OSD 152: We go 100 to 0 real quick
0% lowers, and treating the inevitable like it's already here.
This week Defense Distributed announced an update to the Ghost Gunner 3 that allows the machine to mill an AR lower from a raw billet of aluminum [1]. In a sense, it’s a major change — a decade ago 100% lowers were your only option, and now things have now worked their way down to 0%. And it has never been this easy to make a 0% lower functional.
But while the technology is novel, the idea isn’t. For years it’s been inevitable, just a matter of small-scale manufacturing technology catching up. Accelerating inevitabilities is in fact much of Defense Distributed’s whole vibe. As Cody Wilson said in 2018:
Interviewer: What makes you comfortable with a world where people can pump out guns in their garage anytime they want to?
Wilson: What’s going to make me comfortable is when people stop coming to this office and acting like there’s a debate about it. The debate is over. The guns are downloadable. The files are in the public domain. You cannot take them back. You can adjust your politics to this reality. You will not ask me to adjust mine.
Technology gets better over time. So any debate about what some new tech can do today is just a placeholder for the new debate about what it’ll do tomorrow. It clutters your mind to discuss it.
The more clarifying approach is to think about what the tech will do in the limit. Fast forward 100 years, what’s the ultimate version of this thing? Then figure out that version’s implications.
Small-scale manufacturing is an easy one. A gun is made of a few dozen metal and plastic parts. It’s getting increasingly easy to manufacture metal and plastic parts at home, with no limit in sight. This obviously ends with it being trivial to create high-quality guns at home.
Yes, that’s not a groundbreaking insight. And at some level, everybody knows that’s where things are going. But the hand-wringing about Defense Distributed’s efforts doublethinks around that. The people who want to stop innovation in homemade guns are fired up because they know the inevitable endpoint. But to bother fighting Defense Distributed is to ignore the inevitability. The ultimate outcome isn’t dictated by any one company’s success. It’s dictated by the nature of how technology moves forward. The only way to stop it would be to destroy small-scale manufacturing in general.
Strong encryption is a useful parallel. Every few years, the government picks a new high-profile crime as the reason strong encryption should be illegal, the spiritual successors of the cypherpunks push back, and everyone debates it for a while. What’s happening there isn’t a discussion about the exact implementation details of a backdoor. It looks like that, but it’s really a fight about whether the technology should exist at all. Strong encryption is a permissionless right to speak freely. It cannot coexist with any structure that controls the exchange of information. That’s not a matter of morality, it’s a matter of technology.
Similarly, manufacturing tech will eventually be the permissionless right to create objects of your choosing. It cannot coexist with any structure that controls what people manufacture. And again, that’s not a philosophical statement about what should be allowed. It’s just a description of how technology works.
We touched on a related point in “OSD 106: Law is a verb”, with an excerpt from a speech by Paul Graham where he discussed intellectual property:
The funny thing is “what is property?” historically has been somewhat defined by what’s convenient to be property. In the days of hunter-gatherers, it was not convenient for land to be property. But now it is, so now land is property.
If you imagine that we lived on the moon, and we had to get air in pipes and paid for the air, people could charge for smells. People could charge for good smells. So it would seem reasonable for smells to be property. But [today] you walk by a restaurant and you smell this delicious smell — you get this free boost, for nothing.
I think the record labels are like these people who are from the moon. They used to be able to sell these things, because the only way you could get them was through their channel. But now, files move around like smells and it’s just not convenient to charge for them. Ultimately, this stuff is pragmatic.
That applies to laws, too. In practice, the law is determined by what’s feasible to have as law. And that’s just a function of technology.
Here’s how that plays out (from OSD 106):
Guns are in an odd spot right now, where the the laws about them are shifting from feasible to infeasible right in front of us. Think about historical examples, like voting rights for women or marriage for gay people. A feasibility breakdown has two steps:
Increasingly widespread disregard for the law
Increasingly ineffective responses from the law’s defenders
That cycle repeats for a few years. Then one day you wake up and the law is so gone that it’s hard to remember it was ever there.
People have known that guns are on this path ever since 3D-printing first became a thing. So that’s not new. What is new is that step 2 has started. A few states have banned homemade guns, and the ATF is thinking about doing the same. But of course the whole point is that they’re unbannable — and getting geometrically more unbannable as manufacturing technology improves — so that takes you back to step 1. Then step 2 again in a couple years, and so on, faster and faster each cycle.
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[1] The machine actually only mills the upper half of the lower from a raw billet. You need to attach the pre-finished “lower lower” and buffer tower ring. So it’s not really milling a full lower from a raw billet, but the point of this essay is that that doesn’t matter. It’ll get there eventually, so where the tech happens to be today is irrelevant.
This week’s links
Rare Breed Triggers’ 3-position trigger
Compliance with the letter of the law go brrr
Good intro video to radios
Mom says come home for dinner, over.
(But seriously this whole space is pretty cool.)
How Pennsylvania’s legislature passed permitless carry after nearly a decade of trying
In-depth reporting from Stephen Gutowski at The Reload. The governor vetoed the bill, but it’s a major change that it even got through the legislature.
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The article misses the most boring example of technology beating law. PORN. Porn production and distribution used to be illegal in the usa. The internet just broke this legal framework in a few years. Stoping the distribution became a joke as people could download porn from other countries.
Would love to hear about your thoughts about decentralized antifragle tech that’s based on top of heavily centralized and fragile infrastructure and technology.
Do you see this as an impediment to decentralized tech in general?