Thursday, February 9, 2012

Sociopaths in news: Anonymous

A reader sent me this article featuring Barrett Brown, one of the faces of anonymous. It's an interesting portrait of the man and the organization.  I saw some things that suggested sociopath to me, but it's so difficult to know what is really going on in someone else's head.  Under the teaser: "From a tiny Uptown apartment he's organizing a worldwide collective of hackers that brought down HBGary and helped overthrow the government of Tunisia."


Finally, there is the inscrutable topic itself. Anonymous is sometimes referred to in the mainstream media as a group or a collective—the Christian Science Monitor went with “a shadowy circle of activists”—but Anonymous, per se, doesn’t exist. It has no hierarchy, no leadership. So even though Bloomberg and others have called Brown a spokesman for the group (which, again, isn’t a group at all), Brown denies having any position within Anonymous. 

“Anonymous is a process more than it is a thing,” Brown tells Isikoff. “I can’t speak on behalf of Anonymous, because there’s no one who can authorize me to do that.”

When he explains Anonymous to a newbie, Brown relishes the inevitable confusion and will toggle between sincerity and irony to heighten it. Until you’ve spent some time with him, it’s hard to know what to believe. When you’ve gotten to know him better, it’s even harder. 

“You have to remember,” Brown says, reclining in the green lawn chair, one arm slung over its back, a cigarette dangling between his fingers, “we’re the Freemasons. Only, we’ve got a sense of humor. You have to wield power with a sense of humor. Otherwise you become the FBI.” Here Brown is half-kidding. 
***
Brown wrote the following in an essay titled “Anonymous, Australia, and the Inevitable Fall of the Nation-State”:

“Having taken a long interest in the subculture from which Anonymous is derived and the new communicative structures that make it possible, I am now certain that this phenomenon is among the most important and under-reported social developments to have occurred in decades, and that the development in question promises to threaten the institution of the nation-state and perhaps even someday replace it as the world’s most fundamental and relevant method of human organization.”
***
As Brown paces and recounts some of the highlights he’s amassed in just 29 years, it’s tempting to brand him as a fabulist. He’ll begin an anecdote with “I once had to jump out of a moving cab in Dar es Salaam.” But then he mentions that he went to Preston Hollow Elementary School with George W. Bush’s twin daughters. My mother taught the Bush twins at Preston Hollow. I tell him this, and he remembers my mother.

“I was the poet laureate of Preston Hollow!” he says. 
***
Later that night, I call my mother, who taught him art. “Do you remember a kid named Barrett Brown from Preston Hollow?”

“Barrett Brown? Oh, my God,” she says, instantly recalling an elementary student she taught more than 20 years ago. “I don’t remember them all. But I remember him. Yes, he was the poet laureate. I don’t have it anymore, but I kept that poem for years.”

Having now had several corroborative conversations like the one with my mother, I am forced to conclude that most of what Brown says is accurate—if not believable. 

I also like this part (it reminds me of my own shockingly flat learning curve, as manifest by things like my inability to figure out how to mail a package):

He wears the same outfit every day. He owns a dozen identical blue pin-striped oxford shirts. He wears only boots because he hasn’t bothered to learn to tie shoelaces properly. (When Nikki Loehr told me that being Brown’s girlfriend can be exhausting because she must work to keep him on track, citing as one example of Brown’s ADD-powered absent-mindedness his inability to “tie his own shoes,” I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t.)

It was hard to pick representative selections from the article that would lead me to armchair diagnose him with even a semblance of accuracy (even for armchair diagnosis).  He does seem like an interesting guy, though, and I think it is helpful sometimes for people to realize that not everyone thinks like them.  That some people do things just because.  Or for their vanity.  Or because they need much more stimulation than a normal life would provide.  And that they will do whatever it takes.  The caption to the photo of him reads, "'He demanded that this story mention he outgrew his Ayn Rand phase when he was 17. He said, 'If you don’t put that in there, I will personally DDoS the f--- out of you.'"

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

The divided brain

From a reader:

This may or may not be of interest to you, but it did make me think of you so I thought I'd send it:







It is a new perspective by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist on the significance of the anatomical division of the brain (i.e. left vs right hemisphere). He does not make reference to sociopathic behaviour but it would be difficult not to make some associations.


