It’s not just the state. If it wanted to, Google could overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt to destroy every marriage in America.

I love Google. And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I’m terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point people are going to realize that Google has everything on everyone. Most of all, they can see what questions you’re asking, in real time. Quite literally, they can read your mind.

– Jacob Appelbaum (via haarberg)

(Source: voorwaarts, via shl333)

10 months ago  63 notes view comments

youmightfindyourself:

(CNN) — With little notice or fanfare, the digital world is fundamentally changing. What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone — where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog — is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data.

According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top 50 Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants.

The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.

The race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. As Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained to me, “You’re getting a free service, and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that pretty directly into money.”

While Gmail and Facebook may be helpful, free tools, they are also extremely effective and voracious extraction engines into which we pour the most intimate details of our lives.

As a business strategy, the Internet giants’ formula is simple: The more personally relevant their information offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy the products they’re offering.

And the formula works. Amazon sells billions of dollars worth of merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and putting it in the front of the virtual store.

What the Internet is hiding from you

Up to 60% of Netflix’s rentals come from the personalized guesses it can make about each customer’s movie preferences — and at this point, Netflix can predict how much you’ll like a given movie within about half a star. Personalization is a core strategy for the top five sites on the Internet — Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft Live — as well as countless others.

It would be one thing if all this customization were just about targeted advertising. But personalization isn’t just shaping what we buy. For a quickly rising percentage of us, personalized news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source. Thirty-six percent of Americans under 30 get their news through social networking sites.

And personalization is shaping how information flows far beyond Facebook, as websites from Yahoo News to the New York Times-funded startup News.me cater their headlines to our particular interests and desires. It’s influencing what videos we watch on YouTube and a dozen smaller competitors, and what blog posts we see.

It’s affecting whose e-mails we get, which potential mates we run into on OK Cupid, and which restaurants are recommended to us on Yelp — which means that personalization could easily have a hand not only in who goes on a date with whom, but in where they go and what they talk about. The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

The basic code at the heart of the new Internet is pretty simple. The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem to like — the actual things you’ve done, or the things people similar to you like — and tries to extrapolate. Together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us — what I’ve come to call a filter bubble — which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information.

Of course, to some extent we’ve always consumed media that appealed to our interests and avocations and ignored much of the rest. But the filter bubble introduces three dynamics we’ve never dealt with before:

First, you’re alone in it. A cable channel that caters to a narrow interest (say, golf) has other viewers, with whom you share a frame of reference. But you’re the only person in your bubble. In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.

Second, the filter bubble is invisible. Most viewers of conservative or liberal news sources know when they’re going to a station curated to serve a particular political viewpoint. But Google’s agenda is opaque. Google doesn’t tell you who it thinks you are, or why it’s showing you the results you’re seeing. You don’t know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong — and you might not even know it’s making assumptions about you in the first place.

Finally, you don’t choose to enter the bubble. When you turn on Fox News or read The Nation, you’re making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It’s an active process, and just as you would if you put on tinted glasses, you can guess how the editors’ leaning shapes your perception. You don’t make the same kind of choice with personalized filters. They come to you — and because they drive up profits for the websites that use them, they’ll become harder and harder to avoid.

The consequences of living in a bubble are becoming clear. Left to their own devices, personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar, and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.

In the filter bubble, there’s less room for the chance encounters that bring insight and learning. Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics, and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop. But if Amazon thinks I’m interested in cookbooks, it’s not very likely to show me books about metallurgy. It’s not just serendipity that’s at risk.

By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.

It’s not too late to make sure that personalization avoids these traps. But to shift its course, we need more people to become educated about how and why the Web is being edited for them, and we need the companies doing this filtering to show us not just what we’ll click most, but what we need to know. Otherwise, we could each find ourselves trapped in a bubble for one.

