The Secret Life: Three True Stories

By Andrew O’Hagan

Faber and Faber, £14.99

Review by Nick Major

IT is a platitude to say the internet has altered our sense of who we are. Nevertheless, it’s true. As Andrew O’Hagan writes in the introduction to this triptych of artful essays, the internet has "given the tools of fiction-making to everybody", yet we don’t realise the extent to which we are inventing our lives. We exist in a state of imaginative unrest, unsure of where reality ends and the virtual world begins. It is the proper fiction-makers who are in prime position to explore this liminal state of being. We spend every day looking at our computer screens. But the writer, O’Hagan, asks: "What have we been looking for? Is it lively there? And have we grown addicted to untruth?"

These essays from the "wild west" of the internet investigate three frontiersmen who are so enmeshed in the web, they have become stuck in its messy contradictions: Julian Assange, Craig Wright and Ronald Pinn. Anyone familiar with O’Hagan knows he was the ghost writer behind Assange’s unofficial autobiography. Wright is the man purported to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of the online currency bitcoin. Pinn is a contradiction: a real fabrication. Real in the sense that a few years ago he had a passport, a birth certificate, a London apartment, a Twitter and Facebook account, and bought narcotics and contemplated buying guns online; a fabrication because, except in name, he is O’Hagan’s creation.

The Invention Of Ronald Pinn is a morality tale clever enough to raise questions and not answer them. The question at the centre is: "Do you own your own story?" When it came to light that the Metropolitan Police were taking the names of dead children to construct fake identities for their undercover officers, O’Hagan decided to investigate the implications for himself. He took a man’s name from a gravestone and built a second life for him. The result is an enthralling experiment about what it means to be someone, or no-one, in the digital world.

O’Hagan is determined to uncover the "human problems" behind our online lives and so Assange and Wright are not allowed to remain comfortable. They get the reality treatment. He spends months face-to-face with them and gradually we understand their psychology in a way that would be impossible otherwise. O’Hagan is no indoor academic. He is a writer who’s always walked out in search of some inner truth. In his previous collection of essays, The Atlantic Ocean, he writes: "I always felt that outside was the place to test the weatherproof nature of one’s style." This approach has produced his best writing, essays on Hurricane Katrina or The End Of British Farming, for example. It is a strange then to find him going out to meet Assange or Wright, and sitting in computer-lined offices, talking to these men about how much of themselves they want to hide from the world.

Ghosting, his essay on the founder of Wikileaks, is O’Hagan at his very best: eloquent, insightful, honest and dedicated. It is hard to think of a better subject for a writer whose work has so often been drawn to personality and celebrity. The essay covers the period between January 2011, when he first met Assange, and the summer of 2012, when he last saw him, after Assange’s move to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The world’s most notorious hacker rambles on about politics, acts like a capricious teenager and fails to engage with a project he’s contracted to carry out. First, he wants a memoir, then he wants a part-manifesto, then he doesn’t want anything to do with the book but refuses to end the engagement.

The two sides of Assange – the freedom fighter who hates privacy and the narcissist who wants absolute control over his image – eventually become irreconcilable. He has "too much self and not enough". Assange has been holed-up in the Ecuadorian embassy for the last five years. The irony is that his real prison might just be his own mind, with his ego as the prison guard. One often wonders why O’Hagan persisted with the man. "The story was just too large," writes O'Hagan. "What Assange lacked in professionalism he made up for in courage. What he lacked in carefulness he made up for in impact. In our overnight conversations, he told me about the mindset of the expert hacker. He described how, as a teenager, he’d wandered through the virtual corridors of Nasa, Bank of America, the Melbourne transport system or the Pentagon. At his best, he represented a new way of existing in relation to authority."

Craig Wright and Ronald Pinn each have a similar libertarian spirit. They also disregard the power and legitimacy of governments. But their own form of self-government is immersed in a dark web of hidden identities and lawlessness. Like Assange, Wright is a cryptographic genius but also "socially undernourished".

Last year, O’Hagan was asked by a company to write the story of Satoshi Nakamoto as part of their media campaign to unveil Wright as the man behind the avatar. O’Hagan agreed, but refused the money. As it turns out, the story is not about who Wright really is but about who he cannot bring himself to be. That is the real "human problem" with Pinn, Assange and Wright. Reality, unlike the internet, demands that each one of them confront themselves. In helping them do that, O’Hagan proves The Secret Life of the digital world is one of extreme and unnerving self-doubt.