The first chapter begins with a description of a prison. He has threatening interactions with guards and inmates and reports “the loss of my books”, which he had access to together with a radio at a different prison. Then, some “Hispanic fellow” down the hall yells that he will “send you some coffee tonight! You’re awesome, Brown!” This makes him think of himself as one of the “saints”, who has been shamed. While it is important to describe poor conditions in prisons: what does this have to do with the subject advertised in the blurb? The section ends with concerns that the FBI and “Themis” have an “ability and willingness to dig up dirt on activists’ children using social networks”, and other general theories of conspiracy that are detached from the actual actions that led this guy to be imprisoned. Specifically, Themis was planning cyber attacks on WikiLeaks’ anonymous submitters, or to submit “fake documents”, to call WikiLeaks out on fabrication. At this point, I just looked up Barrett Brown’s Wikipedia page, as it seems he might never get to what he was accused of in this book. Brown is a journalist who confessed his association with Anonymous, but had disassociated from it by 2011. Apparently, he previously contracted for $100,000 with Amazon to write a book specifically on Anonymous, but spent the money and never wrote this book. Brown notes in the book that there was an attempt for “hackers… to bring down the Amazon site” with around 1,500 participants; this suggests that Amazon might have paid Brown $100,000 as a ransom to stop leading Anonymous missions that attacked their website. So instead, this book is apparently an avoidance project that does not confess his actual hacking activities. And apparently Brown staged a kidnapping attempt and an outing of 75 Zetas gang members to promote an earlier book in 2011. And several other similar incidents followed in 2011 before the FBI began prosecuting him in 2012. “In 2010, he founded Project PM, a group that used a wiki to analyze leaks concerning the military-industrial complex.” So he is complaining generally about potential government spying… because he had designed a program that aggravated espionage sources on the military-profiteers? Specifically, he mined through hacked-by-others emails for information on “Romas/COIN” that was designed to spy on Arab countries. He was sentenced to “63 months in federal prison” for nebulous claims of “obstruction of justice” and had to pay “$900,000” in damages to Stratfor, the military-contractor he had outed as being a corrupt war-profiteer. The reason this book is disjointed is apparently because Brown has confessed heavy drug usage of meth, as well as paranoia and other mental illnesses.
I am now going to search this book for the key terms in this bio instead of attempting to find some lineal meaning. When discussing “Anonymous”, Brown writes its techniques included “drawing upon obscure network protocols to allow internet users to temporarily knock out websites via sheer blunt force”. Or “outright hacking… a raid of Turner’s email account yielded proof that he’d served as an FBI informant, confirmation of which cut him off from his white nationalist allies—as well as from the FBI itself”. That’s something American propaganda films don’t show. Hackers are outing informants to prevent the FBI from gathering data on white-nationalist groups? Why would such activities be useful for anybody other than the white-nationalist groups? Brown claims that it is nonsensical to believe that Anonymous could “be capable of taking control of the nation’s power plants.” He explains that the name “Anonymous” came from 4chan using the “default… username ‘Anonymous’” for anybody who did not want to enter “a screen name”. In another section, he comments on Anonymous’ use of “lulz” to refer to their “pursuit” of malicious pranks, such as “messing with online children’s games like Habbo Hotel”, or a “‘nationwide campaign to spoil the new Harry Potter book ending.’” He quotes an anonymous Anonymous member for the last quote, as opposed to his own activities.
Regarding Zetas, Brown writes that a “dealer” who was “connected to the Mexican contingent of Anonymous” was indeed kidnapped. He confesses that he assisted this operation of freeing the kidnapped affiliate by threatening with outing gang-member names. But the press “promptly decided that I myself was in charge”. He then faced threats of retaliatory assassination by the gang, and then the narrative gets confused because of Brown’s consumption of large quantities of drugs while on this job. He leaps to a discussion of receiving requests from one conservative blogger to hack another conservative blogger to prove the assertion that one of them was an “antisemite” to win a “dispute” between them. He includes a discussion where he points out this would be illegal, but which seems to end with him neither agreeing nor disagreeing to go ahead with it. By not explaining what he decided to do, he seems to be advertising his malicious hacking services of this type to future potential clients.
In summary, this book confesses with light details the types of hacking services Brown has been selling to clients on all sides to attack anybody for money. However, the lack of technical details about just what the hacking process involves indicates that it is likely that Brown only connects clients with hackers, instead of having the knowledge to fabricate such attacks himself. The re-branding of Anonymous as a white-hat organization is certainly countered by books such as this one that explains its purely nefarious intentions to gain profit, and various other benefits (girls, drugs), without caring if either the hackers or those attacked are hurt (though attempting to protect themselves through anonymity, unless revealing their identity can be used to sell a book, merchandize or the like). If anybody out there is curious about Anonymous and does not mind sifting through a lot of nonsense to mine out bits of sense, they can benefit from this book. But they really must purchase an ebook and search for terms that interest them, as reading the starts and ends of chapters or other standard strategies are not going to be helpful in decoding this project.

Sorry to my fav publisher FSG, but I just couldn’t do this one anymore.

I thought this memoir would be fascinating; I was really interested in learning what Brown has to say about Anonymous, and I’m sure he has a good story to tell. But unfortunately I had to call it quits after 3 (long) chapters because of his writing style. Brown’s writing drips with an attempt at obnoxious sarcasm and ‘bro humor’ that just comes across really irritating to me, and I couldn’t make it through a whole book of this. I’m sure he has an interesting story to tell, and if you can stomach the writing style you’ll enjoy this much more than me.

I appreciated Barrett Brown sharing their story with us in this book, it had everything that I was hoping for from the description and thought it was a interesting premise. It was written well and I’m glad I got to read this.

My Glorious Defeats represents the autobiographical intersection of several spheres: the literary and the journalistic; the tragic and the comic; the technological and the human - justice and injustice, doled out in unequal, unbelievable measures. Brown's story is a complex one, marked by the machinations of the (corrupt, conspiratorial, and, frankly, moronic) powers that be, but here it is told with impish panache. Less a memoir than a modern-day picaresque, whatever absurd situation he finds himself in - be it placed (wrongfully) behind bars, or held in the throes of a drug addiction, or facing deportation for holding a sign the wrong way round - Barrett Brown manages to find the humour in it, to use his individual experience to speak towards something more profound.

The final chapter felt, in its current form, a little less tightly constructed than the others - that being said, every other aspect was a delight (and the cover, and title, are excellent).

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for this ebook ARC.