Disappearing – Not as Easy as It Used to Be

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September 14, 2009

I remember when my dog Rusty disappeared, and we spent a day looking for him. When I went to bed that night, I imagined he was at the park smoking cigars and playing poker, because that’s what dogs do when you’re sleeping; the next day, of course he came home, without any indication on his face that he had even been gone. It was very easy for Rusty to disappear. However, that was the 80’s, and he was a dog.

It’s 2009 and harder than ever for a human being to disappear and start a new life under a false identity. “It’s almost easier to steal an identity today than to shed your own,” writes Evan Ratliff in this fascinating Wired article about what it takes to really disappear in this technological booby trap age. You used to be able to “peruse a graveyard, pick out a name, obtain a birth certificate”, but now the challenges are much more complicated.

In addition to covering a myriad of examples of people trying to disappear, the article has an additional thing to pique your interest: the author decided that after writing an article about how difficult it is to disappear in today’s world, that he would try to hide out for 30 days, and Wired offered a reward of $5,000 if you could find him. He still communicated through twitter and Facebook, and there was not only a Facebook group devoted to finding him, but also one formed to help keep him at large. He was eventually caught, trying to get some gluten free pizza, in New Orleans.

BSKY

Anisse Gross

Anisse Gross is a writer, editor, artist and question asker living in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Believer, Lucky Peach, Buzzfeed, Brooklyn Quarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She openly welcomes correspondence, friendship, surprises and paid work.

One response

Mark Pritchard

September 14, 2009

I wrote about this problem in my upcoming novel “How They Scored” :

I might merely want to start over. I love the idea that you can move to a big city or a small town and get lost. Isn’t that what hundreds of people did after 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? — claimed that all their papers were lost, whether or not it was true. Got new ID with a new name, moved to another state, faded into the woodwork.

You can still do that in America — barely. But with [new huge databases and data-mining techniques], no way. That dead guy whose ID you stole probably liked completely different music, wore completely different clothes, had totally different jobs. Once I started buying Shostakovich CDs and had them delivered to a zip code the dead guy never lived in, a red flag would go up. A complete change in shopping habits combined with a change in address equals the probability of identity theft. That’s what it would be called. Not “starting over.”