The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age

by Andrew O'Hagan

A trio of reported essays exploring identity and the Internet

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. The Internet shorthand IRL—“in real life”—now seems naïve. We no longer question the reality of online experiences but the reality of selfhood in the digital age.

In The Secret Life: Three True Stories, the essayist and novelist Andrew O’Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL. “Ghosting” introduces us to the beguiling and divisive Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose autobiography the author agrees to ghostwrite with unforeseen—and unforgettable—consequences. “The Invention of Ronnie Pinn” finds the author using the actual identity of a deceased young man to construct an entirely new one in cyberspace, leading him on a journey deep into the Web’s darkest realms. And “The Satoshi Affair” chronicles the strange case of Craig Wright, the Australian Web developer who may or may not be the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto—and who may or may not be willing, or even able, to reveal the truth.

O’Hagan’s searching pieces take us to the weirder fringes of life in a digital world while also casting light on our shared predicaments. What does it mean when your very sense of self becomes, to borrow a term from the tech world, “disrupted”? Perhaps it takes a novelist, an inventor of selves, armed with the tools of a trenchant reporter, to find an answer.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Biography, Technology, History, Science, Short Stories

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 6, 2017

About the author

Andrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author.

He is the author of the novels Our Fathers, Personality, and Be Near Me, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian (UK). In 2003, O’Hagan was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. He lives in London, England.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

O'Hagan is a very good writer, and in the story, Ghosting, about ghost-writing Julian Assange's autobiography, he had a very good subject to write about. The first thing that is apparent is that Assange has a very high opinion of himself, of his own intellect, and of his ability to control absolutely everything (except his freedom). O'Hagan says, "Julian is an actor who believes all the other lines in the play are there to feed his lines, that none of the other lives is substantial in itself."

Julian is not a nice man, he is sexist, a nasty gossip and anti-semitic. But he doesn't want anyone to know these things, so with his closest adviser, Sarah Harrison he is going through the book on Wikileaks that two Guardian journalists, Leigh and Harding, had just published. She reads out, "It says here you carried abortion pills around with you that were really just sugar pills. And that you set out to impregnate girls. It says you said to one of them you would call their baby, 'Afghanistan'. Well that does sound like you. I've heard you say that sort of thing about naming babies after your campaigns. But you wouldn't leave all these girls to have babies on their own, would you? Have you been at the births of all your children?"

Julian, "All except one."

O'Hagan listening to all this as his biographer thinks, "But I thought he only had one son? Was he lying to me about his life?"

Assange didn't like the autobiography that Canongate was going to publish and so was distributing transcripts of private conversations and emails he had with the publisher to show their trickiness. He thought he was the only one doing this recording, but O'Hagan says to him that Canongate almost certainly have transcripts of their interviews in which he'd uttered many casual libellous remarks about people and many sexist and anti-Semitic comments. He thought he could control journalists, his biographer, the publisher and the media and that he himself was untouchable.

Assange did some good but his Wikileaks was very directed according to his own politics. He hated America and its allies, especially israel, hated Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Snowden, his 'partner in crime' fled the US to Russia, an Assange 'favoured nation' as part of Assange's suggestion that Russia could protect Snowden best from the CIA as he made his way to South America (however, as the US cancelled his passport he remains in Russia).

Only those with their own agendas and desperate confirmation bias see Assange as man whose whistle-blowing was motivated by a desire to safeguard the rights of individuals against countries and large institutions. He was motivated by his ego and personal hatreds. He is a despicable man who along the way did a lot of good.

There are authors I read who are horrible people, Roald Dahl, Oscar Wilde, Edith Wharton, Orson Scott Card, HP Lovecraft, Dr. Seuss et al. I put aside their dreadful characters and deeds because I enjoy their books. Perhaps it's like that with Assange, you have to consider what he did professionally more than who he is in his private life.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan is a difficult man to dismiss. Here he tells three stories based around computers and two strange Australians and makes something weird and wild and kind of spectacular. The first story, "Ghosting," regards the time he was asked to interview for the opportunity to possibly ghostwrite Julian Assange's biography. O'Hagan is distant, observant, and precise, early on telling us

"It was interesting to see how he parried with some notion of himself as a public figure, as a rock star, really, when all the activists I've ever known tend to see themselves as marginal and possibly eccentric figures. Assange referred a number of times to the fact that people were in love with him, but I couldn't see the coolness, the charisma he took for granted."

Assange comes across as a paranoid narcissist, deeply confused about his role and his life, about what he does and how he wants to be remembered. O'Hagan put the time in, listening and writing, and comes away burned.

The second story, "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," feels dangerous. O'Hagan takes on the identity of a young lad who'd died young, Ronnie Pinn, so that he could enter the Deep Web and see how it operated. O'Hagan's invented Pinn

"tended toward certain enterprises of his own volition...[including] with secretive experts about drugs and false documents and guns...The 'people' now moderating the Dark Web don't care about the old codes of citizenship and they don't recognize the laws of society. They don't believe that governments or currencies or historical narratives are automatically legitimate, or event that the personalities who appear to run the world are who they say they are. The average hacker believes most executives to be functionaries of a machine they can't understand."

When O'Hagan finally gives up the online ruse, he finds Pinn lingers longer in cyberspace, and in his psyche, than he'd anticipated.

The final essay, "The Satoshi Affair," was originally published in LRB a year or so ago. It is a very long, totally immersive essay about the possible originators of Bitcoin, and what the currency will mean for revolutionizing business and banking. If you haven't read much about the subject, this is a good place to start. Don't worry if some of it slips by without your understanding. I have a feeling we're all going feel that way for quite awhile.

O'Hagan is special. You won't be wasting your time, reading about his fascinating interface with the world.

[Occhionelcielo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Le aspettative erano alte, giustamente alte.
D'altronde non sono nativo digitale e nemmeno ingegnere elettronico; le innovazioni informatiche mi trovano sempre ad inseguire con un po' di affanno e poi non sono mai entrato in sintonia con i manuali tecnici.
Che meraviglia dunque quando, nella prestigiosa "Collana dei Casi" del prestigioso editore Adelphi appare un saggio in tre parti su Assange/Wikileaks, dark-internet e bitcoin.