1 year ago  42 notes view comments

In defense of Privacy: The 20th Century’s Most Reclusive Authors

hotparade:

12:59 pm Thursday Jul 1, 2010 by Caroline Stanley

A few years back, when Denis Johnson refused to do press for his novel Tree of Smoke, which went on to win the National Book Award, it was considered newsworthy. (Note: He has since vowed “to learn how to interact with people.”) But in an age where widespread self-promotion (and in many cases, oversharing) is just 140 characters away, the idea of a reclusive author seems both counter-intuitive and strangely romantic. Inspired by Harper Lee’s recent chocolate-fueled assault by a British tabloid reporter, we decided to examine why a few authors of a certain age chose to shut themselves away from the media, and in some cases, from publication and society, as well.

Marcel Proust
The French novelist/social climber was a fixture of Paris salon society up until the turn of the century, but a series of personal events — his brother’s marriage and the deaths of both his parents — along with his deteriorating health and crippling asthma, turned Marcel Proust into a something of a recluse for the final 17 years of his life.

And we’re not just talking a reformed party boy. Proust, who soundproofed his studio with cork walls and installed layers of heavy curtains to keep the light out, would stay up for days on end working on his 3,200-page masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. When greeting guests, he was often unsure of whether it was day or night. As his writer friend Leon-Paul Fargue described him at the time: “He looked like a man who no longer lives outdoors or by day, a hermit who hasn’t emerged from his oak tree for a long time.”

Before he died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922, there was a three year period where Proust rarely (if ever) left his apartment. Dramatic, for sure, but he’s got nothing on Ms. Emily Dickinson, who didn’t leave her family compound for 20 years.

J.D. Salinger
When Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, it was an instant commercial success, and its slang-spouting central character, Holden Caufield, was catapulted into pop culture’s collective subconscious. This didn’t sit well with Salinger, who tired of fame almost instantly, requesting that his photo be removed from the dust jacket of future editions and his agent burn any fan mail. By 1953, he’d relocated from midtown New York City to New Hampshire — “a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish,” which he rarely left outside of the occasional vacation to Florida or back to NYC to meet with his editor friend William Shawn at the old Biltmore Hotel.

His output slowed, and then stopped. After Nine Stories came out in 1953, Salinger didn’t publish another book until 1961 — Franny and Zooey, a collection of work previously published in The New Yorker. (This is the same year that he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.) Another collection of New Yorker material, Raise High the Roof Beam, came out in 1963. His final new work to appear in print (at least of his own volition) was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that ran in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.

While many journalists sought him out over the years, Salinger only broke his silence over the issue of the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories in 1974. In a conversation with a New York Times reporter, he explained: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure… I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man.”

In 1984, Salinger reportedly turned down a request from British literary critic Ian Hamilton to pen his biography, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Hamilton went ahead with the project, and the two ended up in court over the use of material from unpublished letters. Salinger won.

Salinger stuck to his code of privacy and seclusion even in death. When he passed away in January of this year, his literary agents said in a statement that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.” As he’d told them before, he believed that “he was in this world but not of it.”

Thomas Pynchon

While you could argue that Pynchon is just as much of a recluse as Salinger was, there’s definitely more of a sense of humor and some showmanship behind his man of mystery act. To wit, he has made three animated appearances on The Simpsons, once with a bag over his head to blurb a novel written by Marge (“Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!”).

Here’s what we know: Pynchon was born in 1937 on Long Island, New York. After a brief stint studying engineering physics at Cornell, he joined the Navy. When he returned to Cornell two years later he became an English major. Vladimir Nabokov was one of his professors. Pynchon graduated in 1959 and began work as a technical writer at Boeing, before eventually switching to fiction writing and moving to Mexico. His first novel, V, was published to critical acclaim in 1963, and he won the Faulkner Award. When Time sent a photographer to Mexico City to snap his picture, a mustachioed Pynchon reportedly hopped on a bus and rode off into the mountains.

That’s when biographical details get a little sketchy. Pynchon spent some time in both New York and Mexico before moving to California for most of the ’60s and early ’70s, where he lived in Berkeley, Manhattan Beach, and Aptos. When he won the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974, Pynchon sent comedian Irwin Corey to accept the prize on his behalf, and many people present mistakenly thought it was the author.

Rumors started to swirl about why Pynchon — at this point a literary superstar — wanted to remain anonymous. Some said he was J.D. Salinger. (Pynchon’s response? “Not bad. Keep trying.”) Some thought he was linked to Wanda Tinasky, a woman writing angry letters about other famous writers to a paper in Northern California. (Pynchon broke his media silence to tell CNN, “I did not write those letters. This has been a hoax that I’ve had nothing to do with. I’m sorry it’s gone on as long as it has.”)

