My entire Wired story is now available in the December issue, on newsstands now, or online here (the same spot that held the Vanish blog throughout the contest). It includes an interactive map that shows my route with some of the locations of the people who hunted me, and way more pictures of me than should ever have appeared in public. Between that and my extensive use of the third person in writing about myself, I think I’ve set some sort of magazine record for self-indulgence.
Those looking for yet still more info can find some of the hunters stories in their own words, photos of my disguise changes from day to day, and the behind-the-scenes of Wired’s challenges and clues.
Sometime next week, we’ll also set up a live chat of some sort to answer any remaining questions that anybody has. We’ll put out word on the Twitter #vanish stream, of course, with details.
Posted at 10:39 am | 12 Comments | Filed under Vanish, Wired |
In advance of my upcoming piece in Wired recapping my effort to Vanish, I can be found hawking it in multiple mediums this week. First, tonight, live on CNN’s Campbell Brown Show at 8:30 pm. [UPDATE: It's not terribly easy to find, but the video from this is available at the site. (You'll have to click the "On TV" button and then go to the Campbell Brown show.)]
Then, this Saturday, on Weekend All Things Considered, in a piece by reporter Alex Cohen. [UPDATE: Here's the link to the piece.]
I’ll post clips if and when I get my hands on them. In the meantime, here’s a recap of some of the other stories about the whole thing, from during and after:
Posted at 4:56 pm | 3 Comments | Filed under Articles, Media appearances, Vanish, Wired |
Twenty-five days. That’s how long I lasted on the lam. Most people arriving at this site will already know the basics: Last month, after writing a story for Wired about people who faked their own deaths, disappearing from their lives to start again, I set out to do something similar myself. I would drop out of my own life for a month, and act like I was starting a new one. Wired, meanwhile, would offer a $5000 bounty for anyone who tracked me down. We set a few basic parameters and then, journalistically speaking, we turned out all the lights and plunged headlong into the darkness. You can read a summary of what happened here.
I’ll be describing those 25 days in great detail in the December issue. There were almost daily surprises, both in what I found myself doing, and what I saw (and, of course, failed to see) the “hunters” doing to find me.
But for now I wanted to offer an extended thanks. First, to my friends and family, some of whom were made unwitting participants in this privacy-obliterating endeavor, and all of whom—especially my wonderful girlfriend (whose name the dedicated hunters know already)—were incredibly understanding and played along. Also to Nick Thompson, who sacrificed an insane amount of hours from other work and from promoting his own book (“The Hawk and The Dove,” which is getting a fantastic response, and which everyone should check out), to serve as the lead investigator. Without Nick, the whole thing would have failed in a multitude of ways. As well everyone at Wired and Lone Shark Games (particularly Teeuwyn Woodruff and Mike Selinker), both for enabling it and putting in many of their own hours. And finally to all the folks who hunted me—and aided me—for contributing their obsession and ingenuity, and especially for (with a few pretty harmless exceptions) honoring the rules about harassing my family. Many have emailed—and I want to hear from anyone who followed it: eratliff@atavist.net—to let me know they were glad I was caught. I don’t blame them. And although I was disappointed, I’m pretty pleased that at least it was by a clever bunch like Jeff Reifman and the guys at Naked Pizza.
I’d also like to offer an apology, to people I encountered along the way and deceived about my identity. It was one of the worst parts of the whole experience. I’ve been contacting them individually to explain whenever possible (a strange journalistic endeavor, that), and they’ve so far been gracious and forgiving, taking the whole thing in the spirit of fun it was intended. But many I won’t be able to find, and to them I am sorry. I won’t write about anyone by name who hasn’t given me explicit approval to do so.
To critics who griped that it wasn’t “real” enough; that it was either too easy to find me or (as people argued right up until I was caught) too difficult; that a “true” man-on-the-run would or wouldn’t have done this or that; I can only say: You nailed it! I wasn’t, in fact, a “real” fugitive. Very well observed, and I fully support your conviction that you would have done it better. But in our case, we were trying to remain, as much as possible, both authentic and engaging, two goals that were often in conflict. In compressing my time on the lam into 30 days, with the general public as the investigators, we didn’t exactly have a model to follow. You may also find that many of the things people found most “unreal,” like me using my ATM and credit cards at times, were not at all what they seemed.
Finally, to accusations of carrying out a “stunt,” I plead guilty to all but the pejorative assumption—given that category would include the journalistic “stunts” behind “Hell’s Angels,” “The Paper Lion” (and other Plimpton adventures), “Into Thin Air,” and “Nickled and Dimed,” among other pieces of narrative nonfiction that I greatly admire. We attempted what we thought was a unique, albeit self-indulgent and inevitably flawed, reporting venture. We’re hoping readers will find the results as fascinating as we did. But you can check out the December article and decide for yourselves.