La mia delusione in breve:
PARTE 1: l'autore ha il dente avvelenato con Assange poiché la progettata biografia a quattro mani non ha visto la luce. Tiene a farci sapere quanto il soggetto sia scorretto, ritardatario, infantile, capriccioso e pure burino, visto che mangia con le mani e lecca il piatto. Della logica di Wikileaks neanche l'ombra, in compenso chi vuole invitarne a cena il creatore è avvertito.
PARTE 2: il lato oscuro della rete. Che sarà mai? Quali misteriosi algoritmi saranno svelati? Risposta: il nostro va in un cimitero, prende da una tomba i dati di un povero disgraziato e, con questi, comincia ad aprire profili, eseguire acquisti, conoscere followers, insomma acquisire una identità indistinguibile dalle altre agli occhi della rete, sino al patetico incontro con la vera madre del defunto. Che nessuno gli abbia mai raccontato di un certo Pirandello?
PARTE 3: Siamo alla ricerca del Graal: chi si cela dietro lo pseudonimo di Satoshi Nakamoto, inventore del bitcoin? Si comincia con il principale indiziato, in fuga dalla polizia australiana, che riesce a sfangarla con una serie rocambolesche avventure da hard-boiled di serie B. A quel punto ho abbandonato, intanto non avrei mai capito come funziona una criptovaluta, quale sarebbe la sua portata innovativa, quale bisogno soddisferebbe e, soprattutto, se può minare il secolare diritto di signoraggio degli stati sovrani.
Ho mollato, maledicendo l'editore, da oggi per me un po' meno prestigioso.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Secret Life (beginning)
In the introduction to The Secret Life, Andrew O'Hagan explains that 'the leading figures in this non-fiction book, each of whom is real or began real, depend for their existence and their power in the world on a high degree of artificiality'. The secret life of the title is that created by the existence of the internet, that 'marketplace of selfhood' where 'the average user [is] a ghost'. The subjects are 'both masters of the internet and victims of it', and these accounts are all examples of how 'an online self and a real self might constantly be at war with each other'. Each of the stories is a reworked version of an essay previously published in the London Review of Books, two of which (the first and third) I've read before. (I've linked to them below; the full versions are no longer available online unless you're a subscriber, but the LRB site lets you read an extract of decent length before you hit the paywall.)

Ghosting
O'Hagan's account of his time as Julian Assange's ghostwriter, the outcome of which was supposed to be Assange's memoir/manifesto but ended up as Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography , disowned by its subject. It's utterly compelling, brilliantly revealing, horrifying and weirdly funny.

The Invention of Ronald Pinn
Details O'Hagan's decision to create a fake persona after learning about undercover police officers repurposing the identities of the dead. He chooses Ronnie Pinn, who died in 1984 at the age of twenty, after coming across his grave in Camberwell New Cemetery, and experiments with how far he can take Ronnie's new life, from that which can be easily faked (an email address and Facebook account) to the not-so-simple (driving licence, passport). At the same time, he tries to trace Ronnie's history and find people who might remember him. An interesting concept, but left me with a lot of unanswered questions (O'Hagan mentions that he has access to an empty flat in Islington which he uses as Ronnie's address, but never explains how/why – is this standard practice for identity thieves? What if they don't have an uninhabited property conveniently to hand? Are the people who friend Ronnie on Facebook actually people who knew him in the past, or random strangers, or are they also fake?)

The Satoshi Affair
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious supposed inventor of bitcoin? The answer may, or may not, be Craig Wright, a talented Australian mathematician and programmer of genius-level intelligence and significant eccentricity. In 2016, O'Hagan was enlisted as part of a complex corporate project, the culmination of which would be the 'big reveal' of Wright as Nakamoto. The resulting saga is complicated (nothing like reading about the mathematical principles of cryptocurrency to make me feel deeply, deeply stupid) but engrossing, a little thriller-like, a brilliant piece of reportage. In many ways this is the inverse of the Assange story, and in the end I felt sorry for Wright, who seems like someone who desperately wanted to avoid, but in the end could not help, becoming a celebrity (at least in tech and cryptography circles).

The Secret Life (end)
I really enjoyed this book as a whole – it flows like a dream, it reads like a novel, and at their best the stories are riveting. That said, there are weaknesses. I'm not convinced it successfully addresses the themes laid out in the introduction, or that these three stories even feel much like they're about the internet or online selves. The Assange and Wright stories feel like they are more about personality, about how something like an individual's need to see themselves as a near-messianic figure (Assange) or ingrained need for total privacy (Wright) can harm an idea or cause that's much bigger than the individual. Sandwiched between them, the Ronnie Pinn story is very obviously a weak link, unsatisfying on two fronts: it doesn't say much about fake identities, but it doesn't go very deep into this man's real life either. Personally (not that anyone asked), I would've cut that one, expanded the others, and turned this into a book that simply revolves around two uniquely fascinating people – stranger-than-fiction tales that unfold like slow-motion car crashes.

I received an advance review copy of The Secret Life from the publisher through NetGalley.

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[Antonomasia]

This may be one of those spatially unfair reviews, out of kilter with the rating: giving more words to negatives than to describing how one actually quite enjoyed the book and how much interesting material it contains. But the thing is, I’m not sure I find the narration hugely likeable – and as is the custom in contemporary literary reportage, O'Hagan is as significant a character here as his subjects, so that's part of what lingers. (In this I'm completely out of kilter with this Guardian review characterising the author as a 'charmer'. Maybe he's different in person, or maybe it's my standards...) But the essays are undoubtedly interesting and well-written, with greater attention to style, depth and philosophy than you’d find in articles on the same topics on, say, Wired or BoingBoing. And you have to admire his stamina for these long-term projects. However, I have an unease I wouldn’t experience reading about Bitcoin, for example, on those sites. I’m continually aware of this being the London lit world’s take on the topics. Are there errors? How ludicrous does it all sound to the serious geek? (Whilst I know a few, I don't think I know any to whom I could reasonably, casually say, “BTW what do you think of these 8000 and 35000 word articles?”) Has O’Hagan become the go-to man for informal tech support among his friends, who fixes the viruses and knows the best utilities? Maybe he’s someone I’d consider a “serious geek”. Maybe I give him insufficient credit; there’s no actual reason why a writer might not be, especially if he’s reported on some pretty involved internet phenomena. By no means all good geeks have CS degrees. (And not everyone with them is a serious geek. I did part of an IT postgrad conversion course, so maybe I'm more comfortable than some with the topics in this book, but my knowledge is too outdated and too little used for me to singlehandedly overhaul the laptop on which I'm writing this post.)

I’d read 'Ghostwriting’ O’Hagan’s 2014 essay on working with Julian Assange, [now paywalled] more than twice before, so didn’t re-read it again as part of this collection. (I read the book's introduction here as a Guardian article, and the other two essays on the LRB site. So if there's expanded material in the book, I've missed it.)