Until New York Magazine tracked him down in 1996 (using an online service that cross-referenced credit card and telephone numbers), no reporter had interviewed Pynchon in four decades. By this time, he had been back in New York for six years or so, and embracing a very low-key lifestyle. According to the piece, “He shops at neighborhood stores. He lunches with other writers. He spends weekends in the countryside with his family.”

The following year, a CNN camera crew tracked him down near his Manhattan home, but then honored his request not to run the footage: “Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed… My belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’” On a similar note, the following year over 120 letters that Pynchon had written to his longtime agent from 1963 to 1982 were donated to the Morgan Library. At his request, they agreed to seal these letters until after his death.

The past decade has seen Pynchon opening up… a bit. There were those aforementioned appearances on The Simpsons. In 2006, he publicly came to the defense of his writer friend Ian McEwan, who had been accused of plagiarism. And just last year, he provided the voiceover in a trailer for his newest release, Inherent Vice. Or at least we think that it was him…

Cormac McCarthy

Can you really be considered a reclusive author if you agree to go on Oprah? We’re going to go with yes, but only if the last interview you did was with the New York Times over 15 years prior, and you’ve never done a TV appearance before.

In many ways, Cormac McCarthy’s career arc (and subsequent reclusive lifestyle) is the opposite of what we saw with Salinger; while his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, it wasn’t until the publication of National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award-winner All The Pretty Horses in 1992 that he received widespread recognition. In fact, that NYT profile — which McCarthy did only because his agent promised it would be the only interview he’d have to do for years — sums him up rather nicely.

“It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent. “

But it was really a pair of works that followed — No Country For Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) — that made McCarthy a household name. The former was adapted by the Coen Brothers into an Academy Award-winning film; the latter also became a film, but more importantly, took home the Pulitzer Prize for literature and was the April 2007 selection for Oprah’s Book Club. In his appearance on her show, McCarthy — who lives in Sante Fe with his wife and their young son — explained to Oprah that he prefers the company of scientists to other writers.

Harper Lee

It’s kind of funny that a writer who grew up as the best friend of Truman Capote would shy away from the limelight, but that’s just what Harper Lee did. Following the 1960 publication of To Kill A Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year, Lee avoided interviews, public appearances, and to a certain degree writing for public consumption, outside of a few short essays and an incomplete second novel called The Long Goodbye. (There was also talk in the mid-80s of a non-fiction book about an Alabama serial murderer, but that was reportedly put aside as well.)

As she explained in a 1964 interview with author Roy Newquist:

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

Lee broke her more than four decade long silence in 2006. For years she’d ventured out to the University of Alabama for the presentation of annual awards to high school students for a To Kill a Mockingbird essay contest; this time around she agreed to do an interview with the New York Times, but would only talk about the ceremony itself. The following year, Lee was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.

Most recently, Lee — who at 84, is still said to handwrite polite refusals for interview requests  – was accosted in Monroeville by a journalist from The Daily Mail bearing a box of chocolates. Her totally amazing response to the invasion of privacy: “We’re just going to feed the ducks, but call me the next time you are here. We have a lot of history here. You will enjoy it.”

Best polite fuck you ever.

via

1 year ago  11 notes view comments

It’s not just the state. If it wanted to, Google could overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt to destroy every marriage in America.

I love Google. And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I’m terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point people are going to realize that Google has everything on everyone. Most of all, they can see what questions you’re asking, in real time. Quite literally, they can read your mind.

– Jacob Appelbaum (via haarberg)

(Source: voorwaarts, via shl333)

youmightfindyourself:

(CNN) — With little notice or fanfare, the digital world is fundamentally changing. What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone — where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog — is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data.

According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top 50 Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants.

The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.

The race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for Internet giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. As Chris Palmer of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained to me, “You’re getting a free service, and the cost is information about you. And Google and Facebook translate that pretty directly into money.”

