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Cody Rutledge Wilson (born January 31, 1988) is an American gun rights activist and crypto-anarchist.[1][2] He started Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization which develops and publishes open source gun designs, so-called "wiki weapons" created by 3D printing and digital manufacture.[3][4] He is the director of Defense Distributed; it gained international notoriety in 2013 when it published plans online for the Liberator, the first widely available functioning 3D-printed pistol.[5]
Cody Wilson | |
|---|---|
 Wilson in 2023 | |
| Born | January 31, 1988 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Central Arkansas (B.A., 2010) |
| Known for | Defense Distributed |
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Defense Distributed
In 2012, Wilson and associates at Defense Distributed began the Wiki Weapon Project to raise funds for designing and releasing the files for a 3D printable gun.[6] At the time Wilson was the project's only spokesperson; he called himself "co-founder" and "director."[7]
Learning of Defense Distributed's plans, manufacturer Stratasys threatened legal action and demanded the return of a 3D printer it had leased to Wilson. On September 26, 2012, before the printer was assembled for use, Wilson received an email from Stratasys suggesting he was using the printer "for illegal purposes". Stratasys immediately canceled its lease with Wilson and sent a team to confiscate the printer.[8][9]
While visiting the office of the ATF in Austin, Texas to inquire about the legalities of his project, Wilson was interrogated by the officers there.[8] Six months later, he was given a Federal Firearms License (FFL) to manufacture and deal weapons.[10]
In May 2013, Wilson successfully test-fired a pistol called "the Liberator" which reportedly was made using a Stratasys Dimension series 3D printer purchased on eBay.[11] After test firing, he released the blueprints of the gun's design online through a Defense Distributed website.[12] The State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanded that he remove the files, threatening prosecution for violations of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).[13] In October 2014, Defense Distributed began selling to the public a miniature CNC (computer numerical control) mill named Ghost Gunner to make receivers for the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.[14][15]
In November 2014 Wilson was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list,[16] a pick the publication regretted nine years later putting Wilson in its Hall of Shame, featuring ten picks it wished it could take back.[17][18] On May 6, 2015, Defense Distributed and the Second Amendment Foundation filed Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dept. of State, a lawsuit (a constitutional challenge of the ITAR regime used to control speech.[19] On July 10, 2018, the State Department offered to settle the lawsuit and Wilson continued to work at DEFCAD.[20] After his arrest on charges of sexual assault against a minor in September 2018, Wilson resigned from DD.[21] After a plea deal in September 2019, he rejoined the company.[22][23]
Dark Wallet
In 2013, Wilson, along with Amir Taaki, began work on a Bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet called Dark Wallet, a project planned to anonymize financial transactions.[24][25][26] He appeared at the SXSW festival in Austin in 2014 to discuss Dark Wallet.[27]
Bitcoin Foundation
On U.S. election day, November 4, 2014, Wilson announced that he would stand for election to a seat on the board of directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, with "the sole purpose of destroying the Foundation." He said, "I will run on a platform of the complete dissolution of the Bitcoin Foundation and will begin and end every single one of my public statements with that message."[28]
Hatreon
In 2017, Wilson launched Hatreon.us, an "alt-right version of Patreon" providing crowdfunding and payment services for groups and individuals banned from platforms including Kickstarter, Patreon, PayPal, and Stripe.[29] The site attracted notable alt-right and neo-Nazi figures such as Andrew Anglin and Richard B. Spencer. Wilson said that Hatreon clients included "right-wing women, people of color, and transgender people"; Bloomberg News reported that most donations went to white supremacists.[30] According to Hannah Shearer, staff attorney at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Hatreon users incited violence contrary to Hatreon's terms of service, which forbid illegal activity.[30][31]
Hatreon.us claimed to have received about $25,000 a month in donations.[32] The site took a five percent cut of donations.[30] Several months after Hatreon's launch, Visa, the site's payments processor, suspended its financial services. With no means of processing payments, the site became inactive.[33][34]
