The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age

by Andrew O'Hagan

Overview

A Top 10 Book of Essays & Literary Criticism for Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly | Books We Can’t Wait to Read in the Rest of 2017, Chicago Reader

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374277918
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Andrew O’Hagan is one of Britain’s most exciting and serious contemporary writers. He has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize three times, was voted one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of Our Fathers, Be Near Me, and The Illuminations, among other books. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS


Preface xi

Ghosting 1
The Invention of Ronald Pinn 83
The Satoshi Affair 111

Acknowledgments 219

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/17/2017
This splendid collection from novelist O’Hagan (The Illuminations) brings together three essays originally published in the London Review of Books that explore identity in the digital age through three figures: Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks; Craig Steven Wright, who may or may not be the creator of bitcoin; and Ronald “Ronnie” Pinn, who, despite a U.K. passport, mailing address, and gaggle of Facebook friends, is not real. The piece on Assange would be the standout in an ordinary essay collection, but this is not one of those, and O’Hagan’s study of the Australian hacker, for whom he once ghostwrote the first draft of an autobiography, while absorbing, pales in comparison with the profile of Wright (who comes across as an eccentric but altogether more likable character than the narcissistic Assange). But it is Ronnie Pinn, a digital identity created by O’Hagan based on a name from a headstone, whose pseudoexistence says the most about who we are now. O’Hagan’s grasp of storytelling is prodigious, and the ending of his essay on Pinn is a particularly inspired, even moving, piece of writing. Taken as a whole, this is an unmissable collection of up-to-the-moment insights about life in our digital era. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.) (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/15/2017
London Review of Books (LRB) editor at large and Man Booker Prize-nominated novelist O'Hagan (The Illuminations) is an expert in the art of the long-form essay. In this lightly updated collection of three pieces originally published in the LRB, the author provides a compelling examination of selfhood and identity for three distinct personalities wrought in the blurring lines of fact and fiction online. The strongest is "Ghosting," about O'Hagan's attempt to ghostwrite Julian Assange's autobiography in 2011, with O'Hagan displaying a knack for capturing moments of levity despite his frustration as Assange causes the project's derailment. In "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," O'Hagan journeys to the Dark Web to develop an identity for the titular Pinn, who died pre-Internet and has no digital footprint, raising important, difficult questions of the ethics involved in telling someone else's story. The final piece, "The Satoshi Affair," offers a thrilling dive into the fraught world of Craig Wright, who claims to be the mysterious bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto but won't reveal the evidence to prove it. VERDICT A thought-provoking, eminently readable sui generis examination of selfhood from a master storyteller; highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17; "Editors' Fall Picks," 9/1/17.]—Amanda Mastrull, Library Journal

Library Journal

2017-07-17
Three intriguing pieces of journalism about the new threats of a digital age.O'Hagan (The Illuminations, 2015, etc.) is known as a three-time Man Booker Prize-nominated novelist, but he's also a razor-sharp London-based reporter, as evidenced by these three stories from "the wild west of the Internet, before policing or a code of decency." His subjects are diverse and mostly well-known. In the first, "Ghosting," the author describes how he assumed the unenviable position of ghostwriting the autobiography/manifesto of Julian Assange, the infamously imperiled WikiLeaks founder. "It needs to be more like Ayn Rand," said Assange during one of their strange meetings. "I don't know if I can help you with that," was the author's straightforward reply. Describing his subject as "a cornered animal," O'Hagan delivers a troubling portrait of paranoia, trespasses, and consequences that feels unique because of the writer's unique proximity to his subject. The second work, "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," is equally dark, chronicling O'Hagan's successful attempt to create a real identity for a long-dead man. He succeeded in generating an income with Bitcoins and buying heroin and counterfeit money online. "To the moderators of Silk Road or Agora," writes the author, "the world is an inchoate mass of desires and deceits, and everything that exists can be bought or sold, including selfhood, because to them freedom means stealing power back from the state, or God, or Apple, or Freud. To them, life is a drama in which power rubs out one's name; they are anonymous, ghosts in the machine, infiltrating and weakening the structures of the state and partying as they do, causing havoc, encrypting who they are." The third story, "The Satoshi Affair," finds O'Hagan tapped to reveal the identity of Craig Wright, an awkward Australian computer scientist, as "Satoshi Nakamoto," the cryptic inventor of Bitcoin, only to find that even his real subjects can be frauds after all. Three well-written but fleeting vignettes from some of the darkest edges of the internet.

