Cody Wilson is a 25-year old law student and entrepreneur. Founder of Defense Distributed, he has successfully developed the digital design files needed to make a functional pistol almost entirely from a 3D printer. He also runs DefCad.org, a search engine for computer firearm designs. A self-described crypto-anarchist, he views his work in proliferating gun-ownership as a strike against government control.
Brown Political Review: How long have you been interested in guns? Was that a childhood thing?
Cody Wilson: No, I’ve always been around gun culture. At least, like, tangentially or something. I wasn’t really interested in owning a gun or having a gun until I was 22 or 23. That’s when bought my first gun.
BPR: Why’d that happen? Why’d that view change?
Wilson: I moved to Texas when I was 23. And I was living alone in my apartment in Austin. I was like, you know what? Now might be the time. So I bought a shotgun, after some study on the Internet of what the consensus definition of an adequate home protection gun was.
BPR: Where did you grow up originally before Texas?
Wilson: I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and lived there until I was maybe 10 years old, and then lived I in a suburb of Little Rock for another 5 years, or so. Always lived in Arkansas until I lived in Texas.
BPR: And now you’re a third year law student at the University of Texas at Austin, right?
Wilson: That’s right, well I mean, yeah, I would be a 3rd year, but I recently made some decisions – I don’t think I’m returning in the fall. But, I mean, currently I think I’m still on the books over there. [Laugh]
BPR: So you’re putting your legal education on pause for Defense Distributed?
Wilson: [Laugh] Yea, let’s say indefinitely. There’s a number of opportunities I’m running after right now. Right now it’s like, yeah, I’m not coming back. But, let’s be honest, if any of this gets much bigger than it’s gotten, or prolongs itself, I don’t see myself retuning.
BPR: What’re some of the other opportunities you’re pursuing? Is there just Defense Distributed?
Wilson: No, no. [Laugh] Since March of this year we’ve been operating a site called DefCad as an independent business of Defense Distributed. It started as a subsidiary but now it’s its own corporation. And it’s attracted angel interest and outside venture capital interest and we’re developing it as a kind of online marketplace and search engine thing. And then I have a number of speaking engagements, museum acquisitions, and traveling opportunities, and things, and I don’t know, the money’s there so, seems like I can support myself.
BPR: And you started DefCad because that other 3D-printing site took down all your files, right?
Wilson: That’s right, yeah. December 20th, Thingiverese took down all their gun files, and a number of users – including my administrator of the now ‘DefCad’ – collected all those [files] and put them in our own repository, which soon began to grow, totally out of my expectations. I know I just thought we just needed a platform to develop, but instead we create a kind of hub.
BPR: So when did you start working on Defense Distributed?
Wilson: Well technically, the public project, it turns one year old today.
BPR: That’s great! Wow! What a fortuitous interview date, then!
Wilson: [Laugh] Yeah right. Now that’s the public side. I released a video, the original Wiki Weapon video on July 27th, and I filmed it for maybe four days before that. [Laugh] And it was the summer of 2012, really, so from maybe the beginning of June into late July was when we did most of the planning and got down most of the rhetoric. Now, the rhetoric would change over time. See, at first we thought we could just succeed completely on 2nd Amendment-type avocation. But things change over time. And we were basically kind of forced to reveal our hand, slowly but surely. And then of course the Newtown events really thrust us into the debate; with harsher scrutiny it required kind of arguing from a broader set of principles. But, yeah, the rail work was laid 1 year ago.
BPR: That’s interesting, the kind of spread from 2nd Amendment to beyond. Do you view this uploading of Computer Aided Design files of guns to the internet as more of a 1st amendment or 2nd amendment kind of thing?
Wilson: I would resist the temptation to boil it down just to that. You can say well these are safe harbors, these are our jurisprudence of protection we can claim in the end, but it’s much more of a kind of emphatic project about the anarchic future of freedom of information and what these distributive technologies mean. But if you want to kind of turn into that calculus: Sure it’s first a speech act, and a project about ‘Well, what are the logical consequences of the freedom of information, what are the physical consequences of design and digital manufacture?’ So it’s all about that. And in doing it well, with this object, which it has, just visceral, immediate impact to people – so, the firearm I think was the best way of really introducing the concepts of our project.
BPR: Yeah, testing the limits of how free we want information to be, or how free the government wants information to be.
Wilson: Oh yeah. And not just a pure test. So, you know we are partisans. I mean, we represent a clear position in this debate. Which is like: Yeah, we want a world where you can download the gun. Not only are we willing to advocate for it – we’re willing to create that world. And this what is most offensive, or perhaps most alarming; that we weren’t just willing to play theory games, but that we like took it upon ourselves to actually instantiate the reality. Of course a number of people have just [reacted] hardcore.
BPR: Yeah you talked about in a couple of your other interviews that I saw, this being a ‘real political action’, rather than, some theoretical mind game –
Wilson: [Laugh] Ugh, so dramatic.
BPR: I know right. You have a way with words.
Wilson: But it’s right. Like I told our guys often during the months: Look, making is politics. And this is what they don’t like. And you’ve seen some of the, perhaps you’ve seen some of the legislative proposals in the wake of our progress, especially after Liberator, which is like: How do we regulate technology from back to front, how to digital rights manage the devices, how do we license the operation, how do we control access to the information – they’re literally searching for any kind of crevice for political intervention into the process. But the thing is – it resists. The whole process resists political intervention. It resists political intervention. And this is its duty.
BPR: Yeah. One of those policy proposals is the Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act by Steve Israel, right?
Wilson: Right.