Posted at 4:32 pm | 10 Comments | Filed under Articles, Crime, Disclosures, Recent stories, Vanish, Wired |
What does it take to up and disappear these days? Not to head off the grid for a few days, mind you, but to actually vanish from your life? That question is the subject of a two-part feature I’ve been working on for Wired over the past few months, the first piece of which is in the September print issue, and out online now. It tells the story of an Arkansas man named Matthew Alan Sheppard who faked his death last year and took off on the run, and the cops who pieced together his plan and tried to track him down alive. The story is also a broader look at the evolving cat-and-mouse game between investigators and the intentional missing — be they fugitives from the law, insurance scammers, or people under pressure who just walk out the door one morning and never come back. The short answer is: going on the lam is not like it used to be.
The trouble with stories of people caught faking deaths, or just lighting out on the run, however, is that in hindsight they always seem to fall victim to a singular dumb error. (Or, in the case of plane-jumper Marcus Shrenker, probably the recent fake-death attempt people are most familiar with, a tidy collection of dumb errors). “If I had just…” is the refrain of the caught fugitive, while stories of successful lives on the lam — for obvious reasons — never get told. Even the Matthew Alan Sheppards of the world can’t tell us what I think we really want to know: so how hard is it really, to disappear?
So I decided to try it.
For part two of the story, I’m going on the lam for 30 days. The magazine has put a $5000 bounty on my head for anyone who finds me. The contest has a variety of rules, for both me and my presumptive pursuers, to try and make it a reasonable simulation of a real life on the run. The most important of which, for me, is this incentive: if I am found before September 15, most of that $5k comes out of my story fee.
You can find the details, and follow or participate in the speculation, at www.wired.com/vanish. They’ll have any info on my bank account usage, cell phone, email, and the like, along with disturbingly large professional photos of me taken from every angle (which are also in the magazine). The man running that site, my editor Nick Thompson, wants me found, and he doesn’t have a clue where I’m going. So anything that comes from him is trustworthy. Anything that purports to come from me, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
I’m not dropping out, though, heading for a cabin or living in a cave. So security permitting, I’ll be posting more thoughts and leftovers from the first piece here over the month — or however long I make it. But if you are reading this, it means I’m already gone.
Posted at 5:23 am | 10 Comments | Filed under Crime, Wired |
At yesterday’s press conference describing the administration’s new “financial stability plan” for the banking system, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner offered what seems to be the obligatory new Web site for any Obama administration proposal:
Our work begins with a new framework of oversight and governance of all aspects of our Financial Stability Plan.
The American people will be able to see where their tax dollars are going and the return on their government’s investment, they will be able to see whether the conditions placed on banks and institutions are being met and enforced, they will be able to see whether boards of directors are being responsible with taxpayer dollars and how they’re compensating their executives, and they will be able to see how these actions are impacting the overall flow of lending and the cost of borrowing.
These new requirements, which will be available on a new website FinancialStability.gov, will give the American people the transparency they deserve.
(Clicking over there a few minutes ago, I found a text-only “coming soon” page, with links to Geithner’s remarks. In a way, the page echoes the lack of detail critics observed in the speech itself.) FinancialStability.gov thus joins Recovery.gov, the designated future source of stimulus bill spending, and Astrongmiddleclass.gov, a site that’s meant to provide info on the Vice President’s middle class task force. The former sits idle, awaiting instructions that will presumably come with the passage of the bill. The latter redirects to a section of the White House Web site, and contains the same Obama-esque design. All this Web building, but to what end? Post continued…
Posted at 3:23 pm | 3 Comments | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
When the Obama transition team posted the President-elect’s first weekly video address on YouTube, several transparancy advocates complained that, without comments or response videos enabled, the addresses were merely a one-way conversation. The Obama camp soon relented on comments, resulting in a typical flood of juvenille nonsense following each of the President’s sober monologues. But the transition team, and now the administration, drew the line at video responses. I mean, who knows what kind of crazy shit people might post?
Well, via TechPresident, we learn that the YouTube afficionado most outraged by his inability to see his own grainy face alongside the President’s is…House Republican leader John Boener.
Boener’s people want his own video approved as an official response to the President’s January 24 address. They’ve got a point. If you’re going to allow “djfishbone” to advance our democratic dialogue by writing “YEA BUSH 2.0!! i’m not getting on the bus and going to the camp,” why not a proper video reply from the House Republican Leader? It’s possible that Obama’s new media folks have mistaken Boener, so…YouTubeish a screen name, for a less serious respondent. Post continued…
Posted at 12:26 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
The most vexing phenomenon I encountered in my recent reporting on Obama’s Web team was the insistence by Obama press folks that everyone inside the transition team speak on background, with quotes attributable only to unnamed “Obama aides.” At first it reminded me of the way certain corporate PR departments — hello, Google — tacitly infantilize their employees by shadowing every interview, under the presumption that even executives aren’t smart enough to resist blabbing away the company goods.
