When readers express a desire for “truth” in memoir, they generally mean they want it only to include the falsehoods we have collectively agreed to accept — the stability of memory, of personhood, of childhood dialogue perfectly recalled. Memoirists, striving toward this view of truth, often neglect the literary demands of self-characterization. One needn’t build a character; one is simply oneself, however shrouded in self-delusion.
This is decidedly not the situation we find ourselves in with Barrett Brown’s extraordinary new book, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.” Brown is an activist associated with the hacker group Anonymous, and a political prisoner recently denied asylum in Britain, all of which sounds a bit dreary until we hear tell of it through Brown’s unhinged self-regard.
“The institution of bed-makery was among the first clues I’d encountered as a child that the society I’d been born into was a haphazard and psychotic thing against which I must wage eternal war,” he writes early on. “There was no reason, and could be none, that a set of sheets must be ritually configured each morning before the affairs of man can truly begin.”
A “machine” that focuses attention on little-known social issues, Anonymous has gone after the Church of Scientology, Koch Industries, websites hosting child pornography and the Westboro Baptist Church. The public tends to be confused by nebulous digital activities, so it was, in the collective’s heyday, helpful to have Brown act as a translator between the hackers and mainstream journalists.
“The year 2011 ended as it began,” he writes, “with a sophisticated hack on a state-affiliated corporation that ostensibly dealt in straightforward security and analysis while secretly engaging in black ops campaigns against activists who’d proven troublesome to powerful clients.”
This particular corporation was Stratfor, a company that spied on activists for the government. Shortly after the attack, the F.B.I. showed up at Brown’s mother’s house, where he was, and asked whether he had laptops to surrender. He declined; his mother hid his laptop on top of some pans in a kitchen cabinet. The F.B.I. returned, just before Brown was scheduled to appear on CNN, and dozens of agents searched the house. His mother cried.
Brown waited for the feds to come back and drag him to jail. He also says he tried to get off suboxone in order to avoid the painful possibility of prison withdrawal, and stopped taking Paxil, inducing a manic state, all of which is given as explanation for his regrettable next move, which was to set up a camera and start talking. The feds had threatened his mother, he told the internet, and in response he was threatening Robert Smith, the lead agent on his case. He found himself in custody the same night.
Brown was then subjected to the kind of nonsense the Department of Justice is prone to inflicting on those involved in shadowy internet activities that, in fact, almost no one in the legal process understands. He was charged with participating in the hack of Stratfor, though he was not really involved and cannot code, and although the whole thing was organized by an F.B.I. informant.
Brown had also retweeted a Fox News host’s call to murder Julian Assange; the prosecution presented this as if he were himself calling for the murder of Assange. But generally, Brown’s primary victim is himself. “My thirst for glory and hatred for the state,” he writes, “were incompatible with an orthodox criminal defense, in which the limiting of one’s sentence is the sole objective.”
In his cell, with an eraser-less pencil he needs a compliant guard to repeatedly sharpen, he writes “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.” His mother types it up; The Intercept publishes.
He develops the character he will play in his memoir: a self-aware narcissist and addict. He wins a National Magazine Award, and is especially pleased that his column “Please Stop Sending Me Jonathan Franzen Novels,” wins while Franzen is in attendance.
While Brown is in jail reading letters from the kinds of people who write to people in jail, things go awry. “Donald Trump was about to take office, having been elected president with the assistance of my chief enemy, Palantir founder Peter Thiel, and my chief ally, Julian Assange.” Brown breaks with Assange, and loses associates.
Many, many people disappoint him. A member of Anonymous reveals himself to be a Nazi. After Brown is released, The Intercept announces that it is closing down the Snowden archive, and Brown burns his National Magazine Award certificate in protest.
The reader may be forgiven for losing the thread. This is a book in which the stakes are both incredibly high (a state throws you into prison) and very low (a “Hobbity-looking” fellow writes a piece you don’t like in Gizmodo). Brown’s looping, musical sentences are flirtations, bending reason toward satire, hovering always on the fine edge between absurdity and profundity, as if Thomas De Quincey (another fan of opium-derived compounds) had taken upon himself the problems of the post-9/11 military-industrial complex.
The state is an afterthought here — a litany of absurdist horrors too stupid to appall. Of course Brown would be denied his constitutional right to a lawyer after a thin-skinned prison official decided to punish him for talking to a journalist. Of course Brown, newly released from prison, would find himself holding a “Cops Kill” sign that somehow gets rearranged to “Kill Cops” such that he is once again incarcerated.
Brown plays up the impetuous narcissism for comedic effect, but how many revolutionaries, softened by history into noble bores, were precisely the self-promoting, self-centering semi-narcissists their societies needed at the time?
We’re left with a man who refuses to look away from the deep structure of the world, an unstable position from which there is no sanctuary. “My Glorious Defeats” is deranged, hyperbolic and as true a work as I have read in a very long time.
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