Many of our modern crimes are crimes of the imagination. We think of the unspeakable and exchange information on it. We commit a ‘thought-crime’ – giving the illicit or the abominable an audience. Some of us pretend to have relationships we don’t actually have just for the sense of freedom it gives us, and some want porn for that reason too. Building the fake Ronnie became something more than creating a character in a novel: it became personal, like living another life, as an actor might, trying not only to imitate the experience of a possible person but testing how far I could develop a sense of reality and empathy for him. And I found I did: I had feelings about my invented Ronnie, and I cared about how he seemed. I decided my Ronnie, unlike the real one, would have gone to university and I placed him at Edinburgh from 1982 to 1986. I applied for a fake degree certificate in his name – there are several websites offering this service, all of them pretending the certificates are for ‘novelty value only’, but they look as real as the originals, have identical seals, holograms and watermarks, and can sell for thousands of pounds. They are clearly meant for people who want to pretend they have a degree that they don’t have. Edinburgh seemed right: I knew how to think as Ronnie in the Edinburgh of those years.
I realised my Ronnie would need a face. He would need it more for identity cards than for his online life, though even there it seems wrong after a while not to have a face to represent the self you are projecting to the world. I could have lifted an age-appropriate face – the chances of detection would have been slight. But I was uneasy about that: I suspected my Ronnie might travel into some dark areas, and I wanted it to be me who was to blame, or at least responsible, so the face of a real person, alive or dead, was out. Through a friend in the film business, I contacted a special effects guy and over tea in Portland Place I swore him to secrecy. The conversation about how my man would look turned into something like a casting session. ‘I think he should look like me, but not too much,’ I told him, and we agreed he’d make several images of a face that blended mine with those of two other men who agreed to sit for portraits. Ronnie’s face would then be a mixture of the three. My special effects helper asked me if I’d heard of Weavrs.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s where you’re going,’ he said. According to their website, Weavrs are ‘personality-based social-web robots’ that ‘publicly blog about how they feel, where they go and what they experience’. An article by Olivia Solon in Wired magazine questioned the guys behind it. ‘The team … won’t reveal exactly how the Weavrs algorithm works – referring to it as their black box,’ Solon wrote, ‘but say they create personalities from social data that then “blog themselves into existence”.’ It’s taken for granted in these circles that digital robots are becoming a tool of big business; in China, for instance, Weavrs are used to collect data on young people and their preferences. In the old days researchers would speak to individuals, but nowadays the invented person, the digividual, is more reliable when it comes to showing what people want.
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The unstable factor is ‘people’. My Ronnie Pinn had integrity at his source, a real person who lived and breathed and was called Ronnie Pinn, but he himself had none, which didn’t stop him from beginning to live a life much larger than reality. The photograph of ‘Ronnie’ showed a man in his forties with his author’s eyes and a younger man’s haircut. He was a composite, yet he seemed quite ordinary – everyone, after all, is a composite – and nothing about him suggested he wasn’t walking in the world like us. My Ronnie was soon set up on Facebook, with his photo uploaded and his background details included, his ‘education’, his football team (West Ham), and the fact that he now worked as a driver for a firm called Executive Cars. It was at this point that Ronnie’s ‘character’ began to veer off on its own, as characters do when you’re creating them in fiction. Ronnie, it turned out, was quite right-wing, he was gay, he was a historian who’d turned his back on academia and wanted England out of Europe. On Facebook, he expressed his character in his choice of people and institutions to follow. He liked fast food, so, for a while, he had a logo of Wendy’s on his page. He had Wembley Stadium as the background on his home page. Every day I added new elements to him and found new avenues. He liked Star Trek, The Wire and Queer as Folk. He joined Twitter and started following certain monarchists, capitalists, fast food outlets and old school connections, as well as politicians like Nigel Farage. People automatically started following Ronnie Pinn, either because of his interests or because he followed them. But to increase his footprint I kept adding more possibilities, including a host of fake Facebook friends. They were like ghosts and I came to think of them as figments, the invented, the others, who shored up the legend of a fake person by being plausibly real while being totally fake. In less than an hour one morning the invented friends of Ronnie Pinn came into being. They had names like William Eliot, Jane Deleon and Stephen Watley, and who’s to say they weren’t ‘real’. After a while, an alarm bell went off somewhere, and Facebook sent a warning. ‘Please verify your identity,’ it said. ‘Facebook does not allow accounts that: Pretend to be someone else; Use a fake name; Don’t represent a real person.’ But the fakery of the fake Ronnie’s fake friends didn’t trouble them for long. It was just another robot sending the warning, moved to do so after a number of keystrokes set off the alarm. But the fakery continued to go deeper and Ronnie Pinn grew in reality and the warnings disappeared. At the time, Facebook had 864 million daily users, of whom at least 67 million are believed by the company to be fake. There are more social media ghosts, more people being second people, or living an invented life as doppelgängers, than there are citizens of the UK.
