State Repression

The Ballad of Barrett Brown

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Almost ten years ago I read a review of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity in the Intercept that I’ve never forgotten. Written from a federal prison cell by Barrett Brown, a radical hacktivist with a pen dripping venom instead of ink, it heralded the kind of voice that, it seemed to me at the time anyway, we needed more of: egregious in its insult comedy, mad about politics, and contemptuous of a society where great pontificators like Franzen ruled the cultural roost. I always wondered what had happened to the irreverent, off-kilter author of “The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Prison,” and it turns out that thereby hangs a sad tale. As the author Jacob Silverman writes for New York, Brown came to prominence during the heyday of the anti-surveillance movement headed by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, only to end up in a tumbledown house filled with parakeets and other animals on the southern coast of England, desperate to be granted asylum. It is a story of disillusionment and defeat, one that maps in miniature the unfulfilled promise of a movement that once hoped to change the world.

—Ryu Spaeth, features editor, New York    

The Ballad of Barrett Brown He was a “preppy anarchist” who went to jail for his fight against the surveillance state. Was it all for nothing?

Photo: Bobby Beasley
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Categories: State Repression, Surveillance

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