The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age
By:
- Synopsis
-
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.
- Copyright:
- 2017
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 240 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780374717094
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780374277918
- Publisher:
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Date of Addition:
- 10/08/18
- Copyrighted By:
- Andrew O'Hagan
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Computers and Internet, Literature and Fiction, Sociology
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.