While Gmail and Facebook may be helpful, free tools, they are also extremely effective and voracious extraction engines into which we pour the most intimate details of our lives.

As a business strategy, the Internet giants’ formula is simple: The more personally relevant their information offerings are, the more ads they can sell, and the more likely you are to buy the products they’re offering.

And the formula works. Amazon sells billions of dollars worth of merchandise by predicting what each customer is interested in and putting it in the front of the virtual store.

What the Internet is hiding from you

Up to 60% of Netflix’s rentals come from the personalized guesses it can make about each customer’s movie preferences — and at this point, Netflix can predict how much you’ll like a given movie within about half a star. Personalization is a core strategy for the top five sites on the Internet — Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Microsoft Live — as well as countless others.

It would be one thing if all this customization were just about targeted advertising. But personalization isn’t just shaping what we buy. For a quickly rising percentage of us, personalized news feeds like Facebook are becoming a primary news source. Thirty-six percent of Americans under 30 get their news through social networking sites.

And personalization is shaping how information flows far beyond Facebook, as websites from Yahoo News to the New York Times-funded startup News.me cater their headlines to our particular interests and desires. It’s influencing what videos we watch on YouTube and a dozen smaller competitors, and what blog posts we see.

It’s affecting whose e-mails we get, which potential mates we run into on OK Cupid, and which restaurants are recommended to us on Yelp — which means that personalization could easily have a hand not only in who goes on a date with whom, but in where they go and what they talk about. The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.

The basic code at the heart of the new Internet is pretty simple. The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem to like — the actual things you’ve done, or the things people similar to you like — and tries to extrapolate. Together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us — what I’ve come to call a filter bubble — which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information.

Of course, to some extent we’ve always consumed media that appealed to our interests and avocations and ignored much of the rest. But the filter bubble introduces three dynamics we’ve never dealt with before:

First, you’re alone in it. A cable channel that caters to a narrow interest (say, golf) has other viewers, with whom you share a frame of reference. But you’re the only person in your bubble. In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.

Second, the filter bubble is invisible. Most viewers of conservative or liberal news sources know when they’re going to a station curated to serve a particular political viewpoint. But Google’s agenda is opaque. Google doesn’t tell you who it thinks you are, or why it’s showing you the results you’re seeing. You don’t know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong — and you might not even know it’s making assumptions about you in the first place.

Finally, you don’t choose to enter the bubble. When you turn on Fox News or read The Nation, you’re making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It’s an active process, and just as you would if you put on tinted glasses, you can guess how the editors’ leaning shapes your perception. You don’t make the same kind of choice with personalized filters. They come to you — and because they drive up profits for the websites that use them, they’ll become harder and harder to avoid.

The consequences of living in a bubble are becoming clear. Left to their own devices, personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar, and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.

In the filter bubble, there’s less room for the chance encounters that bring insight and learning. Creativity is often sparked by the collision of ideas from different disciplines and cultures. Combine an understanding of cooking and physics, and you get the nonstick pan and the induction stovetop. But if Amazon thinks I’m interested in cookbooks, it’s not very likely to show me books about metallurgy. It’s not just serendipity that’s at risk.

By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn. If personalization is too acute, it could prevent us from coming into contact with the mind-blowing, preconception-shattering experiences and ideas that change how we think about the world and ourselves.

It’s not too late to make sure that personalization avoids these traps. But to shift its course, we need more people to become educated about how and why the Web is being edited for them, and we need the companies doing this filtering to show us not just what we’ll click most, but what we need to know. Otherwise, we could each find ourselves trapped in a bubble for one.

In defense of Privacy: The 20th Century’s Most Reclusive Authors

hotparade:

12:59 pm Thursday Jul 1, 2010 by Caroline Stanley

A few years back, when Denis Johnson refused to do press for his novel Tree of Smoke, which went on to win the National Book Award, it was considered newsworthy. (Note: He has since vowed “to learn how to interact with people.”) But in an age where widespread self-promotion (and in many cases, oversharing) is just 140 characters away, the idea of a reclusive author seems both counter-intuitive and strangely romantic. Inspired by Harper Lee’s recent chocolate-fueled assault by a British tabloid reporter, we decided to examine why a few authors of a certain age chose to shut themselves away from the media, and in some cases, from publication and society, as well.