As I mentioned a couple of years ago after reading Julian Assange - the Unauthorised Autobiography, I’ve changed my mind quite a bit about the Ghostwriting essay. Initially I thought O’Hagan dreadful for his lack of insight and some of his phrasing; a year or more later, I realised I’d been expecting him to display though processes appropriate to a trained counsellor or therapist – yet that was never his job, so why should he? – and that I hadn’t been sympathetic enough to the amount of stress he was under and how that would have affected his outlook. (I never had any doubt that Assange would have been difficult company, but thought that insufficient attention was given to the effects of stress on him, and on the idea of him as an individual who may be both damaged and damaging.) Now, as well as having realised what a useful guide to interviewing and writing it is, I figure that perhaps that was, yes, an unfair expectation of O’Hagan, and the majority of people would be even more critical in his shoes, but that doesn’t mean either that I have to really like his approach - and there are people who aren’t helping professionals who have less judgemental and more generous outlooks than his. But he is who he is, and it’s unusual to find writing of this quality and depth about the tech world , so these pieces are worth reading regardless if you have an interest in both tech and decent writing.


O'Hagan has surely spent too much time around lynchpins of internet culture to have a simplistic view of the web's influence, and it's unfortunate that the book's Introduction in its guise as a Guardian article was given such a facile and misleading clickbaity title. That headline doesn't create expectations of a piece that will spend a paragraph explaining how Dickens believed that rail travel would change the meaning of selfhood. I found the piece thought-provoking about how the internet, and especially social media, may have changed the sense of interior life. In my teens in the 1990s, I think that there was a sort of inbetween pre-internet culture in which confessional columnists such as Zoe Heller became prominent to newspaper readers, not having to be as funny as their equivalents in earlier decades, recounting more quotidian aspects of life - but as with blogs pre-social media, these were not daily or hourly offerings. They had time to percolate. I think I tried to get back to that for several years this decade by eschewing the instant likes of Twitter and Facebook, but continuing to write on here. I definitely can't know the idea of private selfhood O'Hagan ascribes to Henry James and his creation Isabel Archer, not simply because of the internet, but because of those journalists and my teenage ambition to work in their world, even if I wanted to write about what I saw as "better" (more cultured or more serious) topics. The confessional journalists were sheltered from the public, however, because they were operating in the dial-up era where the internet, sorry, information superhighway, was a sideshow curiosity, and not a medium for anyone who pleased to pull apart what you just said. O'Hagan ends with a vague assertion that social media and lack of privacy will make the novel new; I prefer a more definite idea, from a very recent Goodreads review by Manny: Knausgård. It's easy to see why he's become the most talked-about novelist of our time. Knausgård, more than anyone, even more than Proust, is focused on what it means to be a writer. Once, novels about being a novelist were dry and abstract, but since the rise of the internet we've all become novelists. We're all blogging, Goodreading, Instagramming and Facebooking, turning our lives into text and trying to reassure ourselves that this is a worthwhile activity. Most of the time, it clearly isn't.

Most early reviews of the book agree that 'The Lives of Ronald Pinn' is the weakest of the three essays, but without going into many reasons why. In this shorter (8000 word) piece, O'Hagan mimics the activities of identity thieves and undercover cops making personae by creating internet profiles and acquiring fake documents (with a photo that looks 10-15 years too young) for a man born around the same time as he was, but who died in the 1980s. He details information he finds about the real Ronnie Pinn, and then changes gear into novelist mode, inventing details about the man which contradict some of those about the real man whilst he was alive; plenty of these are class-marked and are a better match for O'Hagan's world than for the deceased South London bloke. As an activity, it didn't make a tremendous amount of sense, being neither one thing (fiction) nor the other (as close as possible a match to the real man for maximum real-world convincingness), but it was revealing about how novelists work and why literary fiction is such a middle-class liberal world, as the Scottish author, in contradiction of his real-world inspiration, decides that his version of Pinn studied in Edinburgh, and is gay. (The real Pinn had a girlfriend.) Though 'Pinn' is interested in far-right politics. Is that simply a way of exploring darker sides of the web, or a reflection of lazy middle-class liberal assumptions about white working class men - or both?

And, I'm sorry, but how is the following not a pretentious copout that wouldn't stand up in court? (If O'Hagan had said something to that effect, and dissected the artistic philosophy behind it, and disclosed a bit of trepidation and other feelings about finding oneself in the dark of the Silk Road, that would have been a different story and a different opinion from me, BTW.) ‘It begins with a character, usually,’ William Faulkner said, ‘and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.’ And I can only say that the Ronald Pinn I made up tended towards certain enterprises of his own volition and I let him... An individual called Ronald Pinn, using his own pass-codes, paying with the bitcoins purchased in his name, bought white heroin and had it sent to his London address. It arrived in a small vacuum pack between two white cards in a jiffy bag, and cost about £30... Addressed to Ronald Pinn, it all came to the empty flat and I had it checked for authenticity. Of course, there is a history of art pranks that break or skirt close to the law, but the ends of this one never looked clear enough or even artistically playful enough for it to seem too far from the actions of script kiddies, the ones who don't even have political motivations, showing off what they can hack just because they can, and they're never endowed with the gravitas of a multi-page LRB article. (One of the instances where I'd love the opinion of more serious geeks.) The essay ends with O'Hagan meeting the mother of the real Ronald Pinn; probably, she didn't want any of what she said to appear in print, but it means that half the human story is missing, whether it's her annoyance and/or O'Hagan's reflections on the differences between the 'character' and the real man, and on the exercise as a whole.

The Satoshi Affair is far the most technically involved of the pieces, as well as being the longest at 35 000 words, and is relatively complex in the computing concepts it covers and in the high-drama twists and turns of Craig Wright's vacillations and struggles to prove his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic founder of Bitcoin and - probably more importantly in the long run than the hardcore geek and dark web currency, blockchain technology, which is expected to have revolutionary implications. Individuals interviewed in 'The Satoshi Affair' variously compare it to the Gutenberg printing press and the Internet itself. (Look at all these Guardian articles, for instance, praising blockchain to the heavens. No-one really seems to be writing [yet] for the lay-ish reader about potential downsides. One significant one does emerge from O'Hagan's essay: high energy usage, though that's for mining bitcoins above all else.) I am not sure whether 'The Satoshi Affair' does enough to explain blockchain, given that its audience, especially in book form, will include readers who know the author for his novels. I thought it was okay, but I'd heard of it before and don't mind looking stuff up elsewhere (which too many people seem to), and at least one of the few current GR reviews found it too complicated.
Wright comes across as interpersonally nicer than Assange (which isn't saying much) but ultimately as difficult to handle, in different ways.

The Satoshi essay perhaps has the most to say about identity online. Wright felt that he himself was a relatively unpopular and controversial figure, and said he needed to hide behind 'Satoshi' to implement the project. At times he wanted to reveal himself to be Satoshi, others not - also pushed and pulled in either direction by gigantic commercial and legal implications. Anyone who's sweated over quandaries about how much of themselves, and which aspects, to show online, knowing what lingers, may find some sympathy with the grand guignol motivations besetting Wright. Then there is the question, subtitled on the LRB cover in hommage to Trollope, 'Is he Satoshi?' (Never having read Trollope, I don't know whether the Popenjoy reference constitutes a spoiler.I find O'Hagan's suggestion, that Wright is probably a percentage of Satoshi, that Satoshi was really a small group, eminently sensible.) Whilst reading the piece, I found myself returning to a tangential issue: that of the British press's feeling that it has a right to know when it doesn't actually need to, its lack of boundaries, and how that might infect attitudes among the public, and interpersonally: a recent and pointlessly, astonishingly destructive example being the outing of the MalwareTech guy who helped halt the international ransomware attack. However, there are clear commercial reasons for Wright to prove himself to be Satoshi - it's not actually just about a journalist believing they have a right to know.

