Glorious Defeats + Victories: Media Narratives, Intelligence Assets, Notes From Prison / Barrett Brown

Award-winning journalist, author, and activist Barrett Brown returns to the podcast to discuss his much anticipated new book, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir. 

Barrett Brown provides updates on the subjects explored in our first interview in 2022, which fleshed out the complex web of media outlets, personalities, hackers, and intelligence community assets connected directly or indirectly with far-right Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel. I asked Brown how his bid for asylum in the UK has played out, and why he really isn’t worried about being deported or extradited to the United States, despite his current status in the country. And among other themes I wanted to focus on from his memoir, Brown discusses his experience in the United States federal prison system, and the hard truths he learned there about the declining American imperial project.

Content warning: Throughout this discussion, especially in the later half, there is mention of child sexual abuse and trafficking. It is discussed as part of the larger point Barrett makes about conspiracism and covert intelligence entities and tactics. 

“So I would say for prison, I do want to romanticize it somewhat. This is where Dostoevsky gained his soul—in prison. This is where Solzhenitsyn gained his soul—in prison. Solzhenitsyn didn’t do as good a job—he was kind of a silly guy himself, but a serious person with a flawed outlook, like Dostoevsky did. Dostoevsky was by far the great writer. 

“These were the things that informed my mental infrastructure as a child, and of Monte Cristo and so forth. I was always drawn to the prison experience because I could tell, I sensed—I could read in plain English or Russian, as it were, but translated into English—you could see that this was something that was a profound experience that could challenge you, that turn you into steel.

”And so, yeah, there were parts that were frightening. There were parts of it where I'm sitting there, why am I facing was 105 years worth of charges, how did I get into this, and do I regret it? The great thing about prison is that it doesn't let you go back. Your ships are burned.”

Bio:

Barrett Brown is a writer and activist. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Intercept, Huffington Post, New York Press, Skeptic, The Daily Beast, Al Jazeera, and other outlets. In 2009, he founded Project PM, a “distributed think tank” later repurposed to oversee a crowdsourced investigation into private intelligence contractors and little-known surveillance/disinformation methodologies. In 2011 and 2012, he worked with Anonymous on campaigns involving the Tunisian revolution, state misconduct, and other issues. In 2012, Brown was arrested and later sentenced to four years in federal prison on charges stemming from his investigations into HBGary, Stratfor, Palantir, Archimedes, and other firms that would later be implicated in election interference operations in the US and UK. While imprisoned, he won the National Magazine Award and other journalism and writing honors for his column, “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison.” Upon his release in late 2016, he established the non-profit Pursuance to develop a platform for mass civic engagement and to promote his doctrine of non-institutional “process democracy.” His third book, My Glorious Defeats, is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Episode Notes:

Purchase a copy of My Glorious Defeats from Bookshop

Follow Barrett on X/Twitter @ProjPM

The music featured was composed by Nick Vander