Gonzo journalist Barrett Brown’s memoir is a piquant account of the rise of hacktivism

Gonzo journalist and inveterate anti-establishment troublemaker Barrett Brown is putting his talents to the test and enjoying the admiration of the public. In his native Texas, he is serving time in federal prison for a variety of serious crimes.

The year is 2013, and Brown’s adventures include helping the hacktivists of Anonymous publicly expose private U.S. intelligence operatives involved in Deep State abuses of power at a time of growing concerns about Big Brother surveillance.

Brown did this in audacious fashion – often in a drug-altered state, chatting with executives whose hacked emails were posted online while taking opiate substitution drugs. Brown was in withdrawal from antidepressants and opioids, he later testified, when he threatened an FBI agent in a video posted to YouTube.

“I wanted to become famous by disrupting things,” Brown writes in his highly anticipated memoir, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.”

Mainstream press coverage of the time of Brown’s prosecution was inconsistent and, at times, downright inaccurate. The book not only attempts to set the record straight, but also chronicles a pivotal moment in online activism, and does so with no holds barred.

Although Brown was not a hacker, he was a prominent actor/provocateur in the rise of hacktivism, a powerful form of political activism, driven by organizations like WikiLeaks, that used the internet to expose abuses and inspire change. This included supporting the popular uprising in Tunisia in 2011.

These machinations preceded Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, in which he revealed the extensive and unauthorized surveillance of the US population by the National Security Agency (NSA), thus dispelling any doubts about the legality of the revelations.

Brown is a showman, a gifted writer in the tradition of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. He also has a talent for self-destruction and struggles with heroin addiction and depression. He is currently in the UK, fighting for political asylum in court.

Brown, who describes himself as an “anarchist revolutionary with a taste for rebellion,” became a cause célèbre for press freedom advocates and a hero of the radical “Show It to a Man” movement a decade ago.

The majority of the charges he faced in 2013 were baseless computer crimes and absurd violations. Organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Electronic Frontier Foundation insisted that the charges be dropped—and they were.

But Brown had gotten in the way of too many people in the Justice Department and the FBI. He pleaded guilty, including to obstructing a federal investigation, and ended up spending four years in prison. He had to pay over $800,000 in restitution.

His escapades also included working as a prison activist and later exposing alleged racist misconduct by the police. Among his observations from his experiences with Aryan gangs behind bars, he included: “An American prison is many things, including a Nazi training camp.”

Before his conviction in 2015, Brown was subject to a judicial news gag order for a period of time because he refused to stop talking to reporters about his case.

So he began writing a series of prison articles, including a scathing critique of novelist Jonathan Franzen. Some of the articles won him a National Magazine Award.

“The public wants to be entertained. And unlike most wrongfully persecuted political dissidents around the world, I happen to be an entertainer,” Brown writes about his formula for success.

In fact, Brown’s personality in these articles is pretty much what we find in the memoir – “charmingly self-deprecating, winkingly narcissistic, comprehensively self-aware – and even candid.” Publications that bore his name included The Guardian, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post and The Intercept.

But the fun ends after Brown’s release from prison in 2016. Some former close allies become “despised enemies.” A close associate dies of an overdose. An ambitious online project to research and expose abuses – Pursuance – fizzles out.

This is far from a happy ending story. After alienating many who once held him in high esteem, Brown attempted suicide in 2022. and alerted the world on Twitter.

In an email exchange this week, Brown said he was now “actually quite happy in day-to-day life,” but added: “I don’t read anymore and I can’t bring myself to write, which hurts a lot.”

The last chapter of the memoirs was difficult to write.

“Much of what I discovered over the last decade, as it became my task to fully and accurately discern all this, has hurt me deeply,” he writes.

The “vast and serious network of noble saboteurs” that encouraged Brown, in NBC News’ words at the time, to act as a “rebellious and cocky 29-year-old college dropout” who described himself as Anonymous’s chief strategist, no longer exists.

This reviewer will not delve further into the drama of Brown’s troubled legacy and current legal situation. Between the memoir and the ongoing online feuds, there is much more to come.

Pretty much everything is available on the Internet.

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