Eight years ago, we wrapped production of Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary The New Radical. It was my sixth film as an executive producer and my first documentary. When friends asked me about it, I would tell them, “It’s about taking power away from central authorities and giving it to the people.” They liked that. “The main subjects,” I’d continue, “are Cody Wilson, the guy who invented 3D printable guns, and Amir Taaki, who makes crypto privacy tools that people use for buying drugs and human trafficking. ISIS uses his stuff to raise money.” They didn’t like that.
Wilson dropped out of law school after inventing the Liberator, a digital blueprint that allows anyone with a 3D printer to manufacture an untraceable handgun. The first part of The New Radical recounts Wilson’s initial Indiegogo fundraising campaign for the Liberator, which was flagged and taken down; then his 3D printer was repossessed, and the US State Department informed him that if he didn’t take the Liberator file off his website, he would be criminally prosecuted. By the time these actions were taken, more than 100,000 people had downloaded the file. Any one of them could share it, and thousands did. Other printable gun designs would follow.
As Wilson became a news story, he caught the attention of another 20-something, Taaki, who at the time was squatting in a nominally empty apartment in London with a group of anti-capitalist, anti-globalist coders. Taaki had been one of the earliest Bitcoin developers. He founded Britain’s first crypto exchange and organized the country’s first crypto conferences. For a short while, he was the young face of Bitcoin on British television.
Seemingly, these two could not have been more different. Cody, born and raised in Little Rock, Ark., was physically imposing and solemn to the point of severity. Taaki, a Kurdish-Iranian Brit, was wiry and riotously energetic, with a broad smile that made him almost cuddly. Wilson was a red-state capitalist through and through; Taaki was an anarchist proud to have never held a job. Wilson spoke in academic language that often veered into abstraction; Taaki turned his ideas into sing-song poems. Nevertheless, friendship and genuine affection bloomed between the two men.
“Cody and Amir transform from reckless jesters into something more sinister.”
The New Radical follows their bond as it evolves into efforts to create Dark Wallet, a crypto app that would allow users to make untraceable purchases on the Dark Web. That pursuit ended when Taaki mysteriously disappeared. A year later, he was arrested upon landing at London’s Heathrow Airport on suspicion of terrorism. Concurrently, the film follows Wilson as he pursues a lawsuit against the federal government. His case was built not on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, but the First Amendment right to free speech. All computer code is free speech, his lawyers argued. The Liberator is just a recipe, no more illicit than a recipe for chocolate-chip cookies.
The film is observational, never betraying the filmmaker’s viewpoint. Wilson’s and Taaki’s beliefs and exploits are critiqued or supported by journalists, lawyers, a former FBI agent, a Department of Justice prosecutor, open-source godfather Richard Stallman, and in an extended interview with Julian Assange. Throughout, video montages, beginning with President Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Address and ending on news of Donald Trump’s election, point to a world that is barreling toward chaos. Wilson and Taaki transform from reckless jesters into something more sinister.
The New Radical screened in the Documentary Competition of the Sundance Film Festival in January 2017. Thematically, it was the right moment for the film. Premiering just days after Trump’s “American carnage” Inaugural Address, the film’s prediction of an uncertain and unstable future couldn’t have been more apt. Commercially, however, it was exactly the wrong moment for The New Radical. People weren’t looking for new real-life villains, or more reasons to be afraid.
Trump’s presidency mobilized legacy media as a force of “resistance.” The independent film community morphed into something like a battalion in an army at war. When you’re a soldier at war, you’re either with the cause or against it. You don’t ask questions; you don’t need to understand the motivations of the enemy. Wilson was clearly an enemy, and The New Radical was DOA.
Most independent films aren’t hits, and I don’t claim that The New Radical would have found a large audience had Hillary Clinton won in 2016. A film centered around provocative ideas has inherent limits, and while the movie came out during the peak of American culture’s antihero worship, the subjects of a documentary are real humans. Walter White offers the viewer an opportunity for escapism; less so a guy who says that school shootings are “an unfortunate dimension of proper liberty.” And when a portion of your distributor’s staff refuses to work on the film, that doesn’t help, either.
