Pertinacious Tom
Super Anarchist
14th Most Dangerous Man In The World
To me, the world would seem more dangerous without his elk.
How did he get all the way down to 14th? I'd say that to statists, he might just be number one....He's a self-styled "crypto-anarchist". He quotes Foucault. His Twitter handle is @Radomysisky, which was the real name of Zinoviev, the Russian revolutionary tried and executed at the start of the purges. He has a 19th-century taste for ideologies and theories. His hero is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a Frenchman who, it's claimed, is the "father of anarchism" and was the first to declare that property is theft. And he believes that the Liberator will be a mechanism for radical redistribution of power.
He was a law student when he co-founded Defense Distributed . It's an organization that describes itself as "a non-profit software developer and publisher dedicated to striking the roots of all statist monopolism". Its mission is to "radicalize digital natives" by "employing political philosophy, activism and technology … to subvert the physical and digital architecture of oppression on behalf of the public".
What he isn't is some spotty loner who's dreamt all this up in his bedroom because he couldn't get a girlfriend. He was class president of his school, class president of his university, he had offers from Ivy League law schools. He is not even much of a geek. He didn't write the software, he announced it as a goal, at which point the company, Stratasys, that leased him his 3D printer, demanded its return, and the ensuing fight created headlines that led to developers and engineers flocking to his cause.
He is an articulate proponent of an influential new subculture. Welcome to the world of the techno-libertarians, an ideology based on the convergence of libertarian politics and a free and open web. Its poster boy is Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, and a funder of causes ranging from paying young people not to go to college, to Seasteading, a floating offshore nation state. Its spiritual home is Silicon Valley but, like the internet, it's distributed everywhere, an increasingly visible, well-funded new political ideology.
It is also for many people, liberals like myself, a pretty uncomfortable convergence. Because it's one thing to be pro-Edward Snowden, pro-internet privacy, pro-the open source movement. And it's another to be pro the freedom to print off your own assault weapon. And it's this discomfort that Cody Wilson is reveling in.
"There were a lot of comments on Reddit right when the government shut us down," says Wilson. "Reddit is normally anti-gun, by the way. It's young and it's left. And they were saying, 'Shit! I'm having to choose between a world of guns and a world of the managed internet! And I won't give up the internet, so therefore guns! It had forced the decision."
In fact, the issues that 3D guns raise are more complicated, sophisticated and ultimately unknowable than might first appear. Wilson and Defense Distributed are pushing at the margins of the internet, the margins of freedom, of what the ramifications of this technology will mean. And it's impossible to know. Technology is changing our relationship with everything. The future, once a far-off place of mind control and replicants, is thundering up behind us in our rear-view mirror. And he's right: it couldn't be more political....
To me, the world would seem more dangerous without his elk.