It struck a chord with me as I have always found the existence of sociopaths profoundly disembodied, ie living in their heads, in a concrete, abstract, explicit, decontextualised and heavily simplified world.


You might find it interesting.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Lying fluently


I was going out for cheeseburgers with my friend the other day.  There was no parking, so I told her to park in the garage for a nearby mega-music shop.  I thought the chances of getting towed were quite low, but I also thought we might as well walk through the shop and have "witnesses" should there be a problem.  It was a slow night in the shop, though, and so we got immediately accosted by a salesclerk.

"Can I help you?"

"Yes, do you stock Shure microphones?"  I was half hoping that he wouldn't know, and would just send us downstairs to where the DJ stuff was (and the exit).

"Sure, I'll take you down.  What are you looking for?"

"SM-57s,"  I responded, choosing what I consider the rarer model that he would be less likely to know about.

"Oh, are you doing some recording or something?"

"No, sound reinforcement."

"Oh, ok.  Well, here they are."

"How many do you have in stock?"

"How many do you need?"

"I don't know, maybe 5 or more?  It's for my brother, I told him I would swing by and check to see if you had them in your inventory."

"Well, we should have at least 5, maybe as many as a dozen."

"How much are they?"

"XX"

"Do you do any sort of bulk discount?"

"Only for orders of several dozen or more."

"Not even like a 10% something?

"Sorry man, no."

"Ok, thanks.  I'll let him know.  Thanks for your help."

My friend asked as we left, "What was that?  Do you really need microphones."

"No," I replied, "I was just making sure they would remember us if it came to complaining about a tow charge, and it was on our way out anyway."

"It's unsettling to see how fluently you lie.  I mean, I thought I knew from the start that it was a lie, but then you kept adding these odd details and follow-up questions that normal people wouldn't think to include in a lie and I started to wonder myself.  You did that same thing on our trip a couple years ago with those city rats -- you made up an entire life history on the spot without a single hesitation.  It makes me wonder how I would ever be able to tell if you were lying to me."

"Yeah, I know.  I say it with just the right earnestness and sincerity.  It's sometimes hard for me to tell when I'm lying too."

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Hyperlexia

I have a hard time understanding verbal speech.  I can't pay attention to conversations with the television on -- my friends hate me for it.  Even if I'm really concentrating, I can only understand 90-95% of what is said when I am watching television or a film.  In fact, most of the time I don't bother going to the cinema, but wait until a movie is on DVD to watch it with the subtitles.

I noticed it when I was a teen.  I assumed that I had hearing loss due to playing in rock bands and attending loud clubs.  I started religiously wearing earplugs, hoping (as a musician) to guard what remained of my hearing.  When I stopped studying music and went to graduate school, I had to sit at the very front of every class, or I couldn't "hear" what the professor was saying.

Concerned that I might need hearing aids, I had my hearing tested several times.  Each time, my hearing was completely normal.  I was concerned that I was just gaming the hearing test.  When I was little I also had my hearing tested.  I learned to anticipate "tones" by watching the face of the person giving the test -- looking for "tells," microexpressions or other evidence that I should be raising my hand.  (Sociopaths must be difficult to diagnose for certain things because of this.)  At my last hearing test, several years ago, I insisted that I face away from the examiner who was already in another, darkened room separated by glass.  I passed with absolutely normal hearing.  Still I doubted the results, wondering if my acute sense of timing was causing me to hear tones in what I knew would otherwise be an uncomfortably long silence.

The puzzle was that I did not have a hard time hearing in general.  I took several acoustics and sound recording classes at university and had an exceptional "ear" across the sound spectrum.  It was just speech that I had a hard time deciphering.  Not language.  My reading comprehension has always been off the charts.  Verbal language.

My friend's niece learned to read when she was just one year old from (shockingly) those "your baby can read" DVDs.  Someone opined that the niece might be hyperlexic, characterized by an extraordinary facility with written language, frequently paired with a difficulty in understanding verbal speech.  Hyperlexia is associated with the autism spectrum (as with other language issues), with some experts believing that all hyperlexics are autistic.  I don't think I'm hyperlexic.  I show no real signs.  I do think, however, that my inability to decode verbal speech has less to do with my ears and more to do with my brain.  Brain wiring?  Attentional problems?  Whatever it is, it seems to not affect music cognition, but that's another thing shared with the autism spectrum.
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