Approaching the 2024 election, I watched the movie again. I was struck by the number of ways in which it predicted the politics of the past eight years, in particular the realignment of political categories.
As a Second Amendment absolutist, Wilson had a large and passionate fan base on the far right. Taaki, an anti-corporate speaker and activist, prized egalitarianism and feminism. Our fond, half-serious hope as producers was that critics would describe the film as an “alt-right / antifa” bromance, and that we could use a blurb to that effect in our marketing. In 2017, no one believed there was a real-life Venn diagram that captured political bedfellows as peculiar as these two.
But by the time The New Radical premiered, Bernie Sanders-to-Trump (and Obama-to-Trump) voters had played a decisive role in the 2016 election. The horseshoe theory of politics posits that the extreme left and the extreme right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a straight line, converge with each other. According to the political scientist Jeff Taylor, it usually takes the form of “the left and the right as two components of populism, with elitism residing in the center.”
“Their hatred for elites burns hot.”
Neither Wilson nor Taaki are boilerplate populists. They are too condescending and don’t believe they speak for a silent majority, nor do they romanticize their respective countries’ glorious past. But their hatred for elites burns hot. Theirs is a populism of direct action, not electoral politics.
On the eve of the new millennium, Hollywood released Fight Club and The Matrix. Six years later came V for Vendetta. The cultural impact of these films is greater than that of any film that has come since. Each is fantastically entertaining. They are action spectacles and vessels for thought-provoking ideas. They have consistently and dramatically gained popularity in the decades since their release, and the ideas represented in them have become more prevalent. Those ideas are strikingly similar: An everyman protagonist, standing in for the viewer, discovers he is being manipulated by a giant system. According to Fight Club and V for Vendetta, the solution to this dilemma is gross nihilism: bringing down the system and the oppression it imposes through political violence. The Matrix takes a different tack, with liberation coming from a Christ figure.
In The End of History and the Last Man, which appeared shortly after the victory of the West in the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy prevailed while communism, fascism, and ethno-imperialism had all fallen because liberal democracy does a better job of satisfying human desires — psychological, as well as physical — than any other form of social order. “The end of history” implies a gradual but steady decrease in political conflict as the world universally adopts a governing system in which cooperation creates mutual benefit.
In the second half of the book, however, Fukuyama laid out a thesis on how history may restart. He speculated that some people will be fundamentally dissatisfied in a “post-history” because of the dearth of ambition for greatness. He recalled Friedrich Nietzsche, who theorized that the Western liberal democracy that was emerging in the late 19th century would be dominated by “the Last Man.” In sharp contrast to the Übermensch, the Last Man is a mediocrity who leads a life devoted to comfort in a world managed by bureaucrats.
Building on this argument, Fukuyama returned to Plato’s notion of thymos, the part of the psyche that contains anger, shame, and pride, and manifests itself as the desire to be recognized as superior to others. Fukuyama worried that “bestial men” might wreck liberal democracy for the sake of glory, or just to have something interesting to do. Stunningly, he specifically named Donald Trump as the type of person who craves the adulation of the crowd and who might not be satisfied in the new, safer world.
Some 350 years ago, John Locke elaborated the basic liberal idea that emphasizing an individual’s rights and desires over a group’s benefits was a more humane and effective way to organize a society. It seems highly unlikely that Locke, whose writings are permeated with religious belief, anticipated that his ideas could lead to “the end of history.” Whether Übermensch or Last Man, ego-driven or comfort-driven, most people today prioritize the self. The autonomy of the self has become the dominant form of holiness in America today, a supposition supported by the fact that only religious zealots seem to have any immunity to its allure.
“The atomization of Western society is accelerating.”
