Andrew O’hagan’s The Secret Life; Andy Warhol’s Seven Illustrated Books, 1952-1959
A writer gets under the skin of Julian Assange, and behind the masks we all create online.
AT THE END of May, the London
Review of Books published Andrew O’hagan’s excoriating takedown of the Daily Mail and its notorious editor, Paul Dacre. The headline read, “Who’s the real cunt?”—a reference to Dacre’s infamous foulmouthed tirades, directed at a long-suffering staff. Opponents of the right-wing tabloid exulted on Twitter, praising O’hagan’s cutting prose. A week later, some of those same people turned on the writer for a BBC radio interview in which he advocated for internet regulated by “intelligent censors.”
They should have saved their characters: O’hagan, a Scottish journalist and Booker Prize– nominated novelist, doesn’t use Twitter, which he says causes writers to “give their sentences away for free.” In fact, he’s barely a presence on social media.
That admission may baffle readers of his latest book, The Secret Life: Three True Stories
of the Digital Age. In expanded essays, first published in the
London Review of Books, O’hagan grapples with online deception, privacy and our increasingly elastic definition of truth through the stories of three men: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange; Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed bitcoin founder; and Ronald Pinn, a deceased man for whom O’hagan created a fake online identity. The aim of the book, he says, “is it to ask, What does it mean be a human being in the age of the internet? What is your reality?” It is impossible to read The
Secret Life without thinking about the kinds of distortions we create when we log on to the internet, entering what O’hagan likens to a virtual hall of mirrors. But it also pushes him into his narratives as a kind of fourth character, the essayist as activist.
O’hagan had unrivaled access to two of his subjects. He was hired to ghostwrite Assange’s memoir in 2011 and asked by Wright’s team to tell their client’s story in 2015. When he first met Assange, the Australian was on bail, holed up in an English country house. It was the year Wikileaks began publishing “the Guantánamo files,” which detailed horrific conditions in the military prison. To Assange, and his fans, he was the online crusader bravely holding governments to account. To O’hagan, he was a petty if entertaining narcissist and a borderline sociopath. (In the book, O’hagan describes the work as “writing a voiceover for a real person who isn’t quite real.”) Unable to focus on much beyond perceived slights, vendettas and Googling himself, Assange eventually abandons narrating his story to O’hagan.
As O’hagan explains it, Assange had created a trap for himself. “He’s basically telling the world to reveal its secrets and give up its privacies, to be fully selfexposing, but he couldn’t bear to do that himself,” he says.
Similarly, Wright, who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s creator, is ultimately unwilling to prove it publicly. Establishing his identity was a condition set by a Canadian money-transfer company that bought Wright’s intellectual property, since it had to prove to buyers that he wasn’t a fraud. But when O’hagan starts reporting his story, Wright buckles, refusing to offer concrete evidence. “I felt from the beginning that there was a problem” says O’hagan. “Wright was so encoded into his inventions and online existence that he broke down in the face of his exposure. The mask [was] too tightly glued for him to take it off.”
With Assange and Wright, O’hagan is a reporter trying to unravel the myths of what he calls self-creators. “They were hoping that they could rely on me to represent them in a way that would be happy-making to them,” he says. “I never agreed to do that.”
With Pinn, O’hagan went to the darkest corners of the web, creating a new persona he used to buy drugs and counterfeit money. In doing so, O’hagan raises questions about a journalist’s moral responsibilities: Isn’t hacking a man’s identity, even if he’s dead—something U.K. police have done in undercover work—ethically suspect?
O’hagan has heard that criticism, but he believes the result was worth the risk. “It tells a story about who we are, that you can journey into a heart of darkness and…build an entire artificial life,” he says. “I don’t feel especially guilty for doing that.”