My Glorious Defeats
Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Barrett Brown went to prison for four years for leaking intelligence documents. He was released to Trump’s America. This is his story.
After a series of escapades both online and off that brought him in and out of 4chan forums, the halls of power, heroin addiction, and federal prison, Barrett Brown is a free man. He was arrested for his part in an attempt to catalog, interpret, and disseminate top-secret documents exposed in a security lapse by the intelligence contractor Stratfor in 2011. An influential journalist who is also active in the hacktivist collective Anonymous, Brown recounts exploits from a life shaped by an often self-destructive drive to speak truth to power. With inimitable wit and style, palpable anger and conviction, he exposes the incompetence and injustices that plague media and politics, reflects on the successes and failures of the transparency movement, and shows the way forward in harnessing digital communication tools for collective action.
But My Glorious Defeats is more than just the tale of the clever and hilarious Brown; it’s also a rigorously researched dissection of our decaying institutions and of human nature itself. As Brown makes clear, institutions are made of people—people with personal ambitions and personal vices—and it is people, just like him, just like us, who hold power. As optimistic as it is heartbreaking, My Glorious Defeats is an entertaining and illuminating manual for insurgency in the information age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Magazine Award winner Brown recalls his war against the surveillance state in this often-brilliant if sometimes scattershot debut. He begins the account with his days doing "propaganda strategy" for the underground hacker collective Anonymous. In 2012, he was arrested and prosecuted on federal charges of being an accessory to the theft of five million emails from the strategic intelligence firm Stratfor, threatening an FBI agent, and obstructing a search. Much of the narrative follows Brown's trial and four-year incarceration in Texas. Later chapters describe his feuds with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his prosecution in Britain for holding a "Kill Cops" sign at a protest. Brown's captivating prose mixes comic grandiloquence ("Had I not filled teenage journals with inane yet consistent juvenilia to the effect that I would be Caesar or nothing?") with Hunter S. Thompsonesque debauchery ("There are few things in life more hellish than having to explain the exact nature of your role in an anarchist cyberinsurgency to Michael Isikoff while in the opening phases of dope sickness"). Brown superbly depicts the injustices of his prison stint, but his labyrinthine rehash of his adventures in cyberanarchism can be difficult to follow. This works better as a polemic than a personal history.
