z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I think you do a lot of the same thing current kids whose parents are grooming them to be politicians do, except as a kid you would voluntarily do these things.
Keep your online history crazy clean and consistent. Engage in as a little controversial rhetoric online as possible. Choose your friends and who you choose to engage with extremely carefully. Create a believable, likable, almost too clean online public persona and stick to the story like glue, heck make it more truth than fiction if possible.
Using digital privacy practices is useful, but the parents in this case could still see if their kid is using a VPN or Tor, they just wouldn’t know what was being done on those protocols.
Truthfully if the child was going to rebel in any way that actually threaten a nation state, I wouldn’t be able to conceive of a way the parents wouldn’t be able to figure it out very quickly unless the child were more tech savvy and socio-politically savvy than not just their own parents but the intelligence agencies themselves as well.
Sounds like a cool piece of fiction, just not easy to make believable, at least imho.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Not really rebel, more like, say, the kid is LGBT, or maybe is forbidden to talk to someone because they are of a different race or social class, or its an authoritarian regime and they’re trying to find out what is really going on outside their country’s borders.
I don’t think that would be an entire story, more like a subplot of a bigger story… like maybe flashback scenes of a character’s “origin story”, of how they found out their parents are supporters of an oppressive totalitarian regime.
z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Yeah, that sounds like narratively speaking it’d be easier to pull off than becoming a threat to a nation-state. Escape is far more believable and feasible. Still difficult though, as it depends on your world building in regards to the nature of the authoritarian regime. Specifically, are levels of oppression within this fictional regime to the point where even the use of digital anonymity tools is severely scrutinized/punished? Or can the child character claim a legitimate reason to use said tools?
As I said in my previous response, it’s unrealistic that the parents wouldn’t be able to see that their kid was using Tor/VPN to access…something. Can you conceive of some excuse said kid would use should their parents confront the child about said use? Would they outright confront the kid or would they use other tactics to discern what was going on?
Ultimately you either have to make this very believable by utilizing extensive research into the technologies and sociopolitical dynamics involved in the plot, or you have to expand the world into sci-fi so that you can expand the amount of suspension of disbelief you are then able to ask of your audience. Or some mixture of the two I guess.
As a fan of Mr. Robot, I’m more keen on going as realistic as possible (and even Mr. Robot had moments of large amounts of suspension of disbelief), but ultimately it’s up to you which route you’d like to take.