I'm having deja vu with this 3D printed gun censorship stuff. I had my hair on fire about electronic voting in 2006, & for a decade people were like "you're freaking out about a bogeyman." The easy, instant mass blocking of urls & articles about urls & CAD files feels similar.
It's like looking at a system and saying, "you don't understand what you've built, here. You haven't grokked what its failure mode is, because you think it's an electronic version of this old thing but really it's a whole new thing."
Whatever with these gun CAD files, man. The problem is in the way all the parts are working together, and what this particular degenerate case says about the whole -- the settlement & the AG push & the subsequent shockingly effective & rapid censorship....
...What this 3D gun files thing shows is the ease & speed with which official ignorance & mendacity (always present & a factor) can translate directly into suppression of lawful speech by manipulating a very small number of inputs.
That's the bigger story. It's not about guns. It's about the extreme vulnerability of this superficially complex system (but underneath it's shockingly monolithic) to illiberal manipulation. Russiagate & 3D guns are the /same story/, people.
The story is about how easy it is to poke this thing in one or two places and change the world. A lever this long should probably not exist. (cf collectiveidea.com/blog/archives/…)
To end this by returning to the original tweet, my reaction 2006 reaction to e-voting was "OMG SO DANGEROUS HOW CAN U NOT PANIC." And my reaction to being blocked from typing a non-malware political domain name into any FB-controlled box, or seeing it booted from AWS is the same.
(This thread is for all the people who tell me, "Stokes, I'm anti-gun but I've learned from your gun stuff, but this 3D printed guns thing is a bridge too far... burn that crap off the internet with fire please."