In many ways my Ronnie was a typical twenty-first-century citizen. Not least in his falseness. Valuable fake identities are being constructed and deployed in every area of life, and often they are simulacra of their maker’s own identity. In a 2013 book called Murdoch’s World by David Folkenflik, it emerged that public relations staffers at Fox News Channel were serially creating dummy accounts to plant ‘Fox-friendly’ reactions to critical blog postings. One ex-staffer spoke of more than a hundred false accounts set up for this purpose, and said they’d covered their tracks by the use of different computers and untraceable broadband connections. Far from being the creations of stoned computer nerds, fake online identities had long since become a standard feature of big business espionage, police investigations, government surveillance, marketing and public relations. Democracy itself – with its basic notion of one individual and one vote – is far from being an innocent notion in the age of ‘astroturfing’, when whole movements of opinion can be manufactured in an instant, drummed up by the keyboard-savvy, who harvest ‘names’ from social media to support their cause or denounce someone else’s. Edward Snowden opened a door on state-sponsored snooping on private lives, but also, more subtly, he revealed the many ways private life has given itself over to the dark arts of fabrication. A dirty tricks document produced by a secret unit at GCHQ called JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) was called ‘The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations’. JTRIG described itself as ‘using online techniques to make something happen in the real or the cyber world’. Making ‘something happen’ very often means invading someone’s Facebook account and changing the photographs, or mobilising the social network to ridicule them. A ‘fake flag operation’ for example involves posting material on the internet under a false identity with the aim of damaging a reputation. The damage comes under one of two headings: ‘Dissimulation – Hide the Real’ and ‘Simulation – Show the False’. In other words, exploit the porousness of the border between the real and the imagined, as if some Borgesian nightmare had taken over, feasting on a general uncertainty about who exists and who doesn’t. The world, according to GCHQ (and not only GCHQ), is now a zone of conjuring. ‘We want to build Cyber Magicians,’ the secret report tells its secret readers.
Stories of people pretending to
be other people, of people feeling impelled to confect, imitate or perform themselves, describe a change not just in the technological basis of our lives but in the narrative strategies now available to us. You could say that every ambitious person needs a legend to deepen their own. In 2013 Manti Te’o, an exceptional Hawaiian linebacker, a Mormon who played for Notre Dame, found his when he told the sad story of having to succeed for his team after his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died of leukaemia. Despite his grief, the footballer stormed up the field, making twelve tackles in one game, before appearing on news programmes to talk about his heartbreak and to quote from the letters Lennay had written him during her terrible illness. Problem was: the girlfriend never existed. She was a complete invention – the photographs on social media sites were of a girl he’d never met. He hadn’t made it to Lennay’s funeral, Te’o said, because she insisted that he not miss the game. There are hundreds of stories like this, where ‘sockpuppet’ accounts on Facebook and elsewhere have allowed a ‘person’ – sometimes a whole ‘family’ – to put together a life that’s much bigger than the real one. The Dirr family from Ohio solicited sympathy and dollars for years after losing loved ones to cancer – a small village of more than seventy invented profiles shored up the lie. It was all the work of a twenty-two-year-old medical student, Emily Dirr, who’d been inventing her world since she was eleven. Her life was a reality show that she produced, cast, directed, starred in, and broadcast to the world under a pile of aliases that felt entirely real and moving to a large group of devoted followers.
