OBJECTIVE JOURNALISM — WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange praised Barrett Brown’s unique Hunter S Thompson Style, while others referred to Brown as a gonzo journalist or satirist, an impression of his work that is as popular as it is uninformed. This is probably a symptom of poor literacy enforced by the American education system, but it is also an integral part of a desperate campaign to clean the shit off of Brown’s diapers. Brown plead guilty to threatening FBI agent Robert Smith, but only after a limp-dicked attempt to pass the threat off as satire, a move which has precisely zero satirists crawling out of the woodwork in Brown’s defense. But, on the bright side, career activists are sure that Brown’s disrespect for satire was something heroic and that his current persecution is something that should make satirists everywhere shake in their cowardly booties, just as journalists feel a chill in their fragile bones.
The European World’s abusive relationship with the written word may go back to the Greek philosophy of Plato, which taught that the essence of what makes a human being a human is that it walks on two legs and has a hairless body. Such soulless philosophies, known as essentialisms, dictate that the word tethers itself to reality through simple definitions handed down by an authority such as Plato. This philosophy is the base on which journalism, law, and scientific taxonomy rests, but this disgusting edifice of will to power fails miserably when one attempts to describe the more subtle themes and meanings in novels, poems, or life itself. That was why Hunter S Thompson said that objective journalism is a contradiction in terms, because ultimately it cannot be based on reality but only fallible human authority, an insight which enabled him to deploy language in such a way as to express not just facts but personal meanings to world events. The facts do indeed make government investigators as guilty as Brown, just as they make Noam Chomsky rightly expand the word ‘terrorism’ to include the actions of the US military. As provocative as it may be to turn authority against authority, that is not at all similar to the way in which satirists deploy language. Brown’s comment on William Blake makes it quite explicit that he thinks playful, poetic, or satiric language is worse than worthless.
The hackers that Brown represented often said he couldn’t hack his way out of a paper bag, but he also couldn’t troll his way out of an open barn door. His various tiring opinions and statements read something like Glenn Greenwald’s trial lawyer punditry except muddled up by drug abuse. Gonzo journalists, mystics, and poets often gain insight through the use of drugs, but Brown’s opiate addiction was a pathology clouding his judgement and craft. Brown was ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in restitution to Stratfor for trafficking the credit card details of thousands of subscribers and journalists who were then robbed on Christmas. Despite the madness, this was not a game changing or precedent setting decision but rather derived from a case where sharing links of child porn was previously ruled as trafficking. Links are containers with contents, despite the insistence of supporters who falsely reduce all links to “just links” or empty containers. In Brown’s inverted mockery of my prescient words, [this link is a generous example of the one unfortunate case I know of in which he attempted a parody] he said, “As a media source, Stratfor’s work is protected by the freedom of press, a principle which Anonymous does not give a fuck any day of the week.” The Anonymous that Brown was speaking for in this parody press release was a small group of IRC chat rooms heavily influenced by FBI informant Hector Xavier Monsegur. The sad irony is that the Anonymous he supported from his blinding opiate haze not only persecuted journalist subscribers to Stratfor, but Brown himself.
