In this week’s podcast I’m talking to the novelist and journalist Andrew O’Hagan about lies, paranoia, and the way that nothing, online, is quite as it seems. His new book The Secret Life (Faber) tells, in the words of its subtitle, “three true stories”: one about Andrew’s utterly bizarre time as the prospective ghostwriter for Julian Assange; another about his association with the man who claimed to have invented the digital currency Bitcoin; and the third — still darker and stranger — about Andrew’s own experiment in stealing a dead man’s identity to become someone else online. They add up to a funny, alarming and disturbing picture of what happens when digital fantasy meets analogue reality. Plus, we learn about Julian Assange’s vile table-manners.
You can listen to our conversation here:
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