The atomization of Western society is accelerating. For decades now, our minds have been steered by algorithms that reinforce and build upon our existing opinions. Our clicks can lead us to drown in endless caustic opinions, flattened such that each is seemingly no more valid than our own. Equally, our clicks can lead us to a path of indignity through comparison to the famous-for-being-famous, famous-for-being-impossibly-beautiful, and famous-for-being-rich.
The democratization of information, rather than producing a people who agree on facts and cooperate, has created an army of misinformed, distrustful, angry citizens. It isn’t just conspiracy theorists. Only 17 percent of Americans think our society is going in the right direction; 71 percent are dissatisfied with our system of government; and 78 percent are dissatisfied with the country’s moral and ethical climate. Our common culture has collapsed along with confidence in our institutions. Government, media, industry, the financial system, religion, education, the police, the military, and the courts are all far less trusted than in decades past.
People are attempting to take more control for themselves: We arrange our own information ecosystems; broad swaths of people reject the medical establishment’s counsel; the number of homeschooled children has more than doubled over the past 20 years and is 34 times larger than 40 years ago; independents outnumber Democrats or Republicans; “spiritual but not religious” has become the norm.
In sum, at the same time we accord less credence and support to our institutions, great majorities believe that society has been spiraling out of control. But very few people seem to be drawing the connection between these two things.
Most people old enough to have been around for the monoculture recognize that it kept us on the same page. We long for the time of Walter Cronkite in theory, but in practice, we like to see the rich and powerful exposed for their flaws and brought down. We hold people with influence to impossibly high standards of ethics and decision-making, and then resent them for falling short.
The alternative to the authorities is the glamor of the rebel, embodied in a thousand real and fictional heroes who reject our supposedly oppressive system. From James Dean to Tyler Durden, from Noam Chomsky to Russell Brand. From Neo in The Matrix to Wilson and Taaki. Finally, there is the ultimate rebel icon of the 21st century: Trump. The fact that he comes from the side of politics that labels itself “conservative” says a lot.
The New Radical, by taking untraceable guns and black-market commerce as its subject matter, shone a spotlight on the very real dangers in democratizing power that had previously been monopolized by central authorities. Wilson, Taaki, and Assange are the perfect subjects for this journey, because they are honest to themselves and to our cameras about what the changes they propose will mean. They think the trade-offs are worth it. I believe that most people, should they give it a few moments of thought, would disagree.
Viewership data is impossible for a small film to procure—especially for a film whose themes basically invite its own digital theft. I have, however, seen quite a bit of anecdotal evidence over the years, and it all indicates that the preponderance of the film’s audience viewed Wilson and Taaki not as antiheroes, but straight-up heroes .
“There’s no such thing as an antiwar film,” opined François Truffaut. The great director was suggesting that a cinematic portrait of the adventure and thrill of combat and the brotherhood among soldiers will inevitably glorify war. I don’t deny that Wilson and Taaki come across as badasses in our movie, and of course, one definition of the word “radical” is basically “super cool.” I wasn’t naïve to the fact that a good chunk of the audience would be fans of Wilson’s and Taaki’s ideas, or even become fans of their ideas while watching the film. But I did feel like there would be a mix of opinions, and was optimistic that we would start a debate.
Shortly after The New Radical premiered, Wilson founded a website to provide crowdfunding and payment services for people banned from Indiegogo, PayPal, Stripe, Patreon, and the like. Declaring it “the alt-right version of Patreon,” he named the site “Hatreon.” Yeah, he’s a real piece of work. Shortly after its founding, Hatreon predictably had its payment processing withdrawn by Visa. Unable to find alternate processing, the site died.
Wilson gained further notoriety when he hired a professional escort who turned out to be underage. Outside of the country at the time his arrest warrant was issued, he skipped his return flight, briefly becoming an international fugitive. His case was ultimately settled without jail time. Feeling the settlement was lenient, Judge Brad Urrutia accused Wilson of “hiding behind the laws of the country you mocked for years.”
In 2018, the State Department acceded to Wilson’s free-speech argument. Shortly thereafter, he launched a nonprofit website that acts as a community-created repository of firearm blueprints, from the original Liberator to AR-15 frames and more exotic semi-automatic weapons.