Each essay was produced as a standalone, and, assuming the text is the same in the book as on the LRB website, there isn't much material to drawing strands together. For example, what in Australian culture in particular helped produce both Assange and Wright? I remember from material on Assange (which may include the O'Hagan book) the sense of being out on a limb, isolated, whilst the Anglosphere was, even more so before the Web, dominated by the Americans and Brits, and the indignation, the sense of wanting to prove themselves equal, that this provoked in Assange and his fellow hackers, the rejection of the "cultural cringe". I'd also surmise that something of the outlaw culture/origins had an influence somewhere or other. What does Wright think about all that? Does he have anything to add to those ideas? It's not here. Both men, however, appear to have complicated relationships with father figures. (Not exactly unusual.)
There are a number of generalisations about geek culture in the Satoshi/Wright essay, some ringing truer than others.
- ...when such people want to make a point, they often want to destroy those they disagree with. It’s clear how paranoia-inducing it is to be constantly assaulted by people who hate you for thinking your thoughts. Geek culture in general is fantastically vitriolic: even an issue that seems pretty marginal to the rest of us – like the question of who might play Captain America’s love interest – can easily spiral into death threats. In the world of cryptography, this has been a bar to invention and progress: developers are hung, drawn and quartered every day on the internet and they have to be unusually robust to take it.
Whilst by no means all geeks are that way, and as they get older they are more likely to criticise such behaviour, this stuff is there on Twitter, and in the comment sections of comics websites for all to see, applying to entertainment, and unfortunately spreading to become a wider part of online culture.
- This is utopian thinking, even by normal geek standards.
Wellll, there are optimistic geeks and pessimistic geeks. I know both kinds. The people who believe tech will save us all (geoengineering, anyone?) and those who see the world as inevitably dystopian, and choose their tech based on privacy attributes. (Sometimes these are just different aspects of the same people.)
- that is a general truth about computer geeks. They are content to know what they know and not to explain it. They will answer a straightforward slur with an algorithm, or fail to claim credit for something big then spend all night trying to claim credit for something small.
Depends, depends.
O'Hagan certainly reads like an outsider to a world where Aspergers'-like behaviour is simply normal; he judges incidental things against wider-world norms, and it seems like minor faults are under the microscope. I've generally felt most normal amongst geeks; perhaps that's why I don't feel entirely comfortable with his writing.

I'm not the first to say that the three essays in The Secret Life don't really answer the points raised in the introduction. They are not about mass experience of the internet and its implications for interiority. They probably weren't written with that purpose in mind: they were individually commissioned pieces of work. The essays are arguably about the secret life of the internet, however, some of its darker and more cryptic sides, and two of its significant figures. Is there any conclusion to be drawn from all this other than that some complicated things happen online, and white Australian men who are star cryptographers and hackers might not be the easiest people to work with...? Which itself probably isn't a fair generalisation about all those who aren't Assange and Wright... But if the plainness and shallowness of most writing about tech frustrates you, or if you prefer a literary guide to some of the dark corners of the web, regardless of its relative inconclusiveness, this book may be for you.

[Matteo Fumagalli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Videorecensione: https://youtu.be/1pNINTWT758

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Modern society has become utterly reliant on the internet. It is pervasive and has many positive and negative aspects, from the way that it can bring people together to the troubling undercurrents of the darknet. In The Secret Life, Andrew O'Hagan brings us three different stories, one of a man who courted public opinion whilst holding it in contempt, a man who was thought to be someone else and shies away from the spotlight and a final story about a man who does not exist. All of these individuals live in the hazy zone between real and online life.

His first story concerns Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, the website that looks to get under every government’s skin. Assange had signed a fairly substantial deal with Canongate to tell his life story, and O'Hagan is brought in to interview, document and prepare a readable text ready for publication. Assange is a hugely complex character who suffers from justified paranoia, vanity and narcissistic tendencies, who wants to portray a particular image of himself and his website; he reviles excessive state controls that some countries apply, whilst missing the irony of applying similar rules to those that work for and with him. O'Hagan somehow manages to cobble together a manuscript for the publishers, but has come to realise that Assange doesn’t want to publish at all, merely to have the prestige of being an author.

The second essay describes how O’Hagan uses the identity of a deceased young man, Ronnie Pinn, to construct and fake real and online profile. After obtaining a birth certificate he starts by signing up to a couple of social media platforms, as the fake identity grows and the credibility of the identity is established, he starts to venture into the murky world of the dark net where illegal items are easy to obtain. It is all simple to do, but it didn’t really tell O’Hagan who Ronnie Pinn actually was, the more he investigated he realised that he was a much of a ghost in real life as he was on the net. Until one day he found out that his mother was still alive.

The third and final story is called the ‘The Satoshi Affair’ about the mysterious and elusive creator of Bitcoins. For ages no one really knew who Satoshi Nakamoto was, or if it was a group of people who pulled together the code to make the blockchain database that is the foundation of the Bitcoin credibility. There was lots of speculation as to the identity. O’Hagan was then asked to write the story of Satoshi Nakamoto, who may be an Australian web developer and former academic called Craig Wright. He had just avoided being arrested shortly after it was suggested by a website that he was Nakamoto and had headed to the UK with his wife. As O’Hagan interviews him, there are points of lucidity and certain moment when no one is actually sure if he is trying to pull the most elaborate hoax ever.

O’Hagan has bought together three fascinating stories of the modern day blend of real world and online personas and identity. It is quite shocking is some ways just what someone can achieve and obtain in the dark recesses of the net with little or no effort. The essay about Assange made for entertaining reading, just to see what he was actually like from an insiders view was quite an eye opener too. Craig Wright’s story was the hardest to get a grip on, even though he is a clever bloke and more than capable of coming up with the blockchain, there are still elements of doubt as to whether he is the legendary Nakamoto or not. Overall I thought that this was an enjoyable book of our modern age. 3.5 stars.

[andrew y · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ignore the second story.
Story one is everything you ever wanted written about Julian Assange.
Story three is the most fascinating nonfiction pageturner I've read in recent history. But be forewarned, if like me you were expecting an expansion or alteration of the LRB essay, you'll be disappointed. Doesn't make it less excellent though.

