| 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]
He is the writer and host of the podcasts Shell Game, in which he documents his experiments with an AI-generated voice clone,[4] and Persona: The French Deception, an investigation into the French–Israeli scammer Gilbert Chikli.[5] He was a co-host and founder of the podcast Longform.[6]
In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[7] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[8] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[9] 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.[10] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[11] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[12] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[13] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[14] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[15] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[16]
Ratliff left a coded message[17] — 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.[18]