Yesterday, I noted that Barrett Brown had threatened a libel suit in response to my post, “Narcissism, Isolation and Trolls.”
The first thing to remember about such a situation is that the threat of a lawsuit is just that — a threat. And this is true even after someone gets a lawyer to send you a threatening letter, as Barrett Brown has now done:
Mr. McCain,
You recently posted several articles dedicated largely to the subject of my client Barrett Brown. One such article includes the following passage:
Notice, however, that Brown speaks of “my colleague Michael Hastings,” expressing a collegiality that probably exists mainly in Brown’s mind. Brown and Hastings both had blogs at True/Slant, the now-defunct site which, despite funding from Forbes Media and Fuse Capital, flamed out in 15 months after publishing such memorable works as Rick Ungar’s “Send the Body to Glenn Beck.” But while Brown and Hastings were both True/Slant contributors, it wasn’t like they were hanging out around the office coffee machine, swapping stories.
So here is Brown, staring into the camera and addressing “Rich” as if he were talking to a buddy, while referring to Hastings as his colleague, in a video recorded July 15 — three weeks after the June 23 publication of theVanity Fair piece that Brown references, and two weeks beforeTrue/Slant’s July 29 shutdown. The timing seems significant, as if this were a cry for help.
You might get the idea that Barrett Brown is kind of a moody loner, isolated and alienated, attempting to invent a social context for himself where none exists.
You state, as supposed fact, that Barrett Brown and MIchael Hastings are not colleagues or friends and rather that Barrett Brown is in essence a fraud who uses a false association with Hastings to ‘invent a social context for himself.’ Any amount of investigation on your part would have quickly and easily determined this to be false. Brown and Hastings’ relationship is professional, substantial, and well documented.
Your post falsely insinuating that Brown is fraudulently representing himself and his professional relationships is especially damaging as Michael Hastings wrote the blurb for Brown’s upcoming book and Brown’s reputation and relationship with certain figures such as Hastings is integral to the development of Project PM, Brown’s distributed think-tank. You have published lies which you’ve claimed to be fact that, if taken seriously, substantially damage the financial interests and professional reputation of my client. As these lies are quite easily shown to be untrue it can be assumed that either you printed with malice what you knew to be false or you wrote your article with reckless disregard for its veracity.
My client would like to resolve this matter quickly. We request that you link to the refutation he has posted and that you do so from the post from which the above passage is taken, and also that you publish the entirety of that refutation in an additional post at your blog. Alternatively, you may run a satisfactory retraction to the passage above, although Brown is not requesting that you take down any of your work.
Please be informed that if this situation is not resolved we are prepared to begin legal proceedings to protect my client’s interests.
Best,
[Name of Lawyer]
First of all, as anyone could see if they would care to investigate, Brown’s response is linked from my original post as a trackback. So the terms which Brown’s lawyer seeks “to resolve this matter quickly” were satisfied even before he threatened me.
Second, as to my alleged “reckless disregard for . . . veracity,” this was addressed in my follow-up post yesterday. Barrett Brown himself has admitted to perpetrating falsehoods online as a “troll” in a post called “Confessions of a Phony Internet Muslim.” Given Brown’s self-confessed mendaciousness, my skepticism toward his assertion of collegiality with Michael Hastings would seem entirely justified.
Third, the lawyer’s letter repeats Brown’s tendentious mischaracterization of my post. I wrote that Brown’s video expressed “a collegiality that probably exists mainly in Brown’s mind. . . . [I]t wasn’t like they were hanging out around the office coffee machine, swapping stories.” This was germain to my point that trolls (and remember, Brown has confessed to engaging in troll behavior) are a byproduct of the 21st-century workplace, which often results in people working in social isolation — that is, sitting alone in front of their computers, rather than in an office environment — and that the online world causes some people to fixate on virtual relationships with people they’ve never met in real life.
This isolation has consequences. To quote a famous cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” And likewise on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a sociopathic narcissist unless, in your desperate attempts to bridge the yawning chasm of cognitive dissonance between your imagined importance and your actual irrelevance, you engage in behavior that makes your mental disorder blindingly apparent to everyone who cares to notice. Continue reading Barrett Brown’s Lawyer Sends Me an Email Threatening ‘Legal Proceedings’ →