Kirkus Reviews

"[O'Hagan] explores 'the wild west of the Internet' with incisive vigor in The Secret Life . . . Dizzying and gripping . . . The Secret Life cunningly alights on ways that cyber-deceptions and flawed personalities can collide and combust." —Michael Upchurch, Chicago Tribune

"A riveting book . . . Deeply moving . . . Poignant . . . Unexpectedly heartbreaking . . . To judge from Mr. O’Hagan’s arresting trio of portraits, society’s online Twilight Zone inspires both despair and humanity—often at the cost of truth and trust." —Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating . . . O'Hagan asks probing questions about the meaning and construct of identity in the digital age. Smart and engaging, The Secret Life will change the way you see life on the internet." —Sadie Trombetta, Bustle

"Three fascinating strange-but-true tales of the Internet age. The first—O'Hagan's hilariously frank account of his short-lived career as Julian Assange's ghostwriter—is worth the price of admission." —Ash Carter, Esquire

"O'Hagan, perhaps best known as a fiction writer, transports a novelist's eye for narrative to his journalistic assignments . . . Aside from his subjects' binary backdrops, their secret lives reek as much of Dostoyevsky or Freud as of cyberspace . . . O'Hagan's stories [are] gripping reads . . . a wormy compost of spooks, doubles, neurotic agendas, and artfulness." —Laura Kipnis, Bookforum

"Splendid . . . O'Hagan's grasp of storytelling is prodigious, and the ending of his essay on Pinn is a particularly inspired, even moving, piece of writing. Taken as a whole, this is an unmissable collection of up-to-the-moment insights about life in our digital era." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Andrew O'Hagan is one of my favorite writers . . . [These essays] are a joy to read and perhaps O'Hagan described them best, calling them 'nonfiction thrillers.'" —Library Journal

"Three intriguing pieces of journalism about the new threats of a digital age . . . [O'Hagan is] razor-sharp." —Kirkus Reviews

"O'Hagan is an immensely engaging writer: wry and witty, and insightful . . . despite their technological background, these are ultimately human stories and O'Hagan tells them superbly." —Ian Critchley, Sunday Times

"Altogether, The Secret Life is nothing less than an affirmation that using words well still matters, even now." —David Sexton, Evening Standard

"It is a tribute to O'Hagan's quiet and effective betrayal of Assange that the reader's ambivalence towards the Wikileaker does not prevent the reader's gradual antipathy." —David Aaronovitch, The Times

"O'Hagan [is] a vivid and meticulous writer . . . at the core of this excellent collection we glimpse the unbridgeable difference between the real and the invented." —Andrew Anthony, Observer

"O'Hagan's prose is always a delight. The cadence of his sentences, the way in which he balances extension and brevity, the unspooling and the reeling in, is a masterclass in the art of prose. This is not just a good book, but a necessary one." —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

"The theme is identity in the digital age and [O'Hagan's] three subjects are exquisitely fit for purpose . . . Thrilling." —Esquire (UK)

From the Publisher

Narrating these essays depicting three digital daredevils, Liam Gerrard rarely lets his voice deviate from the evenhanded delivery of a professional newscaster. But on occasion, the details are so strange that even Gerrard’s professional tone diverges to incredulity. Surrounding each featured Web icon is a smokescreen that blurs each one’s essential unlikability. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an insufferable egotist with bad hygiene and atrocious table manners. Ronald Pimm, O’Hagan’s fictional rogue avatar, acquires assault rifles, opioids, and health insurance. The essay about Craig Wright, who claims to be the creator of Bitcoin, repeats the same disturbing point of the previous two: As great as the Web may be at explaining and exposing our world, it’s far better at manipulating the truth and cloaking identities. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

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