My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

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Description

After a series of escapades both online and offline that brought him in and out of the halls of power, heroin addiction, and federal prison, Barrett Brown is a free man, at least for the time being. In 2012 he was prosecuted for his part in an attempt to catalog, interpret, and disseminate top-secret documents exposing a series of intelligence-community plots against reporters and the public. In My Glorious Defeats, Brown, an influential journalist who eventually became active in the hacktivist collective Anonymous, 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 corruption among press, police, and politicos, reflects on the successes and failures of the transparency movement, and provides a dispassionate overview of a newly leaked FBI campaign that has prompted him to seek political asylum from the United States while continuing to leak its secrets to the world. But this is more than just the tale of one man's delirious corkscrew of an international roller-coaster ride, by turns exasperating, terrifying, hilarious, and self-skewering. It's also a personal and incisive dissection of our decaying social and political institutions in this most tumultuous and explosive of times. My Glorious Defeats is an entertaining and illuminating manual for insurgency in the information age.

Reviews

"Extraordinary.... Deranged, hyperbolic and as true a work as I have read in a very long time... Barrett Brown's looping, musical sentences are flirtations, bending reason toward satire, hovering always on the fine edge between absurdity and profundity."
--Kerry Howley, The New York Times Book Review

"A lively prison memoir from the cyber age."
--Kirkus Review (starred review)

"Brown's captivating prose mixes comic grandiloquence with Hunter S. Thompsonesque debauchery."
--Publishers Weekly

"A masterful foray into the darkest recesses of media, intel, and disinfo that somehow manages to be as hilarious as it is frightening. It's plain to see why such lengths have been taken to silence the author. Barrett Brown is our Hunter S. Thompson."
--Frankie Boyle, author of A Short History of the Apocalypse and My Shit Life So Far

"Funny, infuriating, and brilliant, My Glorious Defeats is a must-read for anybody who cares about how our country really operates, why so many Americans consider Washington and everything that comes out of it to be a 'swamp, ' and what we can do about it. You don't have to like Barrett Brown's politics (I do), but you sure have to respect his guts. He doesn't pull any punches."
--John Kiriakou, author of Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison and The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror

Author Bio

Barrett Brown is an award-winning journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Vice, The Intercept, Skeptic, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post and other outlets. In 2016 he won the National Magazine Award in the category of columns and commentary. He was released from federal prison in November 2016 after serving four years. He applied for political asylum in 2021 in the United Kingdom, where his case is currently pending. He lives in London.