(3089/898) Demosthenes and Locke

1623) As soon as [their father] got them both onto his citizen's access [to the Net, Valentine and Peter Wiggin, ages 9 and 12] began testing the waters. They stayed away from the nets that required use of a real name. That wasn't hard because real names only had to do with money. They didn't need money, they needed respect, and that they could earn. With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were their words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.

They used throwaway identities with their early efforts, not the identities that Peter planned to make famous and influential. Of course they were not invited to take part in the great national and international forums - they could only be audiences there until they were invited or elected to take part. But they signed on and watched, reading some of the essays published by the great names, witnessing the debates that played across their desks.

And in the lesser conferences, where common people commented about the great debates, they began to insert their comments. At first Peter insisted that they be deliberately inflammatory. "We can't learn how our style of writing is working unless we get responses - and if we're bland, no one will answer."

They were not bland, and people answered. The responses that got posted on the public nets were vinegar; the responses that were sent as mail, for Peter and Valentine to read privately, were poisonous. But they did learn what attributes of their writing were seized upon as childish and immature. And they got better.

When Peter was satisfied that they knew how to sound adult, he killed the old identities and they began to attract real attention.

[...] Her main identity on the nets was Demosthenes - Peter chose the name. He called himself Locke. They were obvious pseudonyms, but that was part of the plan. [...]

They began composing debates for their characters. Valentine would prepare an opening statement, and Peter would invent a throwaway name to answer her. His answer would be intelligent, and the debate would be lively, lots of clever invective and good political rhetoric. Valentine had a knack for alliteration that made her phrases memorable. Then they would enter the debate into the network, separated by a reasonable amount of time, as if they were making them up on the spot. Sometimes a few other netters would interpose comments, but Peter and Val would usually ignore them or change their own comments only slightly to accommodate what had been said.

Peter would take careful note of all their most memorable phrases and then did searches from time to time to find those phrases cropping up in other places. Not all of them did, but most of them were repeated here and there, and some of them even showed up in the major debates on the prestige nets.

"We're being read," Peter said. "The ideas are seeping out."

"The phrases, anyway."

"That's just the measure. Look we're having some influence. Nobody quotes us by name, yet, but they're discussing the points we raise. We're helping set the agenda. We're getting there."

[... T]he character of Demosthenes gradually took on a life of his own. At time [Valentine] found herself thinking like Demosthenes at the end of a writing session, agreeing with ideas that were supposed to be calculated poses. And sometimes she read Peter's Locke essays and found herself annoyed at his obvious blindness to what was really going on.

Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise [... and] stopped being frightened of the idea of becoming, to a degree, Demosthenes.

Orson Scott Card
Ender's Game (1977)