From Cyberspace to Composite: Two Fantasies of Hacking

Once upon a time, in the early years of the internet, nobody knew you were a dog.

In those days, nobody knew that I wasn’t really a 21-year-old graphic designer from Britain either. Every night, in the witching hour, I would sneak down to my father’s study, furtively unlock the door, and spend all night flirting on IRC with well-built Australian women. Tom Brindle had left the key in the lock once after losing a particularly savage drinking contest to our mother, and I cycled the three miles into town to get a copy cut. From then on, it didn’t matter who ‘sat’ on my ‘lap’ or what weird shit I wanked to, because it happened in a place as placeless and secret as Narnia.

Watching the trailer for Ubisoft’s forthcoming Watch Dogs reminded me of those nights because I feel sure they couldn’t have come from the same planet. Ubi’s game belongs to the world of Foursquare, Girls Around Me, and geotagged Twitter posts, where I can sit on a train and watch my best friend’s kid nephew’s tween Twitter spats. But I didn’t get social networking until I was 18 and didn’t ‘get’ it for another year after that. My adventures took place in the world of another hacking game: Introversion’s 2001 classic Uplink. Existing more than a decade apart, these games represent two very different fantasies of what role technology plays in our lives.

A Very Brindle Christmas

This article was jointly written by John and Jimmy Brindle.

How does your family spend Christmas? Eating a huge dinner whose duties are passed slowly down from generation to generation? Guiltylessly zombifying with well-stuffed stomachs before a blazing TV? Perhaps you all go out for a walk along the spine of a nearby hill and reflect upon the changing landscape. Whatever it is, I’m sure you have your way of doing things. That’s nice. We Brindles spent each festive season ritually fighting and betraying one another.

Tom Brindle, alias ‘Dad’, was ahead of his time. When he wasn’t collecting incapacity benefits under 14 different aliases or undergoing torturous experimental treatments, he funded his ever-growing family as a ‘Future Consultant’ for the games industry. Many tropes and trends of the noughties had their origins in the Skinnerian laboratory that was our childhood – and just as many died there. But of all his experiments, we will never forget that winter when he and Ma came up with a plan to gamify Christmas.

The rules were simple: three teams would compete in three separate areas of Christmas preparations, with one handling the tree and decorations, one cooking the dinner, and one mixing the drinks (a task very much the equal of the others in the Brindle household). Each would follow a list of objectives laid out by Tom and carefully balanced by Ma, specifying in what fashion they were to complete their duties.