Cody’s primary vocation remains the one depicted in the last section of The New Radical. The receiver is the only part of a gun that is regulated. “Eighty-percent receivers” are pieces of fabricated metal that require a few modifications to become the centerpiece of a fully functioning and entirely untraceable weapon. Wilson and his team manufacture and sell a miniature computer-controlled mill that performs those last modifications. Each of these machines is capable of producing thousands of untraceable “ghost guns.” Essentially unknown in 2016, ghost guns are now commonly used in crimes. Wilson has made his vision of freedom a reality.
Terrorism charges against Amir Taaki were dropped. In 2018, he assembled a group in Barcelona dedicated to leveraging blockchain to help national-liberation causes such as the Catalan independence movement. He compares the group to a startup incubator, driven by social change, rather than profit. Upon its launch, Taaki stated that members of this collective would relinquish their other responsibilities and commitments, undergo a period of “ideology training,” and live an ascetic life in a common property. Their long-term objective is “the complete collapse of the world state system.” In 2023, Taaki revived the Dark Wallet agenda, again pursuing untraceable transactions, this time under the name DarkFi, a subversive play on the more corporate “DeFi,” for decentralized finance.
For all the accusations of self-aggrandizement leveled in the film—and implied in this essay—both men have withdrawn from the media spotlight and only become more committed to their causes.
Guns are a decided issue in America. Some people won’t admit it, but 400 million guns aren’t going away. Plus, gun control is a clear political loser, and the current Democratic presidential ticket has seemingly accepted that fact. The question now is how quickly our national fetish will be physically distributed to the rest of the world, with some help from Wilson and his ilk.
Cryptocurrency has made a lot of people rich, but I don’t see that it has changed anything fundamental. If I were forced at gunpoint to make a bet on its future, I’d bet on the banks.
Online privacy and illicit commerce remain battlegrounds between the state and its antagonists. The recent arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging service Telegram, was perhaps the boldest move to date to tame the digital frontiers of communication. States will gain new capacities for control through technology in some ways just as they lose it in others. It is an arms race with no end in sight.
Perhaps the most consequential question for the 21st century will be how different governments act in this new world. The New Radical takes a somewhat lengthy detour into the story of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the online black market Silk Road. Unlike with Wilson’s sex offense, the law did find a way to extinguish Ulbricht. At only 29 years old, he was given an unprecedented sentence of life in prison without parole on charges including narcotics conspiracy and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Few viewers of the film will not be moved by his eloquent plea for leniency or his mother, Lyn, advocating on his behalf. Seeing an individual made an example of in such an obvious and merciless way strikes most people as wrong, even un-American.
“Momentum toward instability and decentralization in the West accelerates.”
It is not, however, un-Chinese. Or un-Russian, un-Iranian … the list goes on. While momentum toward instability and decentralization in the West accelerates, China’s surveillance state is utterly entrenched. Indeed, at the end of the version of Fight Club screened in the Middle Kingdom, Edward Norton’s character gets arrested and is sent to an asylum, rather than watching a cityscape of buildings crumble.
Does Taaki’s incubator have Xi Jinping in its sights? I doubt it. Assange seems to me to be as anti-American as he is pro-transparency, but I suspect that the reason that WikiLeaks has facilitated almost no leaked government documents from dictatorships is because government documents from those countries are not leaking. To be a whistleblower in an autocracy takes truly unfathomable courage and, sad to say, no small measure of naïveté. Autocrats are not going to change their policies because of a little public embarrassment. They will, however, kill traitors without hesitation, and in some cases, their families, too.
And so that’s where we stand. China rises, Russia attacks, and America and the West are judged deficient by standards that only exist because of the free and egalitarian society they themselves have created and continue to promote, however imperfectly. Julian Assange is now free, and enjoys more support from the American public than ever before. People see him as an enemy of the state, but not in a bad way.
Welcome to the new normal.