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Wilson says that he has an array of influences from anti-state and libertarian political thinkers[35] including mutualist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,[11][36] paleolibertarian anarcho-capitalists like Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and classical liberals such as Frederic Bastiat.[37][35] His political thought has been compared to the "conservative revolutionary" ideas of Ernst Jünger. Jacob Siegel wrote that "Cody Wilson arrives at a place where left, right—and democracy—disappear" and that he oscillates "somewhere between anarch and anarchist".[38]
Wilson is an avowed crypto-anarchist, and has discussed his work in relation to the cypherpunks and Timothy May's vision.[39] He did not vote in the 2016 United States presidential election.[40] He frequently cites the work of post-Marxist thinkers in public comments, especially that of Jean Baudrillard, whom he has claimed as his "master".[41][33][42] Asked during an interview with Popular Science if the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting affected his thinking or plans in any way, Wilson responded:
... understanding that rights and civil liberties are something that we protect is also understanding that they have consequences that are also protected, or tolerated. The exercise of civil liberties is antithetical to the idea of a completely totalizing state. That's just the way it is.[43]
Wilson is generally opposed to intellectual property rights.[44] He indicated his primary goal is the subversion of state structures and he hopes that his contributions may help to dismantle the existing system of capitalist property relations.[45]
In a January 2013 interview with Glenn Beck about the nature of and motivations behind his effort to develop and share gun 3D printable files Wilson said:
(It's) a real political act, giving you a magazine, telling you that it will never be taken away... That's real politics. That's radical equality. That's what I believe in... I'm just resisting. What am I resisting? I don't know, the collectivization of manufacture? The institutionalization of the human psyche? I'm not sure. But I can tell you one thing: this is a symbol of irreversibility. They can never eradicate the gun from the earth.[46]
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Wired's "Danger Room" named Wilson one of "The 15 Most Dangerous People in the World" in 2012.[47][48] In 2015 and 2017, Wired said that he was one of the five most dangerous people on the Internet; in 2019 it named him one of the most dangerous people on the internet for the decade.[49][50][51]
Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Wilson was student body president at Cabot High School in Cabot, Arkansas and graduated in 2006. He received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in 2010, where he had a scholarship.[52] While at UCA, Wilson was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and was the president of UCA's student government association. He traveled to China with UCA's study-abroad program.[53]
In 2012, he studied at the University of Texas School of Law but left the university in May 2013 after two years.[26][43][54] On December 28, 2018, he was indicted for sexual assault after a sexual encounter with a minor he met on SugarDaddyMeet.com, a website which matches younger, adult women with older men.[55] He was accused of committing a second-degree felony for paying a 16-year-old girl $500 for sex in a hotel room in Austin, Texas in August 2018.[56]
Wilson's defense attorney, F. Andino Reynal, said Wilson thought the girl was a consenting adult. SugarDaddyMeet.com requires users to declare they are at least 18 years old before they can create an account.[57] When the police issued a warrant for his arrest, Wilson was in Taipei, Taiwan. He was charged with an immigration violation by the Taiwanese National Immigration Agency (NIA) and he was deported to the United States, where his passport had been revoked by the U.S. government.[58][59] After he was returned to the U.S. by the United States Marshals Service on September 23, 2018, he was released on $150,000 bond from Harris County Jail in Houston.[60][61]
On August 9, 2019, Wilson accepted a deferred adjudication in exchange for pleading guilty to one charge. He was sentenced to seven years of probation, 475 hours of community service, and fined $1,200.[62][63][64] After completing his probation in 2022, the charges and case were dismissed.[63][65][66]
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Bibliography
- Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free. New York: Gallery Books (2016). ISBN 978-1476778266.
Filmography
- As himself
- After Newtown: Guns in America (2013)
- Print the Legend (2014)
- Deep Web (2015)
- No Control (2015)
- The New Radical (2017)
- Death Athletic: A Dissident Architecture[67] (2023)
- As producer
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