Evan Ratliff

Evan Ratliff (born c. 1976)[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.

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

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]

"Vanishing" experiment

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

Ratliff left a coded message[15] — 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.[16]

References
  1. Gillette, Felix. "Innovator: Evan Ratliff, Archived November 10, 2012, at the Wayback Machine 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. "Wired.com/vanish". Archived from the original on March 14, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  6. Catch This Writer If You Can and Win $5k ABC News, Aug. 26, 2009
  7. @theativist (Evan Ratliff's Twitter account)
  8. Google Wave API group post
  9. VanishTeam
  10. "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
  11. EvanOffGrid Blog
  12. The Search for Evan Ratliff
  13. Run, Evan, Run!
  14. Thompson, Nicholas (September 8, 2009). "Evan Ratliff Is Caught!". Wired.
  15. @evansvanished
  16. "vanish.team". Archived from the original on July 17, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2019.
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