[Davide · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erigiamo dentro di noi una statua a nostra immagine -idealizzata, beninteso, ma pur sempre riconoscibile - e poi passiamo la vita sforzandoci di assomigliarle.

[Pauline Butcher Bird · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of the chaotic attempt by Julian Assange to write his autobiography. We are in the period before Julian took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy but nevertheless was forced to wear an electronic tag and sign in each day at the local police station while he fought extradition to Sweden on rape allegations.

His ghost writer, Andrew O'Hagan, put together a 70,000 word draft compiled from his visits and interviews with the WikiLeaks entrepreneur against Julian's constant procrastination over many months and then, in the end, refusal to let it go, so the publishers demanded the return of the $2.5 million advance. In that absence, Canongate Books put the book out as an unauthorised biography. This version, the story of the writing of the book, gives us those torturous months that O'Hagan struggled to get it written and ends with visits to the Ecuadorian embassy - a nation not famous for its respect for freedom of speech - where Assange was holed up and isolated, most of his 'friends' and fans having abandoned him. And no wonder.

The supposed champion of free speech about everyone else except himself, Assange comes across as an unreliable and narcissistic man who has no social graces, eats like a pig and repeatedly turns against those trying to help him. This is not a biography but its pages reveal the founder of WikiLeaks unfettered and paranoid.
The rest of this book about two other secret lives are equally fascinating and I recommend it.
Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/d9fkTjija4Y

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 rounded down

Two very good and one average essay focusing on different figures - real and part-invented - who go some in telling the story of the power (and mystery and subterfuge) of the internet.

My favourite was the essay on the period of time the author became Julian Assange’s ghostwriter, which was so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable at times. Second up was an essay on the character of Ronnie Pinn - a real guy who died in his 20s in the 1980s who O’Hagan assumes the identity of online. I wish this essay had been longer and more in depth but it still painted a fascinating (and terrifying) picture of fake people on the internet in the 21st century. Finally was an essay on “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the shady bitcoin inventor who may or may not be an Australian guy called Craig Wright. This was the weakest essay for me as it didn’t really seem to know where it was going.

Overall a pretty solid and very readable collection of longform essays.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Privileged, self-absorbed white men living lives of paranoia and obsession. Yes, okay.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of three long-form essays about identity and the internet.

I absolutely devoured the first piece, 'Ghosting', about O'Hagan's failed attempt to ghost-write Julian Assange's autobiography. It was strange and complex; not only does Assange come over horribly, O'Hagan didn't seem to mind that he also seems like an arsehole.

The second, 'The Invention of Ronnie Pinn', started out well and raised interesting questions, but it did seem that the author was grasping for meaning in a story that didn't actually consist of much.

The last, 'The Satoshi Affair', was about Bitcoin, and not being a tech person I found it very jargon-heavy and quite boring. I suppose if you want to know more about Bitcoin, this would be very useful. Still, the book is worth a read just for the Assange part.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week:
Andrew O'Hagan reads from his essay 'Ghosting', about the turbulent process of writing the memoir of Wikileaks editor Julian Assange. Taken from the book of collected essays THE SECRET LIFE.
Read by the author
Abridged by Rosemary Goring
Producer: Eilidh McCreadie.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tbx8s

[Fionnuala · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been meaning to get my hands on this book for a while; I first read Ghosting back when it was hosted online, and I went back to read it several times over a few years. I'd genuinely never read anything like it before, and I genuinely still struggle to find words for it now. Of course, with that in mind I was a little nervous to see if the other two included essays hold up to it, and while nothing will ever be quite on the level of Ghosting I was pleased to find the other two were compelling in their own right.

In this book, Ghosting has undergone a few minor edits here and there but is overall the same. Despite having read it several times before, I found myself just as hooked. Capturing a person like Julian Assange with such unflinching honesty, yet still managing to remain unbiased, is not an easy thing to do. Yes, there are judgements and comments in here -- this is a personal essay, after all, and Julian's behaviour was certainly abhorrent -- but there's also a lot of sympathy and analysis, as well. The portrait that was painted was one that Julian apparently hated, but from my experience with the man, this is a surefire way to know that it's accurate. Ghosting is a profoundly powerful piece of human analysis, and I really do consider it perhaps one of the best pieces of its kind. Entire biographies have been written about people that have not touched on them nearly as closely as this essay, and it's phenomenal. Not a week goes by where I don't think about this essay, and that's no exaggeration. Definitely a solid 5/5 for this one.

The Invention of Ronald Pinn was the weakest of the three, but still compelling in its own right. It was a fraction of the length of the other two, being around 30 pages or so (the others were at or above around 100 pages) but was packed full of the same kind of emotion and insight that made me love Ghosting so much. I'm unsure as to why it was so short, as there was a lot more there I think could have been explored: the subject matter was the stealing of the identities of dead children by the police force in order to make a false identity for undercover agents, something that is easier to do with people who did once exist but died young enough that they had no fully independent lives of their own. This naturally makes it more difficult to track and disprove the claims made by the agents, and the whole thing is ethically very off. (It's all done without the permission or even knowledge of the families, of course.) There's a decent overview of this practise in the essay, and a very poignant portrait of the real Ronald Pinn, who died not as a child but while very young (20 years old), and while it's fascinating to see how O'Hagan managed to build up a false Ronald, it feels rushed compared to the others. We go from hearing about this practise to hearing about Ronald to seeing how Ronald's identity is used to purchase drugs from the deep web to seeing his identity retired, and then the whole thing cuts off just as O'Hagan is visiting Ronald's mother to presumably tell her his findings. What's there is fascinating, but I wanted more. This feels more like an outline of something that, with O'Hagan's skill, could have easily been made into an essay of the same length as the others. 3/5 for this one.

The Satoshi Affair was unironically one of the most terrifying things I've read in a while, and I read a lot of horror. There's just something about what Craig Wright went through -- the back-and-forth, the certainty, the uncertainty, the fact he lost everything in such a slow and drawn-out way, the fact he might have submitted himself to such onslaught and public shaming all because he thought being known as genuine was worse than being known as a fake... it's heavy stuff. The pacing of this essay is very well done, managing to navigate a lot of very compelling evidence that often feels like a tug-of war, and managing to do so in a way that keeps things clear and keeps things interesting. It reads more like some kind of thriller than something that actually happened, but at the same time the fact that these are all real people is never forgotten -- there's the same kind of insight and empathy seen in Ghosting. My only criticism with this one was that sometimes it did feel a little dry or that it repeated itself; I do wonder if it couldn't have been trimmed down a little more, but at the same time there's nothing there that's atrocious or even just bad. Like everything that has to explain technology extensively, it just sometimes gets a little bogged down. 4/5 for this one.

Overall, with a 5/5, a 3/5, and a 4/5, I've worked it out to 4/5 for the overall book. Honestly, it's worth reading even just for Ghosting, but it's great to know that the others stand up as well.

