctive conscience. But who can guarantee that my "conscience" is nothing more than years of self-deception? Maybe I'm just afraid of the emptiness of what I do is meaningless. Now that I have left DedSec, I have returned to the daily life of running and toiling, and gradually moving to the end of my life in the daily work.
Until the end of my life, I still don't know anything about the answers to these questions.