635: Locke and Demosthenes
| Locke and Demosthenes |
 Title text: Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough up votes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp. |
Explanation
This comic reimagines a scene from Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. In the book, Ender is an above-average-intelligence boy who is selected to become a potential leader of Earth's "Defense" Forces in the event of another Bugger invasion (later re-titled the Formic invasions). Meanwhile, Ender's two older siblings, Peter and Valentine decide to save the world from itself. They do this by asserting themselves as wise demagogues who comment on political events on what are known as the "free nets" which are nets open to comment by anyone in the world. They choose pseudonyms to write under, as no one would take the words of children seriously, they choose Locke (Peter's pseudonym), and Demosthenes (Valentine's) and begin work. Eventually they gain enough respect to be invited to participate in moderated political debates in the higher class nets. By the end of the book, Peter has become the leader of the world, as Valentine runs away with Ender to a planet formerly inhabitted by Buggers to live out their lives in peace.
The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of what blogging has become, without the becoming-the-head-of-government outcome, obviously. Randall is suggesting that if the book was set with today's technology, Locke and Demosthenes would be getting extremely low exposure with their wordpress blogs as evidenced by the 0 comments on each post; the title text sarcastically invites Peter to be head of the UN. Also note that the sarcastic note is addressed to "Peter" rather than "Locke"; Peter's attempt to remain anonymous has failed miserably.
If you happen to be wondering about the squirrel, Peter Wiggin is portrayed as a sadistic sociopath. There is a scene in the book where Valentine stumbles across a skinned squirrel still twitching in pain.
Transcript
- [Valentine is laying on her back on the ground. Peter is feeding a squirrel.]
- Valentine: Ender's up there saving the world, but down here it's falling apart politically. What can we do?
- Peter: I know — we get on the nets and anonymously post political opinions. People reading our articles will see our intelligence, recognize how clear and logical our arguments are, and insist that we be put in charge, so we can fix everything!
- Valentine: Brilliant!
- [The squirrel is eating Peter's food.]
- [A blog.]
- LOCKE
- Powered by Wordpress
- [Articles, partly scrolled down.]
- [...] which is why we must reach out to the Russian leadership.
- Posted at 3:15AM by Locke
- Comments (0)
- [In a larger font]
- The Problem with China
- In recent months much has been made of [...]
- [In a sidebar]
- Recent posts:
- >> A few thoughts on...
- Comments (0)
- >> Russian Aggression...
- Comments (1)
- >> Trade policy and the...
- Comments (0)
- >> And one more thing...
- Comments (0)
- >> Everyone's wrong about...
- Comments (1)
- [A list of links to other websites.]
- Blogroll:
- >> Demosthenes
- >> FiveThirtyEight
add a comment! ⋅ add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ 
refresh comments!Discussion
...may someone explain FiveThirtyEight? Greyson (talk) 15:34, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
- FiveThirtyEight AFAIK is the Twitter handle (and the name of his blog, which is now a part of the NY Times) of statistician Nate Silver. He may have chosen to use that handle as it is the number of votes in the Electoral College. And now that I've done all that research, I might copy this into the explanation. lcarsos_a (talk) 17:13, 19 November 2012 (UTC)
I didn't add this because it might be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that Ender and Valentine aren't going to the formic homeworld, since that was destroyed by the M. D. Device, and I think that in Ender in Exile, Ender is shown to have gone to a mere colony of the formics. Athang (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- I agree with your interpretation, but the book does not come out and say such. For this reason, I changed the wording from "the former Bugger homeworld" to "a planet formerly inhabitted by Buggers". Smperron (talk) 04:55, 14 November 2014 (UTC)
Someone may want to change the transcript about the squirrel vomiting. It's far more likely Peter is holding food in panel 1 and has dropped it on the ground for the squirrel to eat in panel 2...108.162.250.212 05:02, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
- The official transcript states the former, so that was most likely Randall's intention when drawing it. Zowayix (talk) 18:55, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
- True to both. I have added that it doesn't look like it is vomiting, but added the link to the official transcript and noted both that it does vomit, and that it looks like it eats from the ground. The transcript here should describe the comic. Not copy the transcript from xkcd. But use it for clarifications. For instance the names are also not given in the comic, at least not for Valentine, whereas they are given in the official transcript. --Kynde (talk) 20:21, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
- It makes sense that the squirrel is vomiting. Peter Wiggin, in the books, was a psychopath and an animal abuser, so what he fed the squirrel might have been poisonous. 172.71.123.159 18:49, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
- True to both. I have added that it doesn't look like it is vomiting, but added the link to the official transcript and noted both that it does vomit, and that it looks like it eats from the ground. The transcript here should describe the comic. Not copy the transcript from xkcd. But use it for clarifications. For instance the names are also not given in the comic, at least not for Valentine, whereas they are given in the official transcript. --Kynde (talk) 20:21, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
