For very good reasons, neither Washington D.C. nor the private sector wants techno-anarchist Cody Wilson to succeed in his goal of making 3D-printed automatic firearms readily available, so his company, Defense Distributed, might get Napstered. But if such printers become omnipresent, the design for creating these weapons will be accessible and neither shipping nor handling will be required to get your hands on your very own killing machine. That’s when things may get scary. Scarier. From Andrew Zaleski at Backchannel:

Before he can disrupt the government, though, Wilson will have to first best it on its own terms. Wilson disputes the idea that he violated arms export law by publishing the files for the Liberator, the AR-15 lower receiver and the magazines.

“This is Joe Schmo, working in his garage, drawing up some prints for something, and the government’s coming in there saying you can’t hold that up in public and you can’t talk to people about it,” says Matt Goldstein, Wilson’s lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Wilson says now he’s just asking for permission to place his files online again, although he frames this impending battle as something more. “There will be a Defense Distributed v. United States that those bastards at UT law will have to read one day,” he says.

In such moments he steps outside of himself, and speaks of founding Defense Distributed as a fateful event, one for which he’ll be remembered a long time. “When I was in high school, I read Robert Payne’s Life and Death of Lenin… And something about Lenin as a figure was just,” Wilson’s voice trails off. Then he completes the thought: “The zeal of a man who doesn’t just have the idea but can inflict the idea. I want that.”

For the moment, the infliction of the Ghost Gunner on America has been stalled by FedEx and UPS, which refuse to deliver it. In a February email to those who had purchased Ghost Gunners, Wilson kept up his bluster: “I will find another way to ship the machine.”

Yet when we talk again in early March, he sounds jaded. “It’s a massive enterprise of deterrence and prevention in which we are subsumed,” Wilson says by phone. “It’s like the nightmare of a startup with the added complication that no one will allow you to do it anyway.”

 ____________________________

There’s a quotation attributed to Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and philosopher to whom Wilson owes some credit for his present ideas, that reads: “The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.”

Whether done consciously or not, Wilson had moments where he reflected Baudrillard’s thinking. “Besides the song and dance and ‘Cody Wilson’s a big clown,’ there’s a deep dissatisfaction and yearning on the part of all these badasses I work with,” he told me the night I’d arrived in Austin. “We just want something else. We’re cowboys of the digital era—what a grand synthesis on our part.”•