[George Siehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novelist/journalist Andrew O'Hagan provides three quite interesting, if disquieting, explorations of the devious side of the internet. Two of these essays recount his efforts to ghostwrite commissioned biographies of two internet personalities, Julian Assange and Craig Wright. The third deals with Ronnie Pinn, a dead man whom the author electronically resurrects.

The piece on Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, is a personality profile, not an examination of the operation and methods of the organization. The frustrating process of writing and publishing the book is a central consideration. The author conducted numerous interviews with Assange while he was under house arrest at a countryside home pending rape charges in Sweden and while he was living in the Ecudorian embassy in London under political asylum. Assange wanted his memoir published, but did not want to write it, so his publisher invited O'Hagan to author it. Assange was cooperative at first, talking expansively, but did not read and markup the copy when asked to do so. This led to schedule problems with the publishers who were eager to get the book out. Subsidiary rights had been sold to other publishers around the world, so there were strong economic consequences at stake. The situation got nasty, with the primary publisher deciding to publish the draft O'Hagan had provided, and Assange threatening to seek an injunction to stop it. O'Hagan, caught between publisher and subject tried to get Assange to finally read and comment on the draft; the publisher, however, did not trust him to do so. The book was published amid continuing protestations from Assange.

O'Hagan, while admiring the work of WikiLeaks, was less admiring of his subject, describing him as egotistical, hypocritical, and slovenly, in addition to being irresponsible about cooperating in the preparation of the memoir.

A later invitation to write a biography of Craig Wright would provide as fraught an experience as the first. Wright was a bright Australian computer scientist who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, a respected presence on the internet who published a paper there that set out the basis for the blockchain, the programing that is the security feature behind bitcoin. Wright's story was that he used the name to float the paper, because some of his other papers were attacked by academics and others, so he wanted the idea of blockchain to be free of any association with his name. The emotional struggle between his own identity and that of Satoshi became increasingly destabilizing for Wright over time.

An American firm, nTrust, has offered to buy Wright's financially troubled computer business in Australia, reveal Wright as the true Satoshi, utilize the many patents Wright has developed, then resell the whole bundle to a major corporation such as Google for big bucks. O'Hagan will write the biography, a portion of the planned corporate "reveal," but wants to have proof that Wright is Satoshi, as will everyone else. Here, the author does provide some technical background on the components of the blockchain, including public and private keys, which will be central to Wright proving that he is the actual writer of the Satoshi paper. Again, O'Hagan becomes a middleman between a difficult subject and others involved in the authentication process. The process is made more difficult by the early arrangements Wright made to protect the identity of the master key and some of the legal maneuvers he made. There is much tension surrounding the final public "reveal" and its consequences.

The other essay, "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," describes how O'Hagan creates an electronic "life" for a man whose name he found on a tombstone. The man, Pinn, would have been about the author's age. He describes how he was able to get a copies of Pinn's birth and death certificates and other documents by both open and covert means. He notes that a unit of the London Metropolitan Police had similarly stolen identities and used them in undercover work--and how some officers also used those identities to lead second lives on their own. O'Hagan contacted various Pinn's listed in various directories and garnered a bit more information. He visited the schools Pinn attended, saw the buildings where he had lived, and found a few blurry photos. He then began creating a web presence for Ronnie, altering his real addresses and schools, adding a fake college diploma and a digitally composed photograph. He put Ronnie on Facebook and even created some friends for him. Ronnie "evolved" on line, venturing to the Dark Web. Using bitcoins the author provided, Ronnie purchased heroin, a gun, and other things which were mailed to a vacant apartment address O'Hagan provided. Eventually the author closed down the account in 2014, but noted that Ronnie's "legend" "will go on existing in that [electronic] universe though he never lived on earth."

Everything is grist for the writer's mill. O'Hagan, however seems to have suffered much inconvenience for the grindings of his two biography contracts. His Pinn experiment may have been less troublesome since he was in control of that process, but seems creepy or unethical or both. The internet may have problems with its hardware and software, but the biggest concern appears to be its wetware--its creators and users. The outcome here is a very interesting book.

[andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

“La verità, come sempre con uomini come lui, era forse più amara: Craig era un ammasso di paranoie radicate nelle fondamenta stesse della sua vita. La sua esistenza online lo aveva svuotato completamente, e lui non era più certo di avere un’identità.”

Il libro si compone di tre reportage che, oltre ad avere come tema centrale quello del futuristico e a tratti torbido mondo digitale, orbitano attorno all’idea di identità e personalità.
In effetti, più che una ricerca storica o un saggio divulgativo, l’intenzione dell’autore sembra essere quella di addentrarsi nei misteriosi meandri della psiche dei protagonisti dei racconti (l’eccentrico Julian Assange, l’immaginario Ronnie Pinn e Craig Wright/Satoshi Nakamoto) per tratteggiare personalità fortemente carismatiche e, perciò, piuttosto affascinanti.
Suona paradossale, ma il requisito fondamentale per leggere i racconti è sapere di cosa parlano: ripassatevi velocemente su wikipedia cosa sia WikiLeaks, chi sia Julian Assange e qualcosa sulla crittografia; l’autore non si perde in spiegazioni ma “completa il discorso”.
Complessivamente, il libro è accattivante e, se interessati agli argomenti, si legge piuttosto velocemente, nonostante abbia trovato alcune parti eccessivamente “macchinose” (laddove cita uno dopo l’altro nomi di società, ditte e personaggi vari, per esempio).
Il primo racconto è quello che ho preferito fra tutti, mentre mi aspettavo qualcosa di più (legato al dark web) dalla storia di Ronnie Pinn.

[Nathanael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant writer. A bit conceited, sure, and if really self-important prefaces aren't your thing, flip past this one.

And yet, these three stories are an absolute tour-de-force of human greatness the internet age. Behold our slacker kings: unable to manage an IRL life, but able to spin up or wind down the world order in mere minutes. One man creates a new currency, literally a new way of assigning and transferring values; the other brings world governments, not the least of which its lone superpower, to their knees. And yet, neither is capable of human conversation, living a decent life, or doing anything that obviously needs to be done. A kingdom in the balance, they're content to tweet and to chat.

Why? Take a closer look at the second story in this self-contained trilogy. In this story, our fearless other steals a dead child's identity and creates a new online persona in a few short months. There's your explanation of the anti-heroes incontinence. They created themselves and have, unlike Dr. Frankenstein, been unable to inculcate any sense of intrinsic motivation. In being self-made in this Internet Age, they lack a true sense of self.