BPR: He’s touting it as a way for you trying to give access to supposedly undetectable guns. Do you think that legislation could be effective? Or do you see any use for it to be implemented?
Wilson: No, I certainly see the use, and I see why it would be proposed. No question at the margin, and even in the main, it would prevent a set of people from experimenting, and using these technologies for those purposes.
BPR: So you think it would be effective in perhaps curbing some of the proliferation of this technology?
Wilson: Oh, yeah, yeah. Like any law that taxes some activity like that or threatens you with penalties, there’s a great number of people who are sensitive to those consequences, and then will shy away from its use. I mean that’s only logical. But of course I think we all agree that a law like this doesn’t stop the activity, I think, especially in the case of Steve Israel, who is so disingenuous. I mean, I think we can accuse him – well I’ve done it before, on TV, I’ve accused him of acting in bad faith. There’s a particular mendacity of it – he calls it UFA modernization. Well, no, it goes far and beyond the originals principles of the UFA of ’88. It targets the use of these machines for the production of any gun part, particularly rifles and magazines, which were for a long period of time excepted from that law. The reason they were left out of the law originally, is that the law didn’t worry about you being able to make certain gun components, it worried about detection. It’s not concerned about a magazine attachment for detection, or a receiver, which they can already do. He’s interested in preventing a whole new chapter of gun manufacture on an individual level. So this is claiming a public safety interest, through whatever, and then stopping people from developing with this new set of digital manufacturing techniques.
BPR: And do you think, perhaps, legislative efforts to stop this could also come by putting in software to ban gun downloads in the actual 3D printers themselves, or stricter licensing requirements for these machines?
Wilson: I could see – yeah. A number of these proposals have been floated around in different states. Leland Yee in California has proposed something like this. I don’t how realistic they are. Honestly, what I worry about first is the industry itself, the 3D printing industry itself – mostly 3D Systems and Stratasys – kind of colluding to agree on ‘best’ practices, where such kind of DRM [Digital Rights Management] techniques are implemented. I worry about that first over legislative controls. I gotta be honest – my feeling is, just because we’re working with a number of lobbyists and we’re kind of pulling levers behind the scenes here – my feeling is that we can defeat these new ‘undetectable firearm’ acts. They don’t have momentum. 3D guns are really not much inside the news. And I think this Congress, which is at, you know, such continuous loggerhead, will only try to put a new UFA into a new gun bill, or perhaps a new security bill. It would be very difficult for them to get that in there, because I have got people watching over the House and Senate bill, all the time, and I promise you, I think I’m smarter than they are. [Laugh] Sorry. I think we can keep it out of their bills, honestly. I think we have the lobbying power to keep it out.
BPR: But do you think perhaps some like private corporations’ fear of bad press could lead them to stop your activity without government action?
Wilson: Just, over the last year, I’ve learned the personalities of these organizations. Now, to some of the organizations’ credit, I’ve met some CEOs now and they claim that, ‘Yes, though we’re worried about gun violence we’re not gonna prohibit you from using our machines’ – I don’t know. I see a kind of collusive model with all of the big players in the industry – because it is a little bit concentrated in the hands of just a few relative oligarchs. I could see them instituting something that would make it more difficult for people to use these machines to make guns.
BPR: I understand. On a slightly different note, I want to talk a little bit more about your goals with this project. So: In your interview with Glenn Beck, he claimed that your project was frightening because “Occupy Wall Street could take over the world” and wonderful because “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened.” I thought this was a provocative and interesting statement, especially in light of armed resistance movements in places like Syria. Would you say one of this project’s goals includes making revolutions easier and empowering the citizenry against their government?
Wilson: Oh, kind of like lowering the barrier of entry to revolution?
BPR: Yeah exactly.
Wilson: In the actual physical sense. No I think like, not as a defined goal. So, I took Glenn Beck’s statement to be kind of evocative and impressionistic, right? Not literal. He just meant: any radical group [could] kind of out-punch, you know, punch up it’s way, like Occupy, although he’s saying this kind of just spooked by them – I don’t think he ever got the organizing principles. And then, the thing about the Holocaust – I mean look, something like this could’ve been the deciding factor in a past history or something. So he’s right, I think he’s seen the kind of dimension of it in trying to paint it really evocatively for his audience. No, honestly his statement is similar to our purpose. Which is trying to paint an alternative version of the future. I think the consequences of these technologies in this technological society, mean things completely other than the kind of the message that we keep getting pumped back to us. I think Mark Kreiger said something like, it’s the irony of a technological society that it spends all this time and effort even after we’re able to realize [the reaches] humanity activity, that it spins back on itself and prevents these forms of [human civilization]. So I’m just trying to say that – no of course this is what this thing means – you will be able to make a gun – and I’m kind of being uncompromising about that. But I’m not actually interested in, you know, arming resistance operations.
BPR: So it’s kind of revolution-enabling ability is more of a side effect than a goal?
Wilson: Well, I really think, and maybe I’m being naïve here, but I don’t really think the Liberator is more than a kind of completion and a return of this whole psychological operation from WWII. I think it’s at its most powerful as a symbolic act, a kind of speech, thought, political act.
BPR: So the name the Liberator is not literally supposed to imply liberating yourself from a government, but more like liberating ourselves from the status quo and going into the future in terms of manufacturing, even of firearms?
