My Glorious Defeats

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.