My Glorious Failure: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymousby Barrett Brown, MCD, 416 pages, $30
Seven years after his release from federal prison, Barrett Brown has published a memoir about his time in the company of the hacker group Anonymous and his time in prison, along with an updated list of everyone he now despises. Lest the social media star’s followers become transparency martyrs, thinking they’ve heard it all before, My Glorious Failure: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous Digging deeper into Brown’s psyche than anything he’s revealed before.
To wit: “The institution of bed-making was the first clue I encountered as a child that the society into which I was born was a haphazard and crazy society against which I must wage an eternal war.”
my glorious failure Sometimes it reads like HL Mencken and Emma Goldman had a child and raised it with Ritalin and Leroy Jenkins memes. Asking someone to fold his sheets “within a margin of error of one inch,” as Brown and other inmates were forced to do at the Federal Correctional Facility in Fort Worth, is “inherently totalitarian.” Elsewhere, he wrote that if making one’s bed was indeed “conducive to a man’s character,” “then the United States Army, in which this tradition reaches the pinnacle of madness, would send out one after another composed of super-enlightened scholarly knights.” brigade, instead of some people yelling at me for where I put my cup.
The book isn’t just a clever screed aimed at the corners of the hospital, but at the same time, it’s not. Brown, a journalist embedded in Anonymous, was eventually convicted of hacking-related crimes after his fellow journalists infiltrated the servers of a private security company called Stratfor. trace your own past.
His story begins in 2006, when the then 26-year-old was immersed in the raw slime of internet spam: message boards 4chan and 7 sauce and the Wiki Drama Encyclopedia of Parodies and Memes. Brown saw the incredible devastation these communities could wreak when members united around a cause, and he “became obsessed with the question of what would happen when these people realized what they were capable of.”
The first signs came in 2008, when Anonymous launched a campaign against the Church of Scientology, which was fighting to suppress a leaked video of actor and church member Tom Cruise gushing The most secret and sacred theology of the organization. The church used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a crackdown to remove the video, angering some 4chan village elders who maintain their own servers. In November 2008, this 4chan fork launched ominous video The title on YouTube is A message to Scientology, one of the digital voices promised to “expell you from the internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its current form.” The video made national headlines and prompted protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks to gather outside Scientology buildings around the world.
In 2010, Anonymous hackers breached hundreds of Australian government servers in an effort to prevent the passage of internet censorship laws. Shortly thereafter, an article exist huffington post “Reveals an unusual level of understanding of Anonymous.” The author, of course, is Brown, who speculates in the article that “Anonymous” may usurp “the institution of the nation-state” as “the most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.” ”.
The chief architect of the anti-Scientology movement brought Brown into the organization’s inner circle, where Brown made himself useful in the only way he knew how: hacking.
A reasonable person might conclude that Brown came to serve as a spokesperson for Anonymous because he is well-liked by those who organize the movement and often strategizes with them on public and private channels. Communicate their views through cable news and promote other journalists to highlight their accomplishments. However, Brown has refused to accept the label for years, insisting that Anonymous cannot be led or represented. Therefore, anyone who identifies him as a “zit” is an incompetent media norm, a corrupt media norm, or a mean pig who wants to take away Brown’s freedom. The only exception was Brown, who noted in the book that he often introduced himself in “conversations and meetings” by “listing a mutually exclusive set of characteristics” that appeared in media reports about him.
“As to the truth about these and other matters,” Brown’s standard talk goes, “I’m going to be coy right now, and whatever I may be, I’m definitely a show-off.”
Brown is so resistant to external governance that he cannot distinguish between unprincipled behavior (such as the surveillance and reputation-sabotaging activities of security firms hacked by fellow hackers) and illegal behavior (the hacking itself). This border blindness led Brown to assist Stratfor’s hackers, which got him indicted. When his and his mother’s home was raided, this border blindness led him to post a deranged video on YouTube in which he threatened to ruin an FBI agent’s life.
The video led to his arrest. In the ensuing protracted battle with federal prosecutors, Brown’s rocky relationship with Anonymous and his own revolutionary rhetoric were used to send him to prison.
Brown’s life story might be different if he didn’t seem to believe that whatever rules he chose to break shouldn’t exist, whether it was Second Life’s policy against harassing other players, federal prison drug bans, or the U.K.’s “Calling the police” laws.
Then again, his remarkable tolerance for the consequences of his arrogance is also Brown’s greatest asset. Brown served pretrial and post-conviction sentences in several facilities, seemingly entering special housing units at each stop—usually to nonviolently flaunt the rules, but sometimes just to tell his kidnappers he was better than others. Be more aware of your rights.
Many white-collar criminals would keep their heads down and shut up if they were in Brown’s shoes, but he was a civil disobedient, the equivalent of a civil disobedient. ass character, throwing himself into the arms of his country, regardless of how bad things might get. Like the scarred, toothless regulars ass After a 14-year “burn” campaign, the Browns franchise is looking decidedly worse. Still, he couldn’t stop prevaricating.
After contacting dallas observer Brown comments on his England conviction responded “The British are a disgusting, annoying people, and we should eliminate them after destroying Germany.” He then applied for asylum in the United Kingdom, but the British rejected the application in February 2024.
Reading the final chapters of his memoir is like flipping through basic cable channels in the middle of a workday: everyone is trash. JRR Tolkien, Bob Woodward, Julian Assange, and a long list of cable news anchors, bloggers, and middle- and upper-level executives in the private surveillance industry—all of which, in Brown’s view, are just garbage .
Brown has been addressing some of these issues for more than a decade. For what purpose? In an unintentionally clarifying passage, Brown sarcastically noted that he had “some run-ins with the law” and that “since then, I have devoted myself primarily to recording and re-recording this story in order to present certain truths about our civilization.” , and point the way to the future.” A solution to the problem described, and also entertaining because people enjoy it. “
my glorious failure Undoubtedly interesting. But these solutions seem to have been cut for space.