Wilson: Ah, you can see. Right. So the name is a rich name, it has kind of all these problematic evocations. And it really drives the kind of usual suspect critics even further up the wall. But mostly it was, I thought, I was reading a lot of Alain Badiou and he had his theory about ‘what is an event’, ‘what is the new’ and often you hear, especially in critical theory, the idea that like well, Robespierre, the French Revolution, they really recast what they were doing as the historical, you know, ideal completion of a latter day Rome or something. And I was thinking the same thing, like new events, are, in Badiou’s conception, the completion of historically incomplete events. So I saw the Liberator conception was never brought to fruition. The United States War Department kind of like abandoned it, never really dropped the guns all over Europe – I thought at least conceptually we could have complete it by putting it into the Internet, it would have been in some sense completed. It’s like – I took the name – It was a kind of hubris, for historical ambition. I wanted to revisit the concept and kind of achieve completeness.
BPR: What was the WWII project that you’re referring to?
Wilson: This WWII project was called – well the pistol was called the FP-45 Liberator.
BPR: Okay.
Wilson: And the idea was – it was a psychological operation first. The War Department, GM [General Motors], stamped a bunch of metal pistols, single shot 45 ACP metal pistols, and the idea was they would airdrop them over occupied Europe. Now the goal wasn’t really to get the citizens to actually do the fight for them. It was to basically instill a fear in the occupation that any citizen could have a firearm, and might be a location of resistance. So to really undermine their morale and then challenge [them physically]. So I thought this was the same thing, and the most fitting possible name. And in the most, I don’t know, theoretic way of achieving the event, we would call it the Liberator, we would revisit the concept and complete it. So now we put the gun, considered ‘2.0’, the gun was released to the Internet, and if you go back and look at my video I’m bringing back the WWII imagery. And this is just my kind of winking at history.
BPR: That’s interesting. So you don’t think it’s going to be of use against an American military of F-15’s. But that it’s symbolic to have the possibility that any citizen could own firearms if they could print it out.
Wilson: We created this moment, where – and I don’t know why we were successful, I did the best I could, maybe it was a fluke of history. But we put a lot of world governments on notice that, yeah this is possible now. And I think that’s good in the history of the balance of power between sovereigns and subjects. You know that was a point for subjects. Anyone can download a gun – regardless of these pie-in-the-sky central plans.
BPR: So even if it can’t prevent storm troopers entering your house, do you think this could be a bulwark against future tyranny by instilling fear in the government?
Wilson: Exactly. I think it’s most effective as this psychological operation. It also, what you do call them, the apologists, the government apologists, all the major world media, immediately accepted our premises. I mean, not even just really, but pretty much, which is, ‘Well this is a problem of digital techniques of manufacture, not only will this gun always be out there, but better ones will come, and on and on and on.’ It was a propaganda victory. Our vision of the future is currently winning.
BPR: Making it harder for these ‘central planners’ to plan.
Wilson: Oh, certainly. Not only harder to plan, but actually harder to govern , hard to win. I think we recognize the historical moment that we’re in. We basically stole, or used, let’s say, the narrative that, well, this is often progressive narrative – technological progress is constant, continuous, it can’t be stopped – and often this is put in service of a state narrative for something: we can make the government more efficient, political economy, blah, blah, blah, welfare capitalism will always get better, you know – more efficient government techniques of and democratic means of control and accountability, I mean you hear this from Obama like every other day. So you take that narrative and then you say, now you have distributive technologies, and look, power flows outward and downward, and these technologies will only get better, these technologies only increase. So it’s a kind of an antithetical narrative, which I don’t think is ever supposed to be mainstream. But it’s amazing, for that at least a brief week it really was! You hear about 3D printing, and they know you can print a gun. That’s a total propaganda victory.
BPR: So you’re talking about the constant progress of technology. Right now you have the Liberator, which breaks after one shot. Are there barriers to better fully printable guns?
Wilson: Yeah, there’s certainly – One, we still don’t really know the limits of the techniques we’re using. My printer has been broken since the third Liberator that we printed. I haven’t been able to get it repaired. It’s kind of a long process. It’s not like I haven’t been trying. But that’s just an FDM, which is Fused Deposition Modeling, which is a technique most people have access to use right now. But the Selective Laser Sintering patent just expired so I expect more open source projects built around SLS, which has much higher modulus, which has a more interesting range of materials, like nylons and different powders. Of course there’s Formlabs which does a [stereolithography] technique, which uses resin. I mean there are so many things to experiment with right now that none of us have done. I mean I’ve tried to build the DefCad forums up to at least host a place so people can at least talk about their experiments and so we could all kind of learn. There are people involved in instrumentation right now. I have a number of engineers that work with me. I mean, we’re learning so much. I can’t even tell what the horizons of an object is, where we’re going to find resistance. I don’t want to misrepresent the properties of material. No question plastics are not the ideal way of building this weapon. But I’d say, as a kind of a responsive step to the way the legislators are building their new, fancy digital manufacturing printing bills, we’re extending from using just 3D printing, to using CNC milling and other forms of digital manufacture. And you know, they’re not just coming after 3D printing.
BPR: CNC milling?
Wilson: Yeah, what’s happening is, these politicians – I think at first, I was working with, or speaking to a group called Public Knowledge, and they helped Steve Israel build, or write his bill – he was the on this before anyone else was concern about it. And what he was doing – what he didn’t want was to be accused of, was trying to go after 3D printing specifically, by industry. So he wrote into his bill, that like, ‘Well, there are many kinds of computer-aided, individual manufacture, and these things are problematic because people can make guns, blah, blah, blah.’ Well what he ended up doing was setting a template for all the other bills to come after him, once Liberator happened. And now what your see is all these politicians are going after computer-aided personal manufacture itself. So not just 3D printing, but CNC milling, any kind of desktop fabrication, laser cutting – they’re going after computer-aided manufacture. I mean, purely reactionary. But what I’m thinking is – well , in the end, Defense Distributed’s umbrella shouldn’t just include 3D printing – we did well, we created a 3D printed gun. But now as a kind of oppositional technique, we should embrace all forms of digital manufacture, and then advocate the liberation of information under all these platforms, for the fabrication of arms.
