Evan Ratliff | |
Occupation: | Journalist |
Credits: | The Atavist, Wired Magazine, The New Yorker |
Evan Ratliff (born c. 1975) 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.
Ratliff is one of the co-authors of Safe: the Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World. His article "The Zombie Hunters: On the Trail of Cyberextortionists", written for The New Yorker in 2005,[2] was featured in The Best of Technology Writing 2006.
He is also the author of the book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal., which profiles the criminal Paul Le Roux.[3]
In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[4] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[5] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[6] 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.[7] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[8] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[9] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[10] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[11] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[12] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[13]
Ratliff left a coded message[14] — 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.[15]