[Laura Testoni]

"Facebook contava 856 milioni di utenti giornalieri almeno 67 milioni dei quali erano ritenuti falsi dalla stessa azienda. Ci sono più fantasmi sui social media [...] che abitanti nel Regno Unito". A mio parere il più fascinoso dei 3 reportage di questo libro è L'invenzione di Ronnie Pin, in cui l'autore si immagina un agente sotto copertura che crea un suo profilo Facebook fittizio ma assolutamente "normale", che grazie agli algoritmi si auto-costruisce quasi da solo come cittadino inglese medio del tutto credibile.
Anche gli altri due racconti valgono la pena di essere letti: nel primo viene descritta la relazione burrascosa dell'autore con Julian Assange di cui scrisse come ghost writer una biografia, progetto costellato da molti dissidi (miti infranti: Assange non esce benissimo dalla narrazione, evidentemente risentita, di O'Hagan); il terzo racconto/reportage indaga la vera identità di Satoshi Nakamoto, l'inventore della blockchain e dei Bitcoin. Storia complicata e davvero misteriosa.
Più in generale questi tre scritti mi restituiscono l'idea che Internet (inteso come persone, tecnologie, interessi) sia un terreno narrativo tutto da costruire: un paesaggio e uno scenario di storie ancora tutte da scrivere e raccontare.

[Mary Lou · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the way Andrew O Hagan writes. His work has a structured and genuine feel to it, but even this approach, when applied to his ghosting project for Julian Assange, was destined to fail. He has more than managed to rescue the fruitless hours and hours spent on his attempts and produced this fascinating reading. But my interest waned in the second part and failed me in the third section which is about the elusive Bitcoin founder.

[Jill Andrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely insightful writing .

[Francesca · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5

[Massimo Monteverdi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Il confine labile tra identità personale e virtuale, l'emergere di un terzo genere: l'identità percepita, quella che vedono gli altri, l'unica che davvero conta. Un libro denso, a suo modo agghiacciante. A partire dal ritratto clamoroso di Julian Assange: uno psicopatico con armi offensive potentissime. I due ritratti successivi, l'uomo che non c'è e il padre del bitcoin, sono altrettanto potenti.

[liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because I had read and enjoyed the short story version of the third story, The Satoshi Affair. The book was a mixed bag.

The introduction was unreadable. O’Hagan tells a great story when he’s focused on a narrative, but the minute he gives himself space to ruminate, his prose goes straight to hell. It’s purple, repetitive, full of entirely unnecessary and clunky literary allusions, and massively self-indulgent. His theme throughout the book is the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, or real person and literary character, that people closely associated with the internet supposedly inhabit. He also likes to draw attention to his writerly duty to report the truth above all else. Especially above the close relationships he develops with his subjects. I guess these are fine themes, but they’re not very interesting in his handling. The latter mostly serves to justify his poor boundaries.

The first chapter, Ghosting, is often compelling. The final pages are hand-wringing apology/love letter to Julian. Sometimes the story is a great character study of a sexist narcissist who can’t live up to, nor entirely understand, the values he symbolizes. Other times, it’s a miserable defense of the idea of the man.

The second story, The Invention of Ronald Pinn, is unreadable. The premise is unethical, O’Hagan is unconvincing and trite in his defense of his actions, and he didn’t even tell an interesting story. He’s at his most self-indulgent here.

The third story, The Satoshi Affair, is the strongest. I was happy to get a conclusion! O’Hagan’s portrait of Craig Wright as a conflicted and ambivalent character is much more convincing than the one of Assange. He does a nice job of laying out the case for Wright at the same time as he destabilizes it. The book is worth a read for the first 3/4 of the Assange story and all of this one.

[Zioluc · Rating 1 out of 5]

Non posso negare che sia ben scritto, però dei tre brevi saggi (o meglio "nonfiction") salvo a malapena - e parzialmente - il terzo.

testo 1 - non si parla mai di cosa ha realizzato Assange con Wikileaks, anzi si da' tutto per scontato, anche cose non proprio macroscopiche, in compenso si parla tantissimo, direi fino alla nausea, di Assange e di quanto sia inaffidabile, capriccioso, paranoico, mutevole, egoista, egocentrico e probabilmente autistico.

testo 2 - non si parla gran che di cosa è possibile fare nel dark web, a parte le cose che sappiamo tutti come comprare droga o armi: in compenso si parla tantissimo di come l'autore abbia prelevato l'identità di un povero ragazzo morto dalla sua lapide in un cimitero per poi aprire account a suo nome costruendone una identità fittizia con agganci a quella reale. Per poi andare ad incontrarne la madre, che spero gli abbia dato la meritata padellata in testa, o magari anche una denuncia.

testo 3 - non si parla mai di cosa siano, rappresentino o possano diventare le criptovalute, anzi si da' tutto per scontato, anche cose non proprio macroscopiche, in compenso si parla tantissimo del presunto creatore di Bitcoin aka Satoshi Nakamoto e delle sue fughe rocambolesche. Ok questo non era malaccio, ma comunque lascia molto a desiderare.

[Claudio Magistrelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Se c’è una cosa che sappiamo bene da sempre, e intendo come specie, è quanto sia difficile conoscere davvero una persona. Non è un caso che nel trittico di domande che da sempre accompagna il nostro tentativo di trovare un senso all’esistenza, la prima non si a rivolta all’esterno, ma all’interno: chi siamo? Il nostro primo, gigantesco enigma non riguarda il ruolo di un qualche esser superiore, la nostra destinazione o il nostro scopo su questo sasso galleggiante nell’universo, bensì su un oggetto di indagine molto più misterioso: noi.

Partiamo da un presupposto. Avere un’idea di chi sia la persona che tira le fila della propria mente è già un compito complesso, al punto che già Apollo diversi secoli prima di Cristo sentiva la necessità di spronarci in questo senso dalle pareti del suo tempio a Delphi: γνῶθι σαυτόν, ovvero conosce te stesso. Conoscere davvero qualcun altro è sempre stato quasi impossibile, ma dalla fine del secolo scorso in poi internet si è posto come nuovo elemento di disturbo e di distorsione in questo turbolento processo.

Se è vero che la rete spesso lascia emergere i lati più veri, intimi e irrivelabili di chi la solca grazie alla promessa di un rassicurante anonimato, questo si ottiene attraverso l’uso più o meno temporaneo di identità fantoccio. Maschere da indossare a piacimento per essere un altro, o il sé stesso che non si è mai mostrato poco importa, protetti da una barriera che altera la percezione altrui. O forse sarebbe meglio dire da uno schermo.

La condizione quantica della nostra identità digitale, in cui ciascuno di noi è in ogni momento online sia sé stesso sia il personaggio di sé che si è creato, sembrerebbe in un incipit per una storia sci-fi, e in effetti lo è, non fosse che realtà finzione si trovano a coesistere nel reame del possibile finchè un osservatore non si prende la briga di intervenire. Se a farlo è però Andrew O’Hagan, redattore e critico per la London Review of Books, Esquire e T, il confine rimane labile.