BPR: So you’re planning on upgrading from plastic. What the next step?
Wilson: Well not just upgrading from plastic, there’s still techniques to learn in FDM. So basically yeah, we want to find all the bounds, the material bounds, and then it’s for how to do different cartridges, different handguns, and perhaps shotguns and rifles, in these materials. And honestly then it’s about curating and maintaining that information. That’s Defense Distributed’s purpose. Now there’s going to be a number of things we do in metal with CNC. But, the big project for me right now is this thing called DefCad, and we had to revert our business model, because, right now, the Department of State has made it basically impossible to permanently host this information on the Internet, on the free Internet, because they claim that it requires their permission to do so. So they’ve kind of drawn, in the letter that they wrote to us in May, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, if not you can find it –
BPR: Yeah I read it before.
Wilson: Okay. Well this is the first actual positive expression of the policy that disclosures to the Internet of this kind of technical data require previous or pre-authorized government approval. So, basically they set the table: You’re not going to be able to release your stuff publicly to the internet in a systemized repository, they’re just going to take you down if you give any [content], or even if they don’t, you are in any point subjected to massive civil and perhaps criminal penalties. So, we still know that this information is out there, people want it, and the information wants to get to them, so we’re trying to come up with techniques of sharing it with them, and the ones that we’ve come with so far are some different permutations. So we’ve used white papers by [Google], and we realized, well, if we build our sites into a search engine, instead of a repository, an index, if all the different points of gun data are out in the Internet, then it’s protected speech, and then also it’s the same thing for the user, it’s the same user experience, you yourself download the file and then we’re not implicated, because we stand behind the strong First Amendment.
BPR: Do you think you’re in violation of the ITAR and Arms Export Control Act?
Wilson: Well, I mean, let’s be clear, right? So truth is a process, you know? Seems like we’ve both read Foucault. So there’s no kind of like, ‘Well, did we violate?’ and ‘What is the answer, God?’ No, it’s like, at the end of some political process there will be some decision made as to whether we did or didn’t, but there is no like –
BPR: Do you think you are, by the letter of the law?
Wilson: No, I don’t. It’s an unsettled question. So actually it’s a pretty complex one. It revolves around whether the Internet itself is considered public domain by this bureaucracy, and it also regard are whether this information is actually protected by the nature of its origination. So it wasn’t made according to a government contract, and other things. There are footnotes and guiding authorities from the ‘80’s in the [Directorate of Defense Trade Controls] which indicate that such information is excluded from ITAR control. But this being the historical reality, we knew that the White House saw the news, communicated to Justice and the State Department that it wanted this stopped, and so the State Department leapt to a certain policy conclusion to satisfy the demands of the administration.
BPR: So since you don’t even believe you are guilty by the letter of the law, let alone think that what you’re doing is wrong, so this may be both a pointless and poignant question, but – Would you be willing to go to jail for what you’re doing?
Wilson: I know what you’re asking, and no the [appeal of] martyrdom is tempting for some of these pirates and some of these digital activists. I don’t think it’s necessary in this case, so I’ll sidestep the question just a little bit, because I’ll probably be involved in a civil rights litigation for the next couple years [Laugh], so I don’t want it out there like ‘Yes, I will gladly to go to jail!’ No, this project began and with the kind of commitment – I think you can see for our opposition – I believed that I could do all of this within their legal structures, and in the end that there were no possible legal structures they could build to encapsulate and actually undo, or change, or prevent what we were trying to do. And just to give you a simple example: if Defense Distributed developed the Liberator and just sold it to a couple people, and those people released it to the Internet, Defense Distributed would have never been implicated by the Administration for the disclosure, at least the way they made it. So there was at least, even there, a way that we could’ve done this completely legally and have been totally untouched, but we preferred to disclose the information ourselves, on our reading of the ITAR.
BPR: So when you get directives from the State Department, your default action is not to go head on and attack them, and possibly face stiff legal penalties, but to retreat and retrench, and redirect your efforts.
Wilson: Oh that’s right, yeah. So I’m not at all convinced that they stand on solid ground with this assertion of authority. And I think we were playing against expectations. I think there was the expectation that we would [counter] by not taking down, and of course I had a couple lawyers on standby. So [the moment it] was taken down, I lawyered up, and we prepared our responses. This is exactly the kind of fight you want, at least to mainstream or problematize the idea. So in the end this is going to come down to a potential Federal case – so there are Constitutional questions here. Was DDTC’s take-down request a prior restraint? I think there’s a very good case that it was, the only question in the end is: does the national security interest outweigh the First Amendment interest? But in the case of a single-shot pistol, I don’t know. The facts might very well be on our side. We could even carve out a future protection for physical – I mean this is the most optimistic case – but it could very well be that the United States Government may have given us the foothold to permanently protect this form of disclosure of physical data into the Internet.
BPR: Did you study Constitutional Law in UT Austin?
Wilson: I did, actually. It was my favorite subject.
BPR: So that’s where Defense Distributed and law school meet, right? At Constitutional Law.
Wilson: [Laugh] Yeah I would say so. In fact it was kind of weird – I had, the semester before signed up for a Second Amendment class, and when I got to Austin that year, like last fall, that was when DD had begun – and of course I didn’t know until the summer before. But, I was taking the Second Amendment class, the whole time we were getting national press. It was kind of the most I’ve ever studied the Second Amendment.