Marcel Proust
The French novelist/social climber was a fixture of Paris salon society up until the turn of the century, but a series of personal events — his brother’s marriage and the deaths of both his parents — along with his deteriorating health and crippling asthma, turned Marcel Proust into a something of a recluse for the final 17 years of his life.

And we’re not just talking a reformed party boy. Proust, who soundproofed his studio with cork walls and installed layers of heavy curtains to keep the light out, would stay up for days on end working on his 3,200-page masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. When greeting guests, he was often unsure of whether it was day or night. As his writer friend Leon-Paul Fargue described him at the time: “He looked like a man who no longer lives outdoors or by day, a hermit who hasn’t emerged from his oak tree for a long time.”

Before he died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922, there was a three year period where Proust rarely (if ever) left his apartment. Dramatic, for sure, but he’s got nothing on Ms. Emily Dickinson, who didn’t leave her family compound for 20 years.

J.D. Salinger
When Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, it was an instant commercial success, and its slang-spouting central character, Holden Caufield, was catapulted into pop culture’s collective subconscious. This didn’t sit well with Salinger, who tired of fame almost instantly, requesting that his photo be removed from the dust jacket of future editions and his agent burn any fan mail. By 1953, he’d relocated from midtown New York City to New Hampshire — “a 90-acre compound on a wooded hillside in Cornish,” which he rarely left outside of the occasional vacation to Florida or back to NYC to meet with his editor friend William Shawn at the old Biltmore Hotel.

His output slowed, and then stopped. After Nine Stories came out in 1953, Salinger didn’t publish another book until 1961 — Franny and Zooey, a collection of work previously published in The New Yorker. (This is the same year that he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.) Another collection of New Yorker material, Raise High the Roof Beam, came out in 1963. His final new work to appear in print (at least of his own volition) was “Hapworth 16, 1924,” a 25,000-word story that ran in the June 19, 1965, issue of The New Yorker.

While many journalists sought him out over the years, Salinger only broke his silence over the issue of the unauthorized publication of his uncollected stories in 1974. In a conversation with a New York Times reporter, he explained: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. It’s peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure… I pay for this kind of attitude. I’m known as a strange, aloof kind of man.”

In 1984, Salinger reportedly turned down a request from British literary critic Ian Hamilton to pen his biography, saying he had “borne all the exploitation and loss of privacy I can possibly bear in a single lifetime.” Hamilton went ahead with the project, and the two ended up in court over the use of material from unpublished letters. Salinger won.

Salinger stuck to his code of privacy and seclusion even in death. When he passed away in January of this year, his literary agents said in a statement that “in keeping with his lifelong, uncompromising desire to protect and defend his privacy, there will be no service, and the family asks that people’s respect for him, his work and his privacy be extended to them, individually and collectively, during this time.” As he’d told them before, he believed that “he was in this world but not of it.”

Thomas Pynchon

While you could argue that Pynchon is just as much of a recluse as Salinger was, there’s definitely more of a sense of humor and some showmanship behind his man of mystery act. To wit, he has made three animated appearances on The Simpsons, once with a bag over his head to blurb a novel written by Marge (“Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!”).

Here’s what we know: Pynchon was born in 1937 on Long Island, New York. After a brief stint studying engineering physics at Cornell, he joined the Navy. When he returned to Cornell two years later he became an English major. Vladimir Nabokov was one of his professors. Pynchon graduated in 1959 and began work as a technical writer at Boeing, before eventually switching to fiction writing and moving to Mexico. His first novel, V, was published to critical acclaim in 1963, and he won the Faulkner Award. When Time sent a photographer to Mexico City to snap his picture, a mustachioed Pynchon reportedly hopped on a bus and rode off into the mountains.

That’s when biographical details get a little sketchy. Pynchon spent some time in both New York and Mexico before moving to California for most of the ’60s and early ’70s, where he lived in Berkeley, Manhattan Beach, and Aptos. When he won the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974, Pynchon sent comedian Irwin Corey to accept the prize on his behalf, and many people present mistakenly thought it was the author.

