Until the day he was outed, the most influential commentator on South Korea's economy lived the life of a nobody. Park Dae-Sung owned a small apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of Seoul and freelanced part-time at a telecom company. Thirty years old, he still hoped to earn a four-year degree in economics. In the mornings, he would bicycle to the public library to study for the university entrance exam. His standard uniform was slacks, loafers, and wrinkle-free button-down shirts, as though he were going to work in an office. But with his slightly chubby moon face, glasses, and neatly parted hair, he easily blended in among the rows of students. While they worked through school assignments, he immersed himself in the text of his chosen profession.
In the evenings, Park would go online, frittering away the hours like millions of other geeks. He often played the simulation game Capitalism II, where he'd assume the role of a blue-chip investor, closing million-dollar deals and speculating on skyscrapers. Nothing that he did earned him any attention.
Then, in March 2008, Park opened an account on South Korea's popular Daum Agora forum. Here, he decided, he would call himself Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom, and write exclusively on economics, drawing on both public reports and his years in the stacks poring over Adam Smith and Joseph Stiglitz. Affecting the effortless command of a seasoned investor, he strove to project the authority that had eluded him in real life. The world economy is in the midst of collapse, he warned, so pay your debts and stock up on noodles and drinkable water. He made pronouncements on when to buy or sell a home, exchange Korean won for dollars, and pull out of the financial markets altogether.
As the financial crisis deepened, events confirmed Minerva's prophecies all too terribly. By early fall, each new dispatch would rise into Daum Agora's top five headlines, carried by a tide of user votes and drawing hundreds of thousands of pageviews. South Korea's daily press began publicizing Minerva's predictions and speculating about his identity. The more the newspapers tried to pierce the veil of Minerva, the more their readers devoured his posts, until it seemed the goddess was giving marching orders to the entire economy.
The post that would bring Minerva worldwide fame appeared on August 25, 2008, under the florid title "Overture to the 2008 Financial Wars: Apocalypse Now in Korea." It attacked a plan, floated three days before by the Korea Development Bank, to purchase a large chunk of Lehman Brothers. Minerva held forth at length on the stupidity of this idea, given that Lehman was groaning under $50 billion in debt. If KDB invested in Lehman, Minerva wrote, the people of Korea stood to lose as much as $80 billion. Once again, his pessimism proved to be deadly accurate. KDB and Lehman were unable to agree on a sale price. A few weeks later, Lehman filed for bankruptcy. The newspapers hailed Minerva as "the Internet economic president." The prediction, Park reflected later, was all in the data: "I looked at the mortgage market in America, the oil market, the economic cycle, the circulation of capital. I analyzed all of these and determined the result."
Under the cloak of anonymity, Park believed he could insulate his real life from the adulation surrounding his online presence. Minerva had no published email address, and Park read only a few of the hundreds of comments that accumulated beneath his posts. Wearing the mask of Minerva allowed him to set aside the polite restraint that characterized his personal emails. As Minerva, he wrote with fiery bombast, comparing the gravity of the crisis to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Minerva's ascendance, he now believes, was due to the "pure purpose" of his writing — the sincere desire to help his readers ride out the crisis. "Some people use the Internet for money or fame," he said later. "I didn't."
When the media began hailing Minerva as an oracle, Park did not revel in the glory. If anything, awareness of his growing authority made him take more care with his predictions. He worried about leading his frightened countrymen astray. And as weeks flew by and Minerva's name towered in the headlines, Park began to fear that he might be unmasked.
Names are supposed to function like credit ratings: one account per person; one person per account; the account sticks with you for life. Good credit builds up gradually, and a few bad decisions can undo years of steady responsibility. Tell some lies or make wild predictions and soon no one will listen to you. For those who already hold authority, the best way to keep it is to speak carefully and conservatively. This is why the people we listen to most closely in times of economic uncertainty — the central bankers and finance ministers — have trouble warning of impending crises until they are obvious to just about everyone. The authorities have too much at stake to risk being wrong.