BPR: You’re doing hands-on fieldwork for your class.
Wilson: [Laugh] Exactly. I was like, “I should get credit for this, man.”
BPR: Yeah, right. [Laugh] You should. That’s good. So you talked about Defense Distributed gaining notoriety and the government reaching out to you, but have you found any common thread between who you found opposes and who supports you?
Wilson: Sure, and the most happened after Liberator. When the State Department made its takedown request, there were these great threads all over the Internet, but a fantastic one on Reddit. You know Reddit, is kind of, if you hang out there, you know that it’s, mostly the culture is anti-gun. But I was seeing everyone saying like ‘We support Defense Distributed’, ‘We support the Liberator’. And I saw comments like, ‘What’s going on, this is bizarre Reddit, any other day we would be anti-gun!’ And they said, ‘Look, the government is making us choose between a managed Internet and a world with guns, and so I have to choose a world with guns.’ So yes, we’ve created this kind of, short circuit. It wasn’t originally what we proposed. In the end the First Amendment is used to blur what might otherwise be a cultural hostility to this event.
BPR: So you think you’ve tapped in to this libertarian strain of First Amendment supports who might not be the biggest Second Amendment supporters.
Wilson: Yes very much. Even now we’re working the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, all these groups, which rarely come together on a single issue. So yes I think it is what you say there. And I see a number of people, I get it anecdotally as well, and of course it happens in reverse, but people they come up to me and they’re like, ‘Look, I hated guns. And in fact I still am wary of it. But I get what it is about now. And I get that I can’t advocate this world of management this way. I get that I wasn’t being libertarian. I wasn’t being consistent. Freedom means this.’ And I think that it may have been a reversal. And I hope it continues to be. In a sense, I hope the government moves quickly and perhaps more tyrannically on this, because it will continue to do that form educational impact, and just reach.
BPR: Has the ACLU reached out to you?
Wilson: No, not yet. But I know that we can get them, and we have a couple contacts. It’s just, right now – I don’t know, we’ll see.
BPR: Have any legislators reached out in support?
Wilson: Yes, actually. Well, there are some high profile politicians, which I probably shouldn’t say their names. There are a number of people working behind the scenes, especially since May, to make sure that the gains we’ve made – however symbolic – are not reversed. I would say that Chuck Schumer and Steve Israel could come up [in this discussion], but of course there were similar figures of similar stature who reached out to work against [them in this].
BPR: DefCad and Defense Distributed are non-profits, right?
Wilson: No, DefCad since March has been operating as a P-Corp. It’s not quite profitable, but, no, it’s a for-profit venture. Now yeah, Defense Distributed it’s its own story, I’m applying for a 501(c)(3) tax-exemption there, so it’s a non-profit.
BPR: Do you have any data on the make-up of the donors to Defense Distributed? Where do they come from? Who are they?
Wilson: Yeah, I do. I don’t have the solid figures for you. I have a number of lists. I’ve never broken it down in statistical terms. It follows, roughly, the 80-20 rule, so 20% of our donors have donated 80% [of the money], and we have a number of foreign donors, some quite wealthy and –
BPR: From where?
Wilson: Australia, Switzerland – our biggest donor’s from Switzerland –
BPR: That makes sense, they have a large civilian gun ownership population there.
Wilson: I was thinking that was the connection, but in the end it wasn’t. Might as well have been. So there were a couple of big donors from Germany, and then there’s been really big outside interest in Russia, but not a lot of money has come from Russia in the end. But honestly, the biggest amount of donors have been these Red-State Conservatives in the end.
BPR: Has any support come from surprising supporters, or a lack of support come from people you may had thought would’ve been more keen on your work?
Wilson: Yeah we’ve had a little bit of both. Very early on, like August of last year, Eric Raymond publically supported us, that was probably one of the best early things that could’ve happened.
BPR: Who’s that?
Wilson: Eric Raymond, he’s the icon of the Open Source [Initiative]. Kind of like the, [he came up with] Richard Stallman, who was basically the guy who invented Linux. Eric Raymond was sort of the figure behind Open Source, so his impact was very good. Many people got early on – especially in the Open Source community – that okay, this is one of the really historically expected, second order consequences of open source software, that there would be things like this. So we got a lot of support from that base really quickly, and really early. And then, yeah, some of the groups that we were catering to in the beginning, we experienced unexpected resistance. It all makes sense now, when you think about it, but at the time it was [surprising]. This group is often ‘the NRA conservative’. ‘The NRA conservative’ is [someone] that believes in his traditional institutions, he believes in institutional management of access to these arms. It’s kind of not surprising in the end, I mean, since that more accurately tracks with a definition of rightism. You know, they don’t believe that people should be granted this direct access. There’s a lot resistance. And just on that level of authority, too. And of course there was the other NRA-, conservative-type resistance, where it was ‘Well this scares me. And this’ll just give the Democrats in Washington an excuse to take my guns away.’ But a lot of this speech was before Sandy Hook, and after Sandy Hook I think that the debate got reoriented a little bit, and people realized, or they thought any project advocating firearms freedom was at that point insurgent and in need of support. So a lot of that early indecision died down and we got blanket support from pro-gun people.
BPR: So would you say that there has to be a choice in the future between being pro-gun-control and pro-free-Internet?
Wilson: I’m not sure that it’s that stark, but certainly that is the essence of that, that there will be a similar choice. I frame it to myself this way: You can’t advocate both the political intervention into these processes and these machines or techniques and also for avocation for the freedom of expression, the freedom of production.