By the middle of the summer of 2014, Ronnie Pinn had a Gmail account and an AOL account, as well as accounts on Craigslist and Reddit. It took the best part of a week to install and run the software necessary to get the bitcoins he needed to confirm his existence. I bought them with a credit card – hundreds of pounds’ worth – on computers that couldn’t be traced back to me. In each case they had to be ‘mixed’, or laundered, before Ronnie could buy things. Around every corner on the web is a scam, and the Ronnie I invented had to negotiate with some of the dodgiest parts of the World Wide Web. He now had currency; next he got a fake address. I used an empty flat in Islington, where I would go to collect his mail, the emptiness of the hall seeming all the emptier for the pile of mail on the floor, addressed to someone who didn’t exist but was more demanding than many who did.
It wasn’t long before I saw Ronnie’s face on a driving licence. It took a few weeks to secure a passport. The seller was on the dark net website Evolution; having gathered all ‘Ronnie’s’ information, he produced scans on which the photographs were missing. Then he disappeared. This is common enough: the sellers no less often than those seeking to buy their wares are crooks. Another seller produced the documents quite quickly and with everything in place anyone could have been fooled. Not perhaps the e-passport gates at Heathrow, but a British passport is a gateway to many other forms of ID, as well as to a world of legitimacy. Slowly and digitally, ‘Ronnie’ began to be a man who had everything: a face, an address, a passport, discount cards. He began to have conversations with real people on Reddit, or people who might have been real, and his Twitter and Facebook life showed him to be a creature of enthusiasm and prejudice. Nowadays, everyone can be Frankenstein and his monster, both the hare-brained dreamer and his gothic offspring, and the enabling technology seems to encourage the idea. Ronnie, in the world, was a figment, but on discussion boards he was no less believable than anybody else. ‘Friend’ has become a verb, leaving ‘befriend’ to hint at the old world of warm handshakes and eyes that actually met. People ‘friend’ people on Facebook and they get ‘friended’, but many of them will never meet. Elsewhere on the net the connections may lead to a cold presence, a person who is legitimate but non-existent. Ronnie’s social interaction online could be involved and energetic and characterful, but it seemed that everyone he met had a self to hide and nothing to show for themselves beyond their quips and departures. At one point, Ronnie’s Twitter account got hacked and he was invaded by hundreds of robotic right-wing followers. His ‘information’ had opened him up to being exploited by spambots, by other machines, and by web detritus that clings to entities like Ronnie as a matter of digital course. None of these everyday spooks came in from the cold, and Ronnie moved, as if by osmosis, into the more criminal parts of the internet, where the clandestine earns its keep.
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It wasn’t a million years ago that Marshall McLuhan was able to imagine the media as the benign source of a new togetherness: a place where ‘psychic communal integration’ might occur. But our experience of the internet is tangled with our sense of what its abusers are making of it. The technology is now a surveillance machine, a lying tool, a handheld marketing device, a corporate pinboard, a global platform for ideologues and zealots, as well as a handy life-enhancer. If Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest bring people together, they also complicate our notion of what a person is, and it’s very different from former notions of reality and privacy. After several months, Ronnie had begun to press himself into some officially sanctioned world of paperwork, and, though the paperwork was false, his online demeanour suggested a reality as big as anyone’s. The Ronald Pinn I created from the distant memory of a young man in a graveyard became, in imitation of the bent police officers who inspired his creation, an illegal alien in a world of bespoke reality. The police officers, under their new identities, had affairs and fathered children before disappearing home to their real lives and the world that squared with who they were. Ronnie Pinn had only one direction to go in, down and down into a world of seeming freedom, the dark web, where one can be anybody one wants to be, and at a happy advantage if ‘invented’. The dark web is a place where rules can’t be dictated by any external authority, a place that laughs at authority and authenticity. Normal search engines can’t reach it and access can’t easily be traced to anyone’s computer. Ronnie found his natural domain in that world of few-questions-asked, though I was ready, by then, to answer any question about Ronnie that anyone might care to ask.