Rumors started to swirl about why Pynchon — at this point a literary superstar — wanted to remain anonymous. Some said he was J.D. Salinger. (Pynchon’s response? “Not bad. Keep trying.”) Some thought he was linked to Wanda Tinasky, a woman writing angry letters about other famous writers to a paper in Northern California. (Pynchon broke his media silence to tell CNN, “I did not write those letters. This has been a hoax that I’ve had nothing to do with. I’m sorry it’s gone on as long as it has.”)

Until New York Magazine tracked him down in 1996 (using an online service that cross-referenced credit card and telephone numbers), no reporter had interviewed Pynchon in four decades. By this time, he had been back in New York for six years or so, and embracing a very low-key lifestyle. According to the piece, “He shops at neighborhood stores. He lunches with other writers. He spends weekends in the countryside with his family.”

The following year, a CNN camera crew tracked him down near his Manhattan home, but then honored his request not to run the footage: “Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed… My belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters.’” On a similar note, the following year over 120 letters that Pynchon had written to his longtime agent from 1963 to 1982 were donated to the Morgan Library. At his request, they agreed to seal these letters until after his death.

The past decade has seen Pynchon opening up… a bit. There were those aforementioned appearances on The Simpsons. In 2006, he publicly came to the defense of his writer friend Ian McEwan, who had been accused of plagiarism. And just last year, he provided the voiceover in a trailer for his newest release, Inherent Vice. Or at least we think that it was him…

Cormac McCarthy

Can you really be considered a reclusive author if you agree to go on Oprah? We’re going to go with yes, but only if the last interview you did was with the New York Times over 15 years prior, and you’ve never done a TV appearance before.

In many ways, Cormac McCarthy’s career arc (and subsequent reclusive lifestyle) is the opposite of what we saw with Salinger; while his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, it wasn’t until the publication of National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award-winner All The Pretty Horses in 1992 that he received widespread recognition. In fact, that NYT profile — which McCarthy did only because his agent promised it would be the only interview he’d have to do for years — sums him up rather nicely.

“It would be hard to think of a major American writer who has participated less in literary life. He has never taught or written journalism, given readings, blurbed a book, granted an interview. None of his novels have sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover. For most of his career, he did not even have an agent. “

But it was really a pair of works that followed — No Country For Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) — that made McCarthy a household name. The former was adapted by the Coen Brothers into an Academy Award-winning film; the latter also became a film, but more importantly, took home the Pulitzer Prize for literature and was the April 2007 selection for Oprah’s Book Club. In his appearance on her show, McCarthy — who lives in Sante Fe with his wife and their young son — explained to Oprah that he prefers the company of scientists to other writers.

Harper Lee

It’s kind of funny that a writer who grew up as the best friend of Truman Capote would shy away from the limelight, but that’s just what Harper Lee did. Following the 1960 publication of To Kill A Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year, Lee avoided interviews, public appearances, and to a certain degree writing for public consumption, outside of a few short essays and an incomplete second novel called The Long Goodbye. (There was also talk in the mid-80s of a non-fiction book about an Alabama serial murderer, but that was reportedly put aside as well.)

As she explained in a 1964 interview with author Roy Newquist:

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.”

Lee broke her more than four decade long silence in 2006. For years she’d ventured out to the University of Alabama for the presentation of annual awards to high school students for a To Kill a Mockingbird essay contest; this time around she agreed to do an interview with the New York Times, but would only talk about the ceremony itself. The following year, Lee was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.

Most recently, Lee — who at 84, is still said to handwrite polite refusals for interview requests  – was accosted in Monroeville by a journalist from The Daily Mail bearing a box of chocolates. Her totally amazing response to the invasion of privacy: “We’re just going to feed the ducks, but call me the next time you are here. We have a lot of history here. You will enjoy it.”

Best polite fuck you ever.

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"The riots are underway. It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent."
"

It’s not just the state. If it wanted to, Google could overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt to destroy every marriage in America.

I love Google. And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I’m terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point people are going to realize that Google has everything on everyone. Most of all, they can see what questions you’re asking, in real time. Quite literally, they can read your mind.

"
In defense of Privacy: The 20th Century’s Most Reclusive Authors

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