BPR: You talk a lot about freedom. I’ve gotten a lot from this interview and others that you’ve done that you hold freedom as one of your highest ideals, and I can understand that that could outweigh other concerns. But regardless of whether you think freedom is more important than safety, do you think your actions are making the world a safer place?
Wilson: Yeah I do think it’s probably a testable question, I mean, it might not actually be. But I think I even disagree with your premise about how I regard freedom. Honestly, when I have the opportunity to bring it down to some ‘rights’ semantics, I often go for equality. Because I think equality is a paradigm. I mean, it’s one about individual peers being about to produce on a mass-produced level. I mean, this is speaking to the nature of distributive technologies and techniques: All will be able to, or none will be able to. As I told Glenn Beck, this is the nature of emancipatory politics and the need for radical quality. It’s kind of like, what the original premise of politics is: not just for liberation or freedom, but for the actual achievement of some kind of equality of capacity, or egalitarian social goal.
BPR: Interesting.
Wilson: But I think it really hinges more upon the equality principle. And this is why we were able to shoehorn anarchism into it in the end. Because we highlight the fact that, well there’s all of this discourse and rhetoric about freedom and inequality, but in the end there’s a group of political elite, and, let’s say, governors, who get to tell you what you get to make with your own device, while they get to live out according to a wholly other set of consequences. So, honestly I think this conversation is more about equality. I still would be happy to answer your question: Is the world safer after this project? Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s even estimable in some way. I mean it’s not, I’m not sure.
BPR: So you think one of the fundamental tenets of equality would be for firearm ownership not to be monopolized by the state, and allowed for individual use?
Wilson: Yeah I do. I think, even, that there’s this myth in America that it actually works that way. And then this project kind of started as a means of [actually] achieving that [goal]. Which is like, yeah, you have this Second Amendment, but actually there’s all these techniques of infringing upon your ability to exercise that civil liberty. And like, just watch all the resistance we get to new forms of gun manufacture. But, I guess I would say – coming back to your question about safety – it’s very tempting to – this is going to be an ill-received answer – but it’s very tempting to see a negative dimension in this. And perhaps it’s going to be more immediate. Like if somebody were to use the gun and somebody were to kill someone, it’s be very visible. But of course there are other dimensions to the project. So there’s a kind of positive unseen dimension perhaps, like knowing that anyone can print this gun out. I mean, it’s not just a one-way street. So I don’t how the balance of power was actually reconfigured, or how safety was actually reconfigured, in some sense. And I don’t think there’s any metaphysical way that things change in the universe. But, yeah I’d say that things are much the same today as they were yesterday. And that planes aren’t dropping out of the sky, and that the world is not imperiled by [the creation of the Liberator].
BPR: But if someone used one of your guns to commit a deadly terrorist act, or go on a murderous spree, would you reconsider anything, or feel culpable or anything, or would that be, like you said, just one part of a two-way street?
Wilson: I think, honestly, we have to really take into account the physicality, the materiality of this gun. It is a one-shot pistol. You will have to take the barrel out and reload and you will probably get a misfire on the second or third round. You’re not going to be doing any mass killing with these things, which is not what it was for.
BPR: But what if – and I assume you’re working towards this – you upload CAD files for an AR-15 or even an automatic gun?
Wilson: Oh. Well buddy, I mean, that stuff’s out there. The CNC files for AR-15s, have been up on CNCGuns.com since 2003. You know, the homemade assault rifle, milled from aluminum has not been the scourge of society. You know, that’s a kind of an empirical fact. Adam Lanza didn’t build his own AR, you know, he just took it from his mom. I really don’t we’re dealing with– I’ve seen a lot of press accounts, or even on TV that they’re like, ‘Well aren’t you in some sense arming some future terrorists?’ I’m like, ‘Okay sure, maybe.’ I mean, yes, I see what you’re saying, a someone who cares about the equality of access, and the equality of product. But at the same time I’m not the US Government literally arming Al-Nusra, or the Free Syrian Army. I mean I’m not literally arming terrorists, like your own government. So, I think, the critique is kind of, there a [dissonance], it’s very hard against a presumption, ‘The [faults of] liberty,’ like, what are the problems with freedom, instead of what are the problems with control.
BPR: So you think there’s a hypocrisy with your pro-government critics like Steve Israel?
Wilson: I think it’s a hypocrisy, but it’s kind of expected, and in fact in the end it confirms that, well especially this public discourse serves a state interest, which is to cast out the presumption of guilt and bad faith upon the individual, and the innovator and the person advocating for positions liberty. But it’s very clear that by our taxes we support a grand machinery of violence and oppression. And Obama –I think its a fact of history, and it will at least be revealed even if we can’t see it now – Obama runs one of the greatest terrorist operations in history. I mean, I’m talking about the drone program specifically, not even prisons and all these other things. I mean his processes of extermination and civilian casualties all fail the Nuremberg tests completely. Like we’re dealing with a war criminal literally arming terrorists, and yet the conversation comes back to, ‘Oh don’t you feel bad, Cody Wilson. You give people the ability to print guns.’
BPR: In your view, the contrast between a one-shot pistol and a double-tap drone.
Wilson: [Laugh] Exactly. I go back to Foucault a little bit here too. It’s this idea, like, ‘national purpose’, ‘raison d’etat’. Is it the adequate explanation of everything? So anything that falls under raison d’etat is fine? And in fact raison d’etat can be used to stop any activity like ours too. Like, ‘Oh my God you would allow people to have a single-shot plastic pistol?’ This is seen as the betrayal of human civilization, like, the kind of, end of civilized society, when in fact we know there are devastating and awful weapons and techniques and practices used by our own civilly, democratically elected representatives. I mean, the disparity couldn’t be more.
