'Examining three lives - Julian Assange, Craig Wright, the Australian behind the Bitcoin inventor 'Satoshi Nakamoto', and Ronald Pinn, an online character O'Hagan created - he explores identity, secrecy, and the relationship between the individual, the state, and technology.
'The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. 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, Andrew O'Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and the 'real world'.
'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 into the deep 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, and who may or may not be willing, or even able, to reveal the truth.
'What does it mean when your very sense of self becomes, to borrow a phrase 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. ' (Publication Summary)
'Andrew O’Hagan’s new book is a triptych of long essays about personality in the age of the internet, originally published in the London Review of Books. Two of the three subjects are Australians. The first is Julian Assange, who in 2011 enlisted O’Hagan as the ghostwriter of an ill-fated autobiography. The second is computer scientist Craig Wright, who last year laid claim to being the shadowy Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of the online currency bitcoin. The third piece is on online identity, something O’Hagan explored by using the name of a young man who died in 1984.' (Introduction)
'Andrew O’Hagan’s new book is a triptych of long essays about personality in the age of the internet, originally published in the London Review of Books. Two of the three subjects are Australians. The first is Julian Assange, who in 2011 enlisted O’Hagan as the ghostwriter of an ill-fated autobiography. The second is computer scientist Craig Wright, who last year laid claim to being the shadowy Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of the online currency bitcoin. The third piece is on online identity, something O’Hagan explored by using the name of a young man who died in 1984.' (Introduction)
