Confessions of a Hacktivist

The internet is boring. There is a reason so much online activity has converged on scrolling. Channel surfing, we used to call it, when TV, online’s primitive passive precursor, exploded into hundreds of options, few of them any good. The internet accelerated the trend. We move through tiny bits of text, images, video, occasionally alighting on something that catches our attention for longer than 10 seconds. The pause, the post, the like, the retweet—these illusions of interactivity are all recorded as data in a statistical model; the algorithm automatically delivers more text, images, and video whose constituent parts, converted to mathematical data, are similar to what we’ve just interacted with, creating a self-reinforcing sameness that makes us scroll harder. Surfing was always the wrong metaphor anyway. You can’t surf when there are only swells and no breaks.

Insofar as online is interesting, it’s only as an organizer or broadcaster of something happening in real life. Online tools helped recent pro-Palestinian campus protests and encampments organize and spread, and online forums popularized images of college students acting with dignity and resolve while cops, counterprotesters, and administrators acted like maniacs, but it was the students’ real-world, physical, moral courage that made it interesting. Your finger paused. You watched the video. They were doing something.

Still, those of us who spend a lot of time on social media tend to imagine that that’s where the energy is. We giggle when Linda Yaccarino, the hapless adwoman whom Elon Musk brought in to pretend to run Twitter, chirrups “Lots going on this weekend … join the conversation,” but, Poster, we are her! Each of us imagining that our brutal fisking of a testy Samuel Alito letter or epic takedown of some false equivalence in a New York Times headline makes us an activist—an “online warrior” in an epic battle for the future of the country, of the world. At its best, it can be pretty funny. At its very best, it can leak into the real world and ruin the day of someone whose day deserves to be ruined. But outliers aside, the utility of social media for doing politics, for actively influencing anything other than itself, is small and far from the wild, almost evangelical faith of the early days of the web, when some of us foolishly imagined a democratization of information leading to a democratization of society, that tools of surveillance and control could somehow be turned upon their owners.

Reality seeping into digital life and digital life oozing painfully into reality is a theme of My Glorious Defeats, the new memoir by Barrett Brown. Brown, who describes himself helpfully (but maybe inaccurately) in his subtitle, Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous, was known as both a journalist and a “spokesman” for the loose network of hackers and infosec warriors known as Anonymous, although he would deny, probably correctly, that there could be such a thing as an official spokesman for a nebulous and mercurial online group. He eventually split from them anyway. The internet is nothing if not schismatic. He rose to prominence in an earlier and more innocent—well, less cynical anyway—time for internet-based activism. Movies and magazines made hackers into superheroes and supervillains; the feds began to view them as legitimate national security threats; many of us in online communities imagined that liberating the internal documents of, say, a secretive archipelago of private defense and intelligence firms undergirding the American surveillance state could strike a blow against it. Ah well, nevertheless.

Brown was not himself much of a hacker, by his own admission. His talents and contributions to the Anonymous movement—collective? organization?—were largely rhetorical. Sometimes for good: He could be an appealing, articulate interlocutor for a diffuse network of antiestablishment actors. Sometimes not so much: He had a habit of getting fucked up and making crank calls or posting YouTube videos about his targets in intelligence and law enforcement, which would inescapably come off as threats and be weaponized against him by the very forces and governments against which he directed his rage.

So, inevitably, Brown came to the attention of the authorities. Beginning in 2012, he was subject to a series of increasingly wild and punitive federal indictments, although he did himself no favors with his grandiosity or his habit of recording himself. He shared a link to information taken in a hack of the “strategic intelligence” company Stratfor, which contained, among other things, credit card info, and found himself facing a dozen federal charges and up to 45 years in prison. They even prosecuted his mom. Eventually, most of the charges were dropped—they were thin gruel, and federal prosecutors, as is their wont, were plainly using the threat of decades behind bars as leverage.

Brown pleaded to lesser charges; the government tried to screw him over again by entering new evidence at sentencing. In the end, he went to prison for a few years, and while he had written and worked in journalism since his abortive college years in Texas, it was while incarcerated that he found his real voice, eventually ending up at The Intercept, where essays he wrote as “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison” won him a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.

Those essays are indeed excellent. But their style—bumptious, pithy, manic, and full of equal parts self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation—isn’t easy to sustain, or to tolerate, across four hundred pages. What comes off as charming over a few thousand words begins to grate over a long afternoon of reading. Brown laments, at one point, that past editors haven’t liked his long sentences, but, well, he does have a tendency to go on. Editors aren’t jailers or wardens; they can help to establish necessary order, and a firmer hand might have helped here. “It is a sort of truism that the information age diminishes barriers. But what exactly this means is less obvious and vastly complex, because it means so many other things, all at once, across the span of human experience. Individual observers representing particular backgrounds and industries may reasonably expect to envision some potentially new function or stray unintended consequence of mass connectivity.…” OK, OK.

