Evan Ratliff
Born (1975-04-23) April 23, 1975 (age 48)
OccupationJournalist
Notable credit(s)The Atavist, Wired Magazine, The New Yorker
SpouseSamantha Ratliff

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]

"Vanishing" experiment

In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[6] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[7] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[8] 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.[9] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[10] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[11] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[12] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[13] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[14] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[15]

Ratliff left a coded message[16] — 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.[17]

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. ^ "Wired.com/vanish". Archived from the original on March 14, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  7. ^ Catch This Writer If You Can and Win $5k ABC News, Aug. 26, 2009
  8. ^ @ev_rat (Evan Ratliff's Twitter account)
  9. ^ Google Wave API group post
  10. ^ VanishTeam[dead link]
  11. ^ "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
  12. ^ EvanOffGrid Blog
  13. ^ The Search for Evan Ratliff
  14. ^ Run, Evan, Run!
  15. ^ Thompson, Nicholas (September 8, 2009). "Evan Ratliff Is Caught!". Wired.
  16. ^ @evansvanished
  17. ^ "vanish.team". Archived from the original on July 17, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2019.

External links

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