There was nothing obvious in the life of Ronnie that would have led directly to me or my own habits of invention, though I’d voiced him and played him. Once he had the means, the credentials, the bitcoins and the passwords, he was, in a sense, free, like a character in fiction who must express himself not merely according to his author’s wishes but according to some inner mechanisms embedded in his past and in his nature. ‘It begins with a character, usually,’ William Faulkner said, ‘and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.’ And I can only say that the Ronald Pinn I made up tended towards certain enterprises of his own volition and I let him. The websites on the dark web have a tendency to morph as quickly as the people manning them, but the illicit marketplaces – Silk Road, Agora, Evolution – opened up to him, and he was soon having conversations with secretive experts about drugs and false documents and guns.
An individual called Ronald Pinn, using his own passcodes, paying with the bitcoins purchased in his name, bought white heroin and had it sent to his London address. It arrived in a small vacuum pack between two white cards in a jiffy bag, and cost about £30. He bought Afghan weed and it came the same way; he bought Pakistani cannabis. Addressed to Ronald Pinn, it all came to the empty flat and I had it checked for authenticity. At one point several packs of the powerful painkiller Tramadol came through, as well as other drugs, all ordered by and delivered to the only person ever associated with their purchase, Ronald Pinn. As the weeks went by, his exploits became more baroque and seemed like a stretch for his character. He began buying counterfeit money, which came at fifty per cent of the face value: for £200 you could buy £400 in fake money, and it passed all the basic tests. As an international space populated with anarchists and libertarians, non-conformists and government-haters, the dark web quite naturally gives itself to wide def
initions of freedom. It points to the self-serving nature of power elites, decries corruption in governments and legal systems, satirises the ‘phoney’ war on drugs, and laughs at all officialdom and all attempts to curtail the freedom of individuals. It likes drugs, has no respect for official banks and has a fondness for guns.
Ronnie went in that direction. There were areas I wouldn’t allow him to go into – porn, for instance – but the Ronnie who existed that summer was alive both to drugs and to the idea of weaponry. It’s one of the contradictions of the dark web, that its love of throwing off constraints doesn’t always sit well with its live-and-let-live philosophy. There are people in those illicit marketplaces who sell ‘suicide tablets’ and bomb-making kits. ‘Crowd-sourced hitmen’ were on offer beside assault weapons, bullets and grenades. One of the odd things I discovered during my time with cyber-purists – and Ronnie found it too – was how right-wing they are at the heart of their revolutionary programmes. The internet is libertarian in spirit, as well as cultish, paranoid, rabble-rousing and demagogic, given to emptying other people’s trash cans while hiding their own, devoted not to persuasion but to trolling, obsessed with making a religion of democracy while broadly mistrusting people. Far down in the dark web, there exists an anti-authoritarian madness, a love of disorder as long as one’s own possessions aren’t threatened. The peaceniks come holding grenades. The Manson Family would feel at home.
When Ronnie Pinn went to see this world he found it welcoming and vile. He saw Uzis and assault rifles, grenades, machetes and pistols. As a man with cyber-currency, he was welcome in every room and was never checked. He was anybody as well as nobody. He could have been a teenager, a warrior, a terrorist or a psychopath. So long as he had currency he was okay. The only two sites where the website operators checked him out were Black Market Reloaded and Executive Outcomes, both suppliers of weaponry. You could get past them, but they did try to do check-ups. Other sites on the dark web asked no questions at all. Three hundred and fifteen grams of brand-new gun with a nine-millimetre silencer? An AK47 Black Laminate, ‘with a chrome-lined central barrel, adjustable rear sight and two 30-round magazines’? A Remington M24 sniper rifle? A series of Israeli-made semi-automatic pistols, costing less than the retail price of $2400? On the drugs discussion boards everyone seemed to be having the time of their life, but a sinister silence existed among the shootists. When a gun is purchased it arrives in many parts through the post, ready to be put together and used for who knows what purpose.
The Secret Life Page 10