The Secret Life is a book about identity, secrecy, surveillance and the relationship between the individual, the state and technology at a time when information and data has become the de facto currency of Late Capitalism. It is structured in three long essays, versions of which have appeared in the London Review of Books. Through Julian Assange, Satashi Nakamoto - the much mythologised founder of Bitcoin - and Ronald Pinn, an identity constructed by O'Hagan himself, what emerges in The Secret Life is a uniquely intelligent book about the criminal mind and collective responsibility in the twenty-first century.