The real trouble is that Brown has written one short, compelling, sharply observed book about prison, and then wrapped it in two half-formed volumes about his hacking and media exploits and his trials and prosecutions. The Parts About the Hacks are weighted down by the inescapable fact that much of the action either takes place in chat rooms—there is just no way to make sentences like “Hackers like Sabu, Topiary, Tflow, and Kayla gained followers and detractors within Anonymous and outside of it” interesting—or as recaps of media hits and interviews. The Parts About the Trials are a slog because they too often read like an early-2000s blog post picking apart some lousy op-ed column, with Brown quoting judges and prosecutors at length and then explaining what fools, liars, and knaves they were. Score-settling can sometimes make for very entertaining writing, but it can just as easily descend into l’esprit de l’escalier.

But The Parts About Jail are something altogether different, good as both memoir and journalism. The exquisite sensitivity to tiny slights and indignities that makes Brown a bit of a bore when he’s talking about insider hacker politics or vindictive federal prosecutors makes him the perfect observer of the autocratic and arbitrary society of the American prison, a setting “replicated thousands of times over across the whole of a faltering empire,” within which “millions of men and women have carried out a peculiar sort of life, one dramatically limited by geography but quite rich in adventure, peril, and heartbreak.”

He is a keen observer of racial affinities and hierarchies, which are at once rigid and highly amorphous, contingent on the particular populations of each institution. (There are, for example, more Latinos in prisons located closer to the southern border, which often brings out greater differentiation by specific national origin, by gang or cultural affiliation, than where smaller populations in other prisons may tend to collapse into larger racial categories.) Guards and wardens can be arbitrary, brutal, and capricious—or friendly and helpful. Sometimes the same can be both. Sexual violence exists but is not omnipresent, and other violence between prisoners seems just as likely to be about intragroup enforcement of rules and norms as it is to be battles between racial groups or competing gangs—although Brown notes that he only sees the inside of low- and medium-security facilities and may therefore have been spared some of the worst.

And he likewise has an eye for how economies self-organize, even when the money supply is ... constrained. “Even just in jail units,” he writes, “industry is complex and specialized.”

There are radio fixers, store guys, room cleaners, speaker makers, bauble craftsmen, artists, locker organizers, pen salesmen, lookouts, jailhouse lawyers, phone minute dealers, pie makers, masseuses, and even makeshift doctors who will lance boils or otherwise attend to minor surgeries that one may have trouble getting the prison doctors to attend to. People will sell their cells, receive drugs via mail on behalf of others who’d rather not risk it, rent out syringes, write poems, compose allocutions, do tattoos, make tattoo guns, hide contraband, make hooch, rent out locker space, buy extra items at commissary for others to get around the limits, provide small loans, and draw portraits of one’s family or more elaborate scenes, with Jesus if desired, or a nice car, or naked women, and you would probably disbelieve me if I told you that all these elements can be incorporated into a single scene, generally at the request of a Mexican. That’s right, syringe rentals.

Much of this commerce is carried out using a makeshift currency of postage stamps.

This list of occupations goes on. From the sublime, to the ridiculous. Brown is cut out for prison—that isn’t meant as an insult. He gets along with his cellmates. People like to talk to him. He can explain in entertaining detail how difficult it is to write when you depend on guards to sharpen your pencils for you. He is sensitive to the group dynamics. He can explain how a collective of prisoners negotiates with each other to refuse to return to their cells at night as a form of strike/protest against the unjust discipline of another inmate, and how the corrections authorities will respond. Brown isn’t exactly Jean Genet, but if I didn’t know why he went to prison, I could almost imagine him as a Barbara Ehrenreich–like figure going deliberately undercover at some shitty job or institution to tell us what it is really like. Three or four hundred pages of that, I would have read in a day. As it is, it occupies perhaps a quarter of the book, and I wished that he had given it more room.

Brown was eventually released into the stupidity and weirdness of a newly Trumpified America—not to mention a radically altered internet ecosystem—and he hasn’t had an easy time of it since. He has been harassed by U.S. legal authorities, he has threatened to murder a taxi driver, and he has made a likely ill-fated attempt to claim asylum in the U.K. He has attempted suicide. (The excellent reporter Jacob Silverman chronicled some of these struggles earlier this year.) But for its flaws, My Glorious Defeats contains within it some truly excellent writing and extraordinary journalism. Barrett Brown is perhaps temperamentally ill-suited to bringing about the downfall of the state or the next revolution. Most of us are. If and when it comes, though, I hope he is there to report on it.