Writing as a Roman goddess, Park discovered the power of taking on another name. Had he posted under his own, no one would have paid attention. As Minerva, however, he could easily be mistaken for a powerful official who had assumed a pseudonym for an entirely different reason: to speak the truth without imperiling his career. Park did nothing to discourage this inference, referring, for example, to his extensive Wall Street experience. The press couldn't resist trying to puzzle out his identity.
Anonymous Internet posters are often denounced as hit-and-run artists who intimidate the polite and the sincere. Indeed, online spaces that are rich in anonymity and poor in moderation risk devolving into a cesspool of trolls, flacks, and flame warriors. But here and there, the Internet elevates anonymous voices who speak unvarnished truths that would have gone unrecognized had they appeared below their authors' real names. Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden, TheFunded's (formerly anonymous) Adeo Ressi, and the irascible Bike Snob NYC are all credits to the equalizing power of anonymity.
This phenomenon predates the Internet by centuries. In 16th-century England, a band of heretics moved an illegal printing press around the countryside, publishing a series of anticlerical pamphlets under the name Martin Marprelate. In Rome around the same time, the Italian public took to criticizing the powerful in long, humorous, unsigned verse, surreptitiously slapped up on the base of a statue in the Piazza Pasquino, a tradition that continues to this day. Two hundred years later, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison aired early arguments for the founding of the US in the Federalist papers under the handle Publius. The last time the US fell under a Minerva-scale pseudonymous sensation was in 1996, when Joe Klein's Primary Colors — a novel signed Anonymous — satirized the presidential campaign of Bill Clinton (in the guise of silver-tongued governor Jack Stanton). The narrator nailed such particulars as Clinton's "furrowed brow, pouty-mouthed, elementary-school-penitent look." The book sold about 3 million copies.
Park updated this tradition for the Internet, where archival facts are available on demand, the stream of international news never stops, and sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome make anonymity available to anyone with an ax to grind, a secret to share, or a document to leak. Like the pamphleteers of earlier days, Minerva established himself as a consistent character on the public stage. His writing was distinctive enough for readers to feel they knew him, while the vagueness of his identity allowed them to idealize him as a sage who would guide them through the crisis. The Minerva case is a reminder that anonymity has uses beyond the incognito bashing of enemies. A carefully crafted pseudonymous voice can seem to come from a hidden spring of wisdom — enunciating what everyone wants to hear and what no one is willing to say. But the illusion is fragile. When the person behind the name is revealed, everything comes crashing down.
The first sign of trouble came when Park's phone rang in early October. It was a representative from Daum asking if he would be willing to speak with a journalist. Park hung up in a panic. He had told no one about his secret, not even his sister. But he had submitted his national ID and phone numbers when setting up the Minerva account. So someone at Daum, he assumed, must have handed it over. Then, a few weeks later, the government's finance minister reportedly urged Minerva to step forward so that he could correct the blogger's faulty notions about the country's financial policy (the minister later denied having made such a statement). When this invitation went unanswered, the attorney general announced an investigation into Minerva's true identity.
Fearing exposure, Park began to scale back his blogging. "I will shut my mouth because the nation ordered me to be silent," he wrote. A few days into 2009 he posted an epic farewell, which he hoped would cement Minerva's legacy. Entitled "We Must Rely on Hope," it contained fantastical confessions about Minerva's life as a selfish financier and begged his readers to turn away from a life of greed: "Devils finance capitalism. Don't live like me. Please take care of your family and yourself ... Rescue yourself from money. It's made of paper and ink." His farewell ends, "I apologize again. I'm really sorry. I can only say sorry, nothing else."
Two days later, Park was packing up his cell phone and laptop, getting ready to meet some friends, when the doorbell rang. Looking through the peephole he saw nothing. Whoever it was had covered the lens. Tentatively, he cracked the door open. Four plainclothes investigators pushed past him, displaying a warrant.