"Quando racconto una storia, non mi sembra tanto di riferire delle notizie, quanto piuttosto di indagare la realtà, un’attività alla quale le tecniche del romanzo, lungi dall'essere estranee, sono spesso adeguate. Le persone di cui scrivo tendono a vivere una realtà che si sono costruite da sé, o che per certi versi è frutto di invenzione, e per rintracciarne la trama occorre addentrarsi nel loro etere e danzare con le loro ombre."

Internet ha garantito a tutti gli strumenti per trasformare la propria esistenza in una creazione letteraria, a patto di essere disposti a sporcarsi le mani ed immergersi senza riserve nell’ambiguità identitaria che la rete offre. Questa è la tesi che O’Hagan sviluppa ne La vita segreta attraverso il contatto diretto – ancora una volta, racconto o reportage? – con tre figure emblematiche di questo corto circuito identitaria: Julian Assange, Ronnie Pinn e Craig Steven Wright. Un uomo che ha provato disperatamente ad essere il proprio personaggio, un personaggio divenuto uomo e infine un uomo che ha provato a distaccarsi dal proprio (?) personaggio, rimanendone vittima.

È un percorso circolare quello che O’Hagan propone e per questo senza via d’uscita. Assange e Wright sono due facce di una stessa moneta, benché le loro storie differiscano in tutto. Mentre Assange dietro alla lotta sacrosanta per la libertà d’informazione, e a cui ha prestato un contributo difficilmente quantificabile, ha nascosto per anni un culto per la propria personalità altrettanto enorme, Wright non si è mai davvero sentito all’altezza dei valori di cui il suo alter ego Satoshi Nakamoto si è fatto portatore, sempre che egli sia davvero il volto umano che per anni si è celato dietro l’inventore della tecnologia alla base dei bitcoin e non un mitomane con una fantasia galoppante.

Nel percorso professionale di O’Hagan, Assange e Wright sono stati, letteralmente, personaggi in cerca di autore che hanno tuttavia trovato un modo per raccontare in autonomia la loro storia. La prima parte (saggio? Longform? Episodio?) de La vita segreta dedicato ad Assange si apre con la telefonata con cui a O’Hagan viene proposto di diventare il ghostwriter della biografia del fondadore di Wikileaks, un libro destinato a non concretizzarsi mai a causa delle bizze del suo protagonista.

Lontano dalla figura idealizzata del ribelle braccato dal sistema che ha provato a scardinare, Assange si scopre il paranoico autore della propria narrazione. Delle numerosi immagini dissonanti con la sua immagine pubblica che le pagine a lui dedicate trasmettano in maniera vivida, la più inquietante è composta dalle ore spese a cercare il proprio nome su Twitter, scandagliando ogni anfratto della rete in cerca di dicerie sul proprio conto da imputare al’invidia dei nemici. Colleghi, amici, ex colleghi ed ex amici: chiunque abbia osato mettere pubblicamente in dubbio la limpidità di Assange e distanziarsi dal racconto di paladino della libertà che Wikileaks dà di sé raccontando all’esterno ciò che succede all’interno.

Tra Assange e Wright, quello di Ronnie Pinn appare quasi come un interludio, ma è nella sua manciata di pagine il racconto di un ragazzo morto giovane e tornato in vita online appare come il più rivelatorio ella permeabilità della membrana che divide internet dalla realtà, ma soprattutto della capacità della rete di creare storie, narrazioni autonome che si auto-raccontano e si sostengono.

Così come fanno i poliziotti quando devono scegliere un’identità per un’infiltrazione, O’Hagan si lascia colpire da un nome su una lapide e o li riporta in vita online. La progressiva presa di esistenza di Ronnie è impressionante e spaventosa. Come un bot elettorale russo, Ronnie costruisce la sua personalità su una manciata di dettagli generici, poi dopo lo sbarco sui social Ronnie sfugge dalle mani del suo creatore e inizia a sviluppare un’identità propria, costruisce reti e prende direzioni autonome. Non è il personaggio che si sottrae dal controllo del suo autore a far paura, quello in fondo succede anche su carta, ma la serietà e la rapidità con cui la rete accoglie il redivivo Pinn, conferendogli un certificato di esistenziale le cui propaggini finiscono per attraversare ben presto la barriera e produrre conseguenze concrete, reali e tangibili.

Nel giro di alcuni mesi Ronnie si era ormai insinuati in un mondo di scartoffie ufficialmente riconosciute e, sebbene le sue carte fossero false, il suo comportamento online suggeriva una realtà non me no reale di qualunque altra.

Quella di Pinn non è però la sola identità digitale a guadagnarsi la libertà. Nel racconto finale è Satoshi Nakamoto a smarcarsi una volta per tutte dalla sua controparte in carne ed ossa, sia essa davvero Craig Steven Wright o chi per lui. Simbolo di un movimento che mira a scardinare le istituzione monetarie odierne, Satoshi si rivela un personalità troppo grande per essere contenuta da Wright, o meglio, affinché chi guarda dall’esterno possa vederla come frutto di della mente di un uomo tutto sommato comune come Wright.

Mentre Assange lotta quotidianamente per tenere insieme la sua identità reale e digitale, la separazione forzata e volontaria a cui Satoshi si è sottoposto quando ha smesso di lasciare tracce su internet ha generato un mito. Nella testimonianza di O’Hagan che ha seguito Wright nei giorni che avrebbero dovuto precedere la dimostrazione indiscutibile del suo essere Satoshi, Wright ricorda da vicino il Walter White di Breaking Bad, un uomo smanioso di vedere riconosciuti i propri meriti che per anni ha dovuto celare al mondo, ma terrorizzato dalle conseguenze delle azioni compiute sotto le spoglie del suo alter ego digitale.

Resta in conclusione il dubbio se il suo gran rifiuto sia stato un modo di liberarsi di Satoshi, o se sia stato Satoshi a liberarsi di Wright. Forse nemmeno Wright saprà mai davvero chi fosse Satoshi.

[Zarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent non-fiction book exploring three different essays about different people in the digital space. It doesn't do what it says on the tin though and explore the meaning of self in the digital age, instead they are far more personalised essays, two from the author's own experience of working with prominent figures and one fictionalised tale to show an example. Still fascinating, but not what I was expecting.

[Alessandro Vicenzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

È un volume composto da tre articoli/reportage: il primo, che racconta l’incarico di fare da ghost writer per l’autobiografia di Assange è semplicemente fantastico. Gli altri due, il primo dedicato a un esperimento di creazione di un’identità fittizia in rete e il secondo alla ricerca dell’inventore di bitcoin sono meno interessanti.
La “voce” di O’Hagan però è molto interessante e sono curioso di leggere altro di suo.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like these stories more, but something fell a little flat for me. The content, however, is fascinating, exploring major figures like Julian Assange, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the strange ways of life in our digital age.