We Know No King but the King of NYNEX Whose Name is Phreak
Last night, for maybe the thousandth time, I watched Hackers on my phone while delivering some packages in Death Stranding 2. It’s the cinematic equivalent of comfort food: dope-ass graphics, neon lighting, and dialogue that I was never cool enough to fully understand. If you’ve spent any time around networks or computers, you’ve probably quoted it at least once—if only to mutter “Hack the planet!” ironically under your breath.
As always during my rewatches, I was hunting for something to steal, some kind of detail like a word, a line, a throwaway reference that could be plucked out of 1995 and repurposed in my own writing. And there it was: Phreak introducing himself as “the King of NYNEX.”
What's up, man? I'm the Phreak. The Phantom Phreak? The King of NYNEX? I know you play the game.
If you’re like me, the first 999 times you watched the movie, you probably just nodded along and thought, that sounds like a cool techy word, but what does it mean, oh there's a squirrel. But curiosity finally got the better of me. What exactly was NYNEX?
Baby Bell, Do-do-do-do-do-do
NYNEX was one of the “Baby Bells,” those regional telephone companies spun out of AT&T when Ma Bell was broken up in 1984. Its name was a portmanteau of New York/New England Exchange, and if you lived anywhere from New York to Maine in the 80s and 90s, your landline probably touched their infrastructure.
Excuse me ma'am, I just wanted to let you know that your power is fixed...but the phone lines are a mess. It's gonna take Ma Bell a couple of days to patch 'em up...especially around the holidays.
Think of them as the gatekeepers to the telephone grid—local and regional calls, physical lines, switches, and everything that made a dial tone possible. For a generation of phreakers, NYNEX wasn’t just a phone company. It was a kingdom. So calling yourself the “King of NYNEX” was shorthand for: I run the phone lines in one of the busiest regions of America.
Did you know: NYNEX eventually merged with Bell Atlantic in 1997, and that merger eventually gave us Verizon. So today, Phreak’s claim would basically be: I’m the King of Verizon. (Doesn't sound quite as cool.)
From Phreakers to Fiction
Why does this matter to me, other than as an excuse to rewatch Hackers again? Because little cultural breadcrumbs like “the King of NYNEX” are fuel for what I do in my own books. The Vinestead Anthology is full of synthetic humans, virtual constructs, and corporate empires—but under all that cyberpunk gloss, the DNA comes from the real-world tech empires that once ruled.
A poster with the smirking face of Linda Lovelace greeted him in the next room. He stood for several minutes just outside the door, trying to imagine himself living in that cramped dorm room for four years. It was the room he eventually shared with Patrick after meeting his future friend in a speculative technology course. That was in 1970, when Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor were stirring up excitement about the potential of microprocessors. Though neither company would survive the decade, they did lay the groundwork for ideas never thought possible before.
NYNEX was a reminder that control doesn’t always come from who builds the flashiest new toy. Sometimes it comes from whoever owns the lines, the switches, the gateways... the boring infrastructure everyone else depends on. Vinestead International tries do that with Guardian Angel biochips and VNet, while companies like Perion Synthetics want to sell you a synthetic body that will generate maintenance revenue for the next five hundred years.
It's always about the pipes, not the data.
Why I’ll Keep Watching
So, yeah, that was my big discovery on viewing number 1000. And next time, I’ll probably find something else, maybe the way Razor and Blade’s outfits feel like a proto-TikTok aesthetic, or how Mr. The Plague was just a beta version of every smug tech bro who came after.
Dazed
But for now, I’m content to know that when Phreak crowned himself King of NYNEX, it wasn’t just cool-sounding techno-babble... it was a badge of honor in a world where owning the wires meant owning the world.
And isn’t that what we’re all still fighting over, thirty years later?
Well, that and the very soul of America.
