The Hank Show

Reviews

"Beautifully reported, utterly fascinating, and often chilling, The Hank Show is the story of the brilliant madman who helped give computers the power to track each of us through our daily lives, or as Funk calls it, 'the power to know everything about someone without actually knowing them at all.'”
—Bethany McLean, co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room

"McKenzie Funk chronicles the birth of Big Data through the story of Hank Asher, who may be the most important person you've never heard of. The Hank Show is deeply researched, thoroughly entertaining, and totally terrifying. Your every move is, indeed, being tracked."
—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

“This is one of those rare and mind-blowing books that changes how you see the world. McKenzie Funk has pulled back the curtain on a global surveillance machine that watches all of us, every day, around the clock. The most fascinating part is the actual wizard behind the curtain, Hank Asher himself, whose unbelievable life becomes more wild and fascinating with each turn of the page. Funk is an absolute master of nonfiction narrative, and here he is telling the story for our age.”
—Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money

"The Hank Show is my favorite kind of book, basically a magic trick: A wildly entertaining, wind-in-your-hair yarn about a specific American weirdo that builds into something big and dark and urgent, a map of the hidden forces that constrain our freedoms and limit our lives. Funk's brilliant account stands alongside The Soul of a New Machine and Hackers as a classic of technology reporting. This may be the greatest Florida Man story ever told."
—Jason Fagone, bestselling author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes

"The Hank Show is so much fun to read that you can almost forget at times how frightening it is. That's OK—the surveillance systems Hank Asher helped create won't forget you. The book is thrilling, bracing, and brilliantly reported. McKenzie Funk has given us a truly original—and necessary—story of the end of privacy."
—Jeff Sharlet, New York Times bestselling author of The Undertow

"This is the story of a half-mad master of data, a crazed genius who figured out early on how to sneak into the lives of others on a grand scale. Hank Asher could be the hero of a science fiction fantasy. But in a world in which everything can be traded for money, his methods were real, legal, and very profitable—and ultimately superseded by a corporate America whose cupidity is even more unrestrained than he was. Funk’s research is impressive, the story fascinating and dreadful."
—Tracy Kidder, author of Rough Sleepers and The Soul of a New Machine