Evan Ratliff

Evan Ratliff
OccupationJournalist
Notable credit(s)The Atavist, Wired Magazine, The New Yorker

Evan Ratliff (born c. 1975)[1] is an American journalist and author. He is CEO and co-founder of Atavist, a media and software company.[1] Ratliff is a contributor to Wired Magazine and The New Yorker. He has written one book and co-authored multiple others.

Career

Ratliff is one of the co-authors of Safe: the Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World.[2] His article "The Zombie Hunters: On the Trail of Cyberextortionists", written for The New Yorker in 2005,[3] was featured in The Best of Technology Writing 2006.[4] He is also the author of the book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal, which profiles the criminal Paul Le Roux.[5]

He is the writer and host of the podcasts Shell Game, in which he documents his experiments with an AI-generated voice clone,[6] and Persona: The French Deception, an investigation into the French–Israeli scammer Gilbert Chikli.[7] He was a co-host and founder of the podcast Longform.[8]

"Vanishing" experiment

In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[9] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[10] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[11] The Google Wave development group proposed using the exercise as a test case for the new technology pushing the frontier of real-time web activity.[12] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[13] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[14] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[15] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[16] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[17] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[18]

Ratliff left a coded message[19] — FaLiLV/tRD:aN/HA:aSaTS; TW—tRS/tEKAA/tBotV; FSF—TItN/tGG/tCCoBB; JC—LJ/HoD/aOoP; JM—JGS/MWS/tBotH — which has been translated to be the authors and titles of a variety of books.[20]

References

  1. ^ a b Gillette, Felix. "Innovator: Evan Ratliff, Bloomberg Businessweek (Jan. 20, 2011).
  2. ^ Martha Baer; Katrina Heron; Oliver Morton; Evan Ratliff (2005), Safe: the race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world, HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-057715-5
  3. ^ Ratliff, Evan (October 3, 2005). "The Zombie Hunters". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved August 26, 2019.
  4. ^ Brendan I. Koerner, ed. (2006), The best of technology writing 2006, University of Michigan Press, p. 264, ISBN 978-0-472-03195-5
  5. ^ Evan Ratliff (January 29, 2019). The Mastermind. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-399-59041-2.
  6. ^ Lim, Louisa (September 28, 2024). "Shell Game probes the perils of AI". The Saturday Paper. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  7. ^ Sawyer, Miranda (June 11, 2022). "The week in audio: Persona: The French Deception; Swindler. Saviour. Mobster. Spy?; Londongrad". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  8. ^ Locker, Melissa (September 3, 2015). "Longform: the podcast about writing that uncovers the story behind the headlines". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  9. ^ "Wired.com/vanish". Archived from the original on March 14, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  10. ^ Catch This Writer If You Can and Win $5k ABC News, Aug. 26, 2009
  11. ^ @ev_rat (Evan Ratliff's Twitter account)
  12. ^ Google Wave API group post
  13. ^ VanishTeam [dead link‍]
  14. ^ "Newscould Launches Quick Response VanishTeam Facebook Application to Find Evan Ratliff in Wired's Vanishing Experiment," Newscloud blog (August 2009). Archived 2009-09-13 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ EvanOffGrid Blog
  16. ^ The Search for Evan Ratliff
  17. ^ Run, Evan, Run!
  18. ^ Thompson, Nicholas (September 8, 2009). "Evan Ratliff Is Caught!". Wired.
  19. ^ @evansvanished
  20. ^ "vanish.team". Archived from the original on July 17, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2019.
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