BPR: Do you have a little time to talk about your political views?
Wilson: Sure, I’d enjoy that.
BPR: One of the more interesting things for people just getting to know you and Defense Distributed, is that you are described in several places a ‘market anarchist’. That means you want a privatized police force and someone private to build the roads, right?
Wilson: Well, it’s a little bit, not that, actually. When you use market anarchism today, you’d signal the Center for a Stateless Society, guys like Kevin Carson, some of the people like post-Marxist left-anarchists. So they prefer market anarchism over anarcho-capitalism, which is traditionally the locus of this discussion about privatized police and privatized roads.
BPR: Like Murray Rothbard.
Wilson: That’s exactly right. So that’s kind of the Rothbardian camp that talk mostly about these anarcho-capitalist police forces and roads. Not that I’m not interested in that conversation, but I’m trying to use market anarchism as a signal to another set of people.
BPR: So what signal are you sending out then?
Wilson: Well basically, the kind of de-emphasis of the individualist anarchism of the past couple hundred years of America, and more the avocation of 18th and 19th century anarchist thought, especially continental anarchist thought. So, getting into mutualism, specifically. Market anarchism is consistently [paired] with mutualism. Our contrary ideas of the use of property, use of productive capital, even credit and banking practices. I mean, there’s a whole rich field of ideas that are often not really brought up at all, left unexamined, not taught in political courses, so I’m trying to signal that this is an interesting field of inquiry, and that these ideas are now kind of better emboldened by new software and new forms of manufacture and stuff.
BPR: Mutualism regards property ownership as a ‘you use or you lose it’ kind of deal, right?
Wilson: [Laugh] Yeah. Some best jargon is ‘Well you can leave your house, but you leave and come back, and someone else is living in your house.’ It’s certain questions like that absolute of individual property ownership. And I’m not trying to sell you on some pure mutualist or something. But I really like the political conversation that Proudhon was having at the time. You should read Proudhon’s letters to Bastiat. I mean like he references a place in history, which is relatively unexamined. I think even the early conversations of the anarchists, from Bakunin, and even Kropotkin, these are worth examining. Really bringing back core anarchism and not just making it a sideshow of the Austrian School. And I’m not trying to criticize it from the Austrian School, but I don’t really want to make a big conversation about Rothbardian, Austro-libertarianism. I’m trying to get back to core anarchism as enabled by new technologies.
BPR: On your Wikipedia page it also describes you as a ‘Crypto-anarchist’, which is perhaps even more obscure of a term than ‘market anarchist’. That’s focusing on using the web further anarchism, right?
Wilson: Yeah. You got it. It’s certainly not mainstream, but there’s a number of people who more rigorously and accurately use that term to describe themselves, at least in the circles that we’re running right now. Especially in Europe, especially among the Bitcoin community, they all see themselves as crypto-anarchists first, the kind of evangelist believers in Internet technology and cryptography. That is a real community.
BPR: And so Defense Distributed fits perfectly into that, then.
Wilson: I thought we did. We had a kind of rough introduction to that crowd. But I think over the last 9 months we’ve been accepted.
BPR: I mean once you get Open Source’s blessing, that’s a pretty good step.
Wilson: Oh definitely, I mean among the crypto-anarchist personalities and luminaries that I’ve had the opportunity to meet and to come around to, a number of them are pacifists, and were just kind of quite taken aback by the project. But I think that now they understand that I’m with them, they’re with us, and we’re all advocating for the same picture.
BPR: Are you not a pacifist?
Wilson: Well, I mean, it’s a deeper question and, no, I don’t think I’m a pacifist in the pure sense. I believe that violent struggles of resistance are often wholly appropriate, not to be foreclosed, if that makes sense.
BPR: I mean that is how this country came to be.
Wilson: Well, yeah, let’s be honest about that. I like the way you said it. That’s not a form of historical revisionism or mythology, that’s just the facts. So, yeah, the Jeffersonian idea is fine, ‘When in the course of human events’, yeah, blah, blah, blah, every now and then okay, some blood is spilled, and I don’t mean to be flippant about it, that’s not my mode, but I recognize a place in history for violence.
BPR: The kind of hypocrisy that you see in drones vs. one-shot pistols, is similar to a country founded in violence that is now stopping you from making your own arms.
Wilson: I’m not purely a ‘might makes right’, Nietzschean kind of like ‘Look you got the power, take it’ kind of guy. But a lot of people ignore all that, mystify it, put it away – that all modern democracies were essentially founded upon bloody overthrow of the ruling order.
BPR: On your website you also talk about always wanting to promote ‘private law’. Can you describe that?
Wilson: Yes. Okay. Basically, a private law society is advocated by Hans Herman Hoppe. He is at one of the extremes of the Austrian School, he’s an anarchist, philosopher, he was a student of Jürgen Habermas. And basically he came up with his own set of ethics, which are based on argumentation. Anyway he has this description of how to implement private law, and anarchist forms of civil organizations.
BPR: So would that just involved a ton of contracts specifying arbitration courts?
Wilson: Yeah, it kind of connects with classical liberal thought of a couple hundred years back, that private law is the only just way of organizing society. Just private law. And this is to highlight the fact that there is a set of law that we can describe as public law, which absolutely –
BPR: Is that like common law?