Upon further reflection, though, the Obama policy seemed even more baffling. After all, they didn’t stop people from speaking to me. In fact, they kindly arranged some interviews. They just wouldn’t let those people put their name behind their (completely uncontroversial) words. More to the point, however, I was actually interviewing these people about transparency, which led to unintentionally ironic anonymice like this:
“Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”
Important, but not so important as to warrant putting an actual person’s name behind the statement. To top it off, the Obama aide didn’t even seem to want to remain anonymous. They just didn’t want to break the rules. Even stranger, some of those same people have since spoken in public forums and made the exact statements which I was forced to keep un-attributed.
As Jack Schaffer points out today at Slate, this sort of knee-jerk impulse toward anonymity is also afoot in White House press “background briefings.” At the very least, an administration promising to be the most transparent in history should be required to offer an explanation for the policy, and probably discard it altogether, save for especially sensitive circumstances. It would be a good first step in creating a “presumption of openness.”
Posted at 12:02 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
The first week of the Obama administration has offered answers to what were probably the four biggest questions about how he would translate the campaign’s tech acumen into the White House:
The first, which I addressed earlier in the week, was to what extent would the White House Web site feature the kind of social media and participation elements — common to the campaign and Change.gov — on day one? Answer: not much. There’s a blog and some YouTube videos (see number two, below), but only a standard feedback form for contact. Personally, I’m neither surprised nor particularly disappointed about the lack of interactivity, which I don’t find particularly compelling in the first place. I am a little surprised that it took them a few days to get the executive orders up. But it is the first week.
Posted at 2:00 pm | 1 Comment | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
Doing my part to fill the bottomless news hole that is Obama’s first week in office, I made a couple of forays into other media this week, to discuss my Wired story. The first was on public radio’s “Future Tense,” which aired on Wednesday and is archived here. Next up was G4 channel’s “Attack of the Show,” in which I followed a segment about a Japanese talk show hosted by a chimp. My bit is, perhaps, less riveting.
This weekend on NPR (Sunday, I think, on most stations), I’ll have a stint on Bob Garfield’s show, “On the Media.” UPDATE: Here is my appearance, and here is the transcript.
UPDATE 2: I also appeared on BBC Five Live Radio on the same topic. Podcast available here.
Posted at 12:33 pm | Comments Off | Filed under Media appearances, Politics, Technology, Wired |
Just back from drinking mimosa’s and celebrating the inaugural festivities, I checked in on the new White House Web site. TechPresident reports that the handover happened precisely on time, at 12:01 pm eastern; pretty cool that the Web operation mirrors the transfer of power tradition online. As Obama’s online folks had told me back in December, there’s basically no radical change to the site on day one. No wikis, no social network, and in fact not yet the same participation engines built for Change.gov. The only feedback area I can find is a standard a 500-character contact form. There is, however, a prominently featured blog announcing the new site and reiterating the pledges for transparency and participation. No doubt they’ll be rolling more of that out in the coming weeks. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama’s Web operation was estimated to have somewhere between a dozen and 30 people involved in it. David Almacy, who formerly headed up Bush’s online efforts, told me that they managed WhiteHouse.gov with a staff of…six.
Meanwhile, Change.gov is now frozen but still up; it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it, if anything. And if the transition team carried out the promise made on their “Citizen’s Briefing Book” segment, Obama at this very moment has a notebook on his desk revealing the nation’s top priority, according to the online crowd’s wisdom: “ending marijuana prohibition.” Somehow I’m guessing the answer is…no we can’t.
UPDATE: I should have noted that the first blog post on Whitehouse.gov is authored by Macon Phillips, I quoted in the Wired story and who was one of the savviest people I spoke with. It bodes well for the White House Web operation that he stayed on. Several of the biggest names from the campaign’s Web side returned to the private sector.
UPDATE 2: Some blog reaction: PC World notes the changes and the lack of avenues for participation, and points out that the Bush transition team flubbed their own digital transition in 2001. Tim O’Reilly, not surprisingly, trumpets the site as the culmination of a victory for “Web 2.0 principles” — although it’s unclear how those principles are actually reflected in the site. Kottke observes the Obama team’s more parsimonious coding. Valleywag gets all clever with a they-say-they-for-participation-but-look-no-comments-allowed joke. (In other news: Valleywag still exists! Who knew.) And much more.
Posted at 1:03 pm | 2 Comments | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
