The manhunt for Evan Ratliff
Wired has a writeup of a project they set up wherein one of their writers attempted to shed his identity entirely and build a new life undetected while his editor at Wired organized a internet and real-life-wide manhunt to track him down. Ultimately he was found out, but it’s a fun story and well worth the read.
Some parts that I found interesting: a really good way to disguise yourself if you’re a hip young writer for Wired is to become less attractive — going bald, gaining weight or looking generally slubby. Also, using Tor and maybe some additional proxying just to be sure is pretty effective at anonymizing your behavior on the internet. It helps not to be really engaged with social media; don’t go making a twitter or a facebook account. Fake business cards and a credit card can be a substitute for ID in most places.
I’m not entirely sure how society feels about people who want to disappear, as it were. We obviously romanticize the notion, and I think we sort of want to live in a society that has that option, but it’s obviously hurtful to the people with whom you’ve formed emotional connections. Evan’s experience reveals that it’s not so plesant to be the person hiding either. He complains a lot about being lonely and tired of suspecting everyone.
It also seems almost impossible to form any sort of authentic relationship with other people. Imagine how often you mention something that happened in your somewhat distant past? That sounds absolutely exhausting to me, and I’m sure it alienates you wrt talking to other people. In short, to all of you who were worried about me suddenly exiting someday, fear not. It doesn’t seem like a good way to live life, though it’s of course still sort of interesting to read about.
I’ll only add one more thing: in this instance I think the internet was valuable to the manhunters much less for the information about Ratliff it made available than for the communication and coordination it enabled. Things like emailing the glutein-free pizza places in New Orleans from across the globe were really key in actually finding him. That seems to me much more challenging than getting clues from a twitter account or something like that.