"Would you come with us?" one asked. "We need to ask you some questions."
Even after Minerva had become a regular topic on the evening news, a part of Park continued to believe the world of Daum and the world of his apartment would remain forever separate. Now they had collided, and the police were gathering up his two computers, his external hard drive, his CDs and books. Soon the terrified Park was on his way to an interview room near the city courthouse.
"Are you Minerva?" a detective asked.
"Yes," said Park Dae-Sung, for the first time. "I am Minerva."
The more notorious a pseudonymous writer becomes, the more fame itself begins to threaten the author's anonymity. Journalist Joe Klein repeatedly denied any connection to Primary Colors, at one point swearing on his professional credibility that he was not the book's author. He kept up these repudiations for months until a reporter from The Washington Post got his hands on a manuscript and established that notes made on the pages matched Klein's handwriting. When the truth came out, many journalists were outraged. Of course, the fallout can be much worse: The printer who produced Martin Marprelate's pamphlets in the 1500s was hanged.
Today anonymous dissenters are unlikely to be punished in democratic countries. But the law in South Korea makes it easy for the government to unmask troublesome writers. Every account on Daum and other major sites is associated with a national ID number. In Minerva's case, Daum promptly handed over his IP address, which led the police directly to Park's door.
Even without government intervention, most well-known pseudonymous writers are eventually exposed. Daniel Lyons' Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog followed a classic rise-and-fall story line: a moderate stream of attention boiling into a torrent of public speculation about who was behind it, and then a complete loss of interest after the mystery was solved. (Lyons is now a columnist for Newsweek.)
Still, a few pseudonymous writers have escaped exposure. The most prominent is probably Junius, who penned a series of popular open letters that ran in the Public Advertiser in late-18th-century England. Written in disguised handwriting, the letters contain a mixture of musings on the rights of man and blistering attacks on the corrupt ministers of King George III. Whoever Junius was, he took his anonymity to the grave. Almost 240 years later, historians still haven't settled the question of the vindictive scribe's true identity.
Occasionally, a writer can export his credibility from his online persona to his real one. In early 2008, Nate Silver had a double identity, analyzing baseball statistics under his real name and polling data under the handle Poblano. When Poblano's predictions began to gain a following, he revealed himself, noting, "It just ain't very professional to keep referring to yourself as a chili pepper." Soon his FiveThirtyEight became one of the most prominent political blogs in the US.
Silver, the great exception, took control of his own outing, never lying to the public about his true identity and possessing real credentials to back up his virtual authority. His pseudonymity worked as marketing, but the world probably would have paid attention had he written under his own name. Park, on the other hand, was totally dependent on being unknown.
At their heart, most pseudonymous identities are collaborations between the author, who provides the outline of a persona, and the audience, which fills in the blanks. The result is a sort of virtual superhero, an oracle more accurate than any mortal could hope to be. Compared to the elusive mastermind of the collective imagination, the real author inevitably disappoints.
For 103 days, the South Korean government held Park in a 50-square-foot cell at a Seoul detention center. Interrogators asked about his family, whether he had a girlfriend, whether he was a spy. He tried to keep calm, meeting with his volunteer legal team and studying the writings of the early-20th-century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. "I felt so isolated," he says. "They accused me of selling out my country. No! I'm not a spy. I wanted to help through my criticism. I had thought that South Korea was a democratic country. I felt as though my nation betrayed me."
Then, in April, when the bedraggled young Park anxiously took a seat in the courtroom, Minerva's world collapsed. Now the whole country could see that the brilliant financier they had been betting their livelihoods on was an impostor, the sort of schlumpy nobody who might show up to install your cable. In the glare of public scrutiny, Park not only lost his authority, he began to lose his sense of self.
