- Wilson, Cody.
Come and Take It.
New York: Gallery Books, 2016.
ISBN 978-1-4767-7826-6.
-
Cody Wilson is the founder of
Defense Distributed, best known for
producing the
Liberator
single-shot pistol, which can be produced largely by
additive
manufacturing (“3D printing”) from polymer material.
The culmination of the Wiki Weapon project, the Liberator, whose
plans were freely released on the Internet, demonstrated that
antiquated organs of the state who thought they could control the
dissemination of simple objects and abridge the inborn right of
human beings to defend themselves has been, like so many other
institutions dating from the era of railroad-era continental-scale
empires, transcended by the free flow of information and the
spontaneous collaboration among like-minded individuals made
possible by the Internet. The Liberator is a highly visible milestone
in the fusion of the world of bits (information) with the world of atoms:
things. Earlier computer technologies put the tools to
produce books, artwork, photography, music, and motion pictures
into the hands of creative individuals around the world, completely
bypassing the sclerotic gatekeepers in those media whose
offerings had become all too safe and predictable, and who never dared
to challenge the economic and political structures in which they
were embedded.
Now this is beginning to happen with physical artifacts. Additive
manufacturing—building up a structure by adding material
based upon a digital model of the desired object—is still in
its infancy. The materials which can be used by readily-affordable
3D printers are mostly various kinds of plastics, which are limited
in structural strength and thermal and electrical properties, and
resolution has not yet reached that achievable by other means of precision
manufacturing. Advanced additive manufacturing technologies,
such as various forms of
metal
sintering, allow use of a wider variety of materials including
high-performance metal alloys, but while finding applications in the
aerospace industry, are currently priced out of the reach of individuals.
But if there's one thing we've learned from the microelectronics and
personal computer revolutions since the 1970s, it's that what's
scoffed at as a toy today is often at the centre of tomorrow's
industrial revolution and devolution of the means of production (as
somebody said, once upon a time) into the hands of individuals who
will use it in ways incumbent industries never imagined. The first
laser printer I used in 1973 was about the size of a sport-utility
vehicle and cost more than a million dollars. Within ten years, a
laser printer was something I could lift and carry up a flight of
stairs, and buy for less than two thousand dollars. A few years
later, laser and advanced inkjet printers were so good and so
inexpensive people complained more about the cost of toner and ink
than the printers themselves.
I believe this is where we are today with mass-market additive
manufacturing. We're still in an era comparable to the personal
computer world prior to the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981:
early adopters tend to be dedicated hobbyists such as members of
the “maker
subculture”, the available hardware is expensive and
limited in its capabilities, and evolution is so fast that it's
hard to keep up with everything that's happening. But just as with
personal computers, it is in this formative stage that the foundations
are being laid for the mass adoption of the technology in the future.
This era of what I've come to call “personal
manufacturing” will do to artifacts what digital technology
and the Internet did to books, music, and motion pictures. What will be
of value is not the artifact (book, CD, or DVD), but rather the information
it embodies. So it will be with personal manufacturing. Anybody
with the design file for an object and access to a printer that
works with material suitable for its fabrication will be able to
make as many of that object as they wish, whenever they want, for
nothing more than the cost of the raw material and the energy
consumed by the printer. Before this century is out, I believe
these personal manufacturing appliances will be able to make
anything, ushering in the age of atomically precise
manufacturing and the era of
Radical Abundance (August 2013),
the most fundamental
change in the economic organisation of society since the
industrial revolution.
But that is then, and this book is about now, or the recent past. The
author, who describes himself as an anarchist (although I find his
views rather more heterodox than other anarchists of my acquaintance),
sees technologies such as additive manufacturing and Bitcoin as ways
not so much to defeat the means of control of the state and the
industries who do its bidding, but to render them irrelevant and
obsolete. Let them continue to legislate in their fancy marble
buildings, draw their plans for passive consumers in their boardrooms,
and manufacture funny money they don't even bother to print any more
in their temples of finance. Lovers of liberty and those who
cherish the creativity that makes us human will be elsewhere, making
our own future with tools we personally understand and control.
Including guns—if you believe the most fundamental human right
is the right to one's own life, then any infringement upon one's
ability to defend that life and the liberty that makes it worth living
is an attempt by the state to reduce the citizen to the station of a
serf: dependent upon the state for his or her very life. The Liberator
is hardly a practical weapon: it is a single-shot pistol firing
the .380 ACP
round and, because of the fragile polymer material from which it is
manufactured, often literally a single-shot weapon: failing
after one or at most a few shots. Manufacturing it requires an
additive manufacturing machine substantially more capable and expensive
than those generally used by hobbyists, and post-printing steps described
in Part XIV which are rarely mentioned in media coverage. Not all
components are 3D printed: part of the receiver is made of steel
which is manufactured with a laser cutter (the steel block is not
functional; it is only there to comply with the legal requirement that
the weapon set off a metal detector). But it is as a proof of concept
that the Liberator has fulfilled its mission. It has demonstrated
that even with today's primitive technology, access to firearms can no
longer be restricted by the state, and that crude attempts to control
access to design and manufacturing information, as documented in the
book, will be no more effective than any other attempt to block the
flow of information across the Internet.
This book is the author's personal story of the creation of the
first 3D printed pistol, and of his journey from law student to
pioneer in using this new technology in the interest of individual
liberty and, along the way, becoming somewhat of a celebrity, dubbed
by Wired magazine “one of the most dangerous
men in the world”. But the book is much more than that. Wilson
thinks like a philosopher and writes like a poet. He describes a
new material for 3D printing:
In this new material I saw another confirmation. Its advent
was like the signature of some elemental arcanum, complicit
with forces not at all interested in human affairs.
Carbomorph. Born from incomplete reactions and
destructive distillation. From tar and pitch and heavy oils, the
black ichor that pulsed thermonous through the arteries of the very
earth.
On the “Makers”:
This insistence on the lightness and whimsy of farce. The
romantic fetish and nostalgia, to see your work as instantly
lived memorabilia. The event was modeled on Renaissance
performance. This was a crowd of actors playing historical
figures. A living charade meant to dislocate and obscure their
moment with adolescent novelty. The neckbeard demiurge sees
himself keeling in the throes of assembly. In walks the
problem of the political and he hisses like the mathematician
at Syracuse: “Just don't molest my baubles!”
…
But nobody here truly meant to give you a revolution.
“Making” was just another way of selling you
your own socialization. Yes, the props were period and we
had kept the whole discourse of traditional production, but
this was parody to better hide the mechanism.
We were “making together,” and “making
for good” according to a ritual under the signs of
labor. And now I knew this was all apolitical on purpose.
The only goal was that you become normalized. The Makers
had on their hands a Last Man's revolution whose effeminate
mascots could lead only state-sanctioned pep rallies for
feel-good disruption.
The old factory was still there, just elevated to the image
of society itself. You could buy Production's acrylic coffins,
but in these new machines was the germ of the old productivism.
Dead labor, that vampire, would still glamour the living.
This book recounts the history of the 3D printed pistol, the people
who made it happen, and why they did what they did. It recounts
recent history during the deployment of a potentially revolutionary
technology, as seen from the inside, and the way things actually
happen: where nobody really completely understands what is going on
and everybody is making things up as they go along. But if the promise
of this technology allows the forces of liberty and creativity to
prevail over the grey homogenisation of the state and the powers that
serve it, this is a book which will be read many years from now by
those who wish to understand how, where, and when it all began.
October 2016 