Assange’s ghostwriter pens dispatches from digital age

A fascination with assumed identity is as old as literature itself. But the digital era has exponentially upped the ante.

Who’s that person you just friended on Facebook? If you want to venture onto the cyber-ether as someone of a different gender or race than you were born with, what’s to stop you? There’s no real saying. Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan (“Be Near Me,” “The Illuminations”) explores “the wild west of the Internet” with incisive vigor in “The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age.” The chapter that’s bound to cause the greatest stir is “Ghosting,” his stinging account of being a ghostwriter for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the two other episodes, in which O’Hagan tries to pin down who exactly invented Bitcoin or sees how far he can go in creating an online life for a fabricated character, are just as dizzying and gripping.

O’Hagan was approached about ghostwriting Assange’s memoir in 2011, when hefty advances for the book had already been paid. Writing it involved sitting down with Assange in a laptop-equipped English country manor (“a strange technological distortion of Jane Austen’s novels”) and recording marathon interviews with the WikiLeaks founder. O’Hagan couldn’t have had a better ringside seat to Assange’s world — and what he saw was a fiasco in the making.

“Julian scorns all attempts at social graces,” O’Hagan writes. “He eats like a pig. He marches through doors and leaves women in his wake. He talks over everybody. And all his life he has depended on being the impish one, the eccentric one, the boy with a bag full of Einstein climbing trees. But at forty years old, that’s less charming, and I found his egotism at the dinner table to be a form of madness more striking than anything he said.”

The longer they worked on the project, the more Assange threw tantrums at sharing personal details that would give his “enemies” ammunition against him. “I’ve never been with anyone who made me feel so like an adult,” O’Hagan laments. “And I say that as the father of a thirteenyear-old.” His portrait of Assange is all the more biting because there’s a smidgen of sympathy in it. In trying to figure out what makes him tick, O’Hagan winds up feeling “quite sorry for Julian …. He was in a horrible predicament. He had signed up for a project that his basic psychology would not allow.”

In “The Invention of Ronald Pinn,” O’Hagan borrows the identity of a young man who died of a heroin overdose in 1984 and gives him an online afterlife that goes to some very dark places. With surprising ease, O’Hagan obtains the real Pinn’s birth certificate and death certificate. From there he finagles a fake university degree for him, a Twitter account, a Facebook profile, a driver’s license, a passport, spendable cybercurrency and a London street address.

Once in the system, the online Ronnie gets into all sorts of mischief, including purchasing heroin and counterfeit currency that’s delivered to his London flat. O’Hagan, oddly, refrains from acting out sexual charades on Ronnie’s behalf (surely the motive behind most people’s online masquerades), but few other transgressions are barred. Deactivating Ronnie proves as tricky as inventing him.

“The Satoshi Affair,” the most convoluted of these three tales, may make your brain hurt as it tries to unravel the technology and complex authorship behind Bitcoin. The main focus is on the involuntary outing of Australian Craig Steven Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto, the cybercurrency’s inventor. Wright is as self-sabotaging as Assange is, but in an entirely different way. He wants nothing to do with the limelight. Deep legal and fiscal distress, however, are pressuring him to sell his hundreds of patented ideas to purchasers who hope to make billions with them.

What emerges is a portrait of “a really nice person” who’s “a terrible communicator” and a businessman’s nightmare. Wright may be a genius, but for would-be investors he’s a disaster.