This hacker’s story is deranged, hyperbolic and true

When readers express a desire for “truth” in memoir, they generally mean they want it only to include the falsehoods we have collectively agreed to accept — the stability of memory, of personhood, of childhood dialogue perfectly recalled. Memoirists, striving toward this view of truth, often neglect the literary demands of self-characterization. One needn’t build a character; one is simply oneself, however shrouded in self-delusion.

This is decidedly not the situation we find ourselves in with Barrett Brown’s extraordinary new book, “My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous.” Brown is an activist associated with the hacker group Anonymous, and a political prisoner recently denied asylum in Britain, all of which sounds a bit dreary until we hear tell of it through Brown’s unhinged self-regard.

“The institution of bed-makery was among the first clues I’d encountered as a child that the society I’d been born into was a haphazard and psychotic thing against which I must wage eternal war,” he writes early on. “There was no reason, and could be none, that a set of sheets must be ritually configured each morning before the affairs of man can truly begin.”

A “machine” that focuses attention on little-known social issues, Anonymous has gone after the Church of Scientology, Koch Industries, websites hosting child pornography and the Westboro Baptist Church. The public tends to be confused by nebulous digital activities, so it was, in the collective’s heyday, helpful to have Brown act as a translator between the hackers and mainstream journalists.

“The year 2011 ended as it began,” he writes, “with a sophisticated hack on a state-affiliated corporation that ostensibly dealt in straightforward security and analysis while secretly engaging in black ops campaigns against activists who’d proven troublesome to powerful clients.”

This particular corporation was Stratfor, a company that spied on activists for the government. Shortly after the attack, the F.B.I. showed up at Brown’s mother’s house, where he was, and asked whether he had laptops to surrender. He declined; his mother hid his laptop on top of some pans in a kitchen cabinet.

The F.B.I. returned, just before Brown was scheduled to appear on CNN, and dozens of agents searched the house. His mother cried.

Brown waited for the feds to come back and drag him to jail. He also says he tried to get off suboxone in order to avoid the painful possibility of prison withdrawal, and stopped taking Paxil, inducing a manic state, all of which is given as explanation for his regrettable next move, which was to set up a camera and start talking. The feds had threatened his mother, he told the internet, and in response he was threatening Robert Smith, the lead agent on his case. He found himself in custody the same night.

Brown was then subjected to the kind of nonsense the Department of Justice is prone to inflicting on those involved in shadowy internet activities that, in fact, almost no one in the legal process understands.

He was charged with participating in the hack of Stratfor, though he was not really involved and cannot code, and although the whole thing was organized by an F.B.I. informant.

Brown had also retweeted a Fox News host’s call to murder Julian Assange; the prosecution presented this as if he were himself calling for the murder of Assange. But generally, Brown’s primary victim is himself. “My thirst for glory and hatred for the state,” he writes, “were incompatible