At trial, the government argued that false information published by Park had rattled currency markets and panicked thousands of citizens into selling off dollars, at a cost to the government of $2.2 billion. This, asserted the prosecution, violated a law forbidding the use of a computer to "spread a false rumor maliciously intending to damage the public interest." They asked for a prison sentence of 18 months.
Among the experts who testified on Park's behalf was Kim Tae-Dong, an economics professor at Seoul's Sungkyunkwan University who once served as an adviser to South Korea's president. "Minerva is a much better teacher than I am," Kim said later. "His writing is so easy for ordinary people to understand. I was surprised about his lack of a formal economics background." The judge agreed with Kim's argument: Even if the Minerva posts about the government's policies were false, Park sincerely believed them. Park was acquitted of all charges.
Waiting outside the prison gates were his mother, his legal retinue, and news photographers. But Park's legal vindication didn't solve his problems. For one, South Korean law allowed the government to appeal the case in the hopes of prosecuting Park again. Worse, media ambushes left him fearful of returning home in the days and weeks after his release. "He's been anxious since he went to jail," one of his attorneys says. "He's been forgetting things. It's hard for him to communicate." Prosecutors still had his computers and hard drive. He hadn't been blogging or writing email or even answering his phone.
After his trial, Park likened his situation to that of a soldier who had fought in Iraq: "Losing Minerva ... it's like post-traumatic stress disorder. Consciously, I think I'm all right. But unconsciously, I know something is wrong. I haven't been writing at all. I'm feeling a lot of mental pressure. I had to stop writing not because I wanted to stop but because they forced me to stop. Now I'm having trouble starting again. It feels like I lost a part of myself."
When Park lost his anonymity, he lost his credibility as well. Rather than accept that the ramblings of a self-educated freelancer were superior to their daily newspapers, most of the public wrote off the cult of Minerva as a fad. Daum's hardcore readership became consumed by conspiracy theories about the identity of the real Minerva, who must have set up Park through some Byzantine plot.
A few weeks after his release, the apartment where Park invented Korea's foremost economic authority looked immaculate. A wall calendar was X'ed up through January 7, the day of his arrest. On the wall above the desk in his bedroom were no stock indexes or candlestick charts, just inspirational magazine clippings — images of cars, sneakers, Jesus nailed to the cross, and ads for MBA programs. One read: must be a success. Hanging on the wall was an empty diploma frame. "It doesn't mean anything," Park said flatly. He added, "I used to have friends, but not since my arrest. The police called them up and now they're frightened."
From time to time, a grateful reader who saw his picture in the newspaper or online recognizes him on the street. One woman even sent him a thank-you box of ginseng, in care of his attorneys. His plans are unclear. He mentions fantasies of fleeing his homeland for somewhere that would appreciate him. This fall, he wrote periodically about personal finance for a local newspaper. Next he plans to write a book. His predictions are more conservative now, though, and the earth-shattering power of a national following has not returned. The government may have failed to obtain a conviction, but in unmasking Park it succeeded in destroying most of Minerva's public standing. Prosecutors will have another chance to put Park behind bars this winter, when their appeal reaches South Korea's second-highest court.
It is very difficult to find anyone in the South Korean government willing to talk about Minerva. The prosecutors say they can't discuss the case until the appeal is over. Two spokespeople for the Korea Communication Standards Commission explain that they weren't directly involved with the case, though they do have as many as 50 employees watching Daum and other sites at any given time. "We have to protect our children and our public," one of them explains. "That's the government's job, to maintain a nice, clean Internet." A spokesperson for the Ministry of Strategy and Finance says Park was beneath their notice. "If his theories were made by a publicly recognized institute, we might have some comment. And it is not appropriate for the government to comment on forecasts published by citizens on the Internet." Months before, the head of the same ministry had argued that Minerva's influence over exchange rates had cost billions. Now, however, the government had nothing to fear. Once again, as it had been during his whole previous life, Park could be treated like any other nobody.
Mattathias Schwartz (www.mattathiasschwartz.com) was the founding editor of The Philadelphia Independent.