Wilson: No. Let’s described it this way: if you’re a politician, if you’re elected to office, or if you seize state power, you are allowed to do things which a private citizen would never be allowed to do – all kinds of forms of theft, and all kinds of forms of social engineering, and expropriation. These are allowed for you. And there’s this myth that well, we’re all equal citizens, or equal sovereigns, we’re participating in the same legal structure. He was trying to [redefine] the operation of law in society, so understand if you could just seize state power many things are allowed or given unto you, and this is unjust. In fact everyone should be subject to the same set of laws. The only way to ensure that this happens is to make sure that these set of laws are thrown out of the public sphere and fully privatized.
BPR: Any specific works of Hoppe inspire you?
Wilson: One of his best books, at least my favorite, is Democracy: The God that Failed. It’s this great critique of democratic time-preference and use of capital stock, and a comparison against monarchical, even divine rights of kings logic and stuff. It kind of corrects a flaw in the Austrian School, which is the Austrian School, among other things, is still pro-democracy, pro-democratic. But he said that this is a limitation of the school; in the end if you are going to advocate for these traditional forms, being a liberal democracy is actually one of the worst forms for preserving freedom and the capital stock of a country. And he’s just doing this as a form of historical critique, indicating that no, democracy is not a way of preserving society, freedom, justice and in the end, economics, wealth accumulation.
BPR: You need a more anarchic society, you’re saying.
Wilson: It’s a big book.
BPR: You’ve talked about the Austrian School and libertarianism, but I don’t think there’s a well-formed market anarchist party in this country. Do you subscribe to the Libertarian party or any other political platform in the US?
Wilson: No, I don’t – maybe it’s just my privilege. But I’m not interested in voting, I’m not interested in party politics. I consider myself an Internet partisan, like, I’m in favor of the Internet. I think when it’s beneficial I might try to help some of our friends in the Pirate Parties in different European states, especially when it comes to renegotiating some of their copyright laws and things like that. No, but in the United States there’s no place for me to express political preference inside that institutional framework.
BPR: And so you make your own political acts.
Wilson: Yeah, I mean, exactly. It’s like, what is being told and sold to you as politics its nothing like that at all, it’s in fact a form of police. The only kind of authentic political action is actually contesting spaces that have been policed by the prevailing social order. So, when a politician tells you, “Well this is a 3D printer, you can use it to do X and Y,” you come up to the 3D printer and say, “No, I will use it to do Z. This is politics.”
BPR: Are there any politicians you identify with – here or abroad?
Wilson: You mean if we had to pick a friend or something?
BPR: Yeah.
Wilson: I don’t. Honestly no. Because, there are a number of people who I know who are certainly more my friends than my enemies. But these people are, even at their most radical, they’re still reformist believers in the ideas of constitutional governance and in the ideas of like, ‘Well, we can return to some lost American pristineness.’ This is all problematic.
BPR: That makes sense for politicians who are members of a Constitutional government.
Wilson: Oh no question. No question it makes sense. But you know, show me a politician who’s for like, you know, basically the radical destruction of the whole thing, and yeah, you know, certainly. And like that’s my problem with voting. Yeah. I get to vote. Sure I can vote for the loss of this liberty, or the strengthening of this form this welfare, but I can’t cast my vote for the destruction of the whole damn thing. And that’s why I often don’t vote.
BPR: Yeah, those ballot measures aren’t usually too popular.
Wilson: [Laugh] Yeah. That’s right.
BPR: Alright, last question. Since the State Department began reviewing your files, you’ve kind of fallen off the map. Can you let us know what you’ve been up to, what your future plans are?
Wilson: Yeah. So, that was all kind of – One, what I was thinking was going to happen anyway. And two, I just stopped doing – I stopped doing interviews, I stopped posting regular updates. I kind of haven’t been telling people what we we’re up to, because I’m trying to keep it on [the low] until the government does actually decide to take action against me, and I can then of din up all of the interest we need. So I would say it’s a kind of strategic thing we’re doing right now. I am just laying low, building DefCad, and mending my lists, building a little marketing structure too, so we can get legal fundraising immediately. Uh, that’s it. So I’m just, I’m staying low.
BPR: And fixing your 3D printer right?
Wilson: Well, the parts are in the mail. [Laugh] It was a very long process to get that thing fixed, but I think, within a few weeks we’ll be – I don’t know. I’m going to be in Europe all of next month, but when I get back, I expect that there will be action taken against us, by [the State Department]. And then a whole nother round starts. So, we’re basically just playing for the longest game possible. I’m still doing all my IRS work and everything. It’s just less of the visible kind of gun production and sharing and stuff. You’ve got to law low, and I guess, kind of win a few more strategic messaging victories before we can proceed again.
BPR: What are you doing in Europe?
Wilson: Well there’s a bit of fundraising that I need to do. There’s a Bitcoin project I’m connecting with; I’m probably going to become the Director of a Bitcoin company in London. Which is like slightly related. And then, basically, I’ll be visiting Switzerland … And there’s a museum in London that’s acquired some of Defense Distributed’s pieces, so I’ll be visiting them as well.
BPR: Well thank you so much. I think you answered a lot of questions that were unanswered in some of your previous interviews. Thanks for being so forthcoming.
Wilson: Yeah of course. I apologize if I was scattered and stuff. This early afternoon and everything. I tried to give you my best stuff.
BPR: You did. And look out for the article on BrownPoliticalReview.org.
Wilson: Yeah, send it my way, man. I appreciate it
BPR Interviews Cody Wilson http://t.co/bB1BqYLIfM
BPR Interviews Cody Wilson [Full]
http://t.co/Yi6Q7gQetI