The Real Palmer Luckey

In what seems to be either a total cope or some kind of elaborate op, Palmer Luckey has been completely misrepresented by the media his entire career. Specifically, Palmer has been the subject of what I can only think is a coordinated campaign to make him look unserious, an idiot, as silly/foolish, a tech bro, maybe even a “personality” more than a die hard technology executive.

 This has done a great disservice not only to Palmer, but to us, because we do not know who the real Palmer is, even though it has been right there in front of our eyes the whole time. In fact, Palmer has been not only forthcoming but almost guileless in sharing his views and the parts of his activities that are not classified. He is a fixture on the tech speaking circuit, he pitches his company all the time, they have books about what they do and what their strategy is. When you talk to Palmer, you will be seeing what you are getting. This is one reason I find him easier to work with than some of our other executives. So this lack of accurate analysis about Palmer is not emerging from him. 

The most important thing to know is that Palmer Luckey is leading the military strategy of the tech industry; that is to say, he is the highest authority in the Valley on areas of weapons development, war strategy, and battlefield operations. He is extremely involved in creating war and defense strategy for America and works directly with them continually. Thus he not just head of military for the tech industry, but he is likely the most advanced strategist in warfare for our time, in a position of serious power and already architecting war and combat scenarios at global scale.

 The vehicle for this is Palmer’s company, Anduril, which creates weapons for the new vision of warfare that Palmer Lucky has developed. This involves a never-ending escalation path of weapons development, hooking up the venture capital firehose to the military apparatus to start pumping in a new world of drone swarms, hyper advanced satellite surveillance, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, AR/VR and yes, creating super soldiers with biometrics startups. 

Palmer is the leader of a new effort to introduce a VC-led sea change in weapons development. If this goes as planned, he will lead America and many other countries in a massive escalation in weapons development and in a new kind of warfare. He will re-locate the site of war and defense strategy to the venture capitalist. 

This change will be discussed for the rest of history. Assuming there is anyone left to speak on it. 

My problem with Palmer Luckey is that he is a human rights abuser and war criminal and that his path, obviously, puts him on a collision course with mass death. His path brings all of us onto a collision course with mass death. That is my beef with you and no other. 

I sincerely believe he has what it takes to go all the way to the top, actually, of fucking history. His execution with Oculus is fucking legendary and Palmer brought a level of urgency, execution and vision that had not been present before, though AR/VR had been a technology industry goal and vision, and before that, in sci-fi, for decades upon decades. What Palmer did was introduce the first commercially viable AR/VR technology, delivered at mass scale on a consumer budget. He was the one who actually bridged the gap from fantasy to viable delivery. 

This is a context that we must bring to bear on his new company, Anduril. Palmer has a combination of skills and talents that make me believe he will absolutely succeed. He has experience with hardware, something that is far rarer than software experience in the industry. The issue of having cheap parts and materials needed for commodity hardware that must be constantly updated, like that proposed for the new battlefield, is something he is extremely familiar with. He is familiar with the problems of producing the speed and computation needed to render these immersive experiences, that translate extremely well onto applications in the battlefield. I have not ever seen an executive execute on his level, at his age, and with the amount of capital he has had access to, which frankly, has been totally meager compared to the achievements he has produced. And let’s be honest: the true test for AR/VR was video-game-level performance. And honestly, with all the military games we have, he was basically dealing with role-play soldiers in role-play battlefields, and in an in-game world, having similar requirements for visibility, speed, delivery of real-time information, strategy, etc for the player. There is a very natural affinity between what he has done in the past and what he is doing now. 

When Apple launched its commercial headset this week, Palmer was who I thought of. I think he continues to be criminally under-valued even in achievements that are globally visible. We would not have had this year’s WWDC without Palmer, and I hope that Apple has been far more respectful than Facebook in honoring that. 

So, in all, very serious person, working in the most serious issues of all, and people think he is a joke and a charlatan? Literally how? And everyone thinks he’s… dumb? Frivolous? Like I really don’t even see the play here. People like Jason Calacanis, who has never been trusted with anything more than a podcast and a small goon squad around here, feel like they can look down on Palmer Luckey and talk shit, Palmer who has literally been at the forefront multiple times in changing the strategic direction of the entire industry, as a first mover and as the founder and executive responsible for delivering it. Sorry, Jason, but putting together sponsored meetups for your buddies for 30 years doesn’t quality you to even fucking look at Palmer. No one has given you a billion dollars to do fuck-all, and they never will. Please leave Palmer’s name out of your fucking mouth you fucking fraud. 

Point of personal contention. Moving on. 

At some point a picture circulated widely of Palmer Luckey at some kind of cosplay or gaming event where he was dressed up in a silly costume; this was construed as yet more “Palmer is a joke,” instead of the reality of it, which is that Palmer is a totally game, in some ways serene, unbothered, highly confident person who loves to have a little fun as much as anyone else, and has always enjoyed video games. It was literally just geek culture. That’s it. That’s all you’re seeing here. Grow the fuck up. And I would say that is a healthy thing to see in these folks. Mark Zuckerberg likes getting choked out and killing goats for fun, so I would say that having a tech executive who enjoys cosplay — just like every other degenerate in tech and gaming — is a step up, at least hypothetically. . 

 Then you have the tech press overall, full of absolute morons, who have no better way to take a swipe at tech then by resorting to some psyop-level pattern of poking fun and scoring cheap points, because they have no idea what else to say, morons, heavily damaging. I myself try to avoid cheap points as I think it can demean our work and distract us from the Game of Games: communists v fascists. But, who among us is a saint. At least I have not fallen totally to sin. 

Speaking of the Game of Games, people who want to make these kinds of massive scale changes in society, that have a vision for society, that are playing on the scale of human history, that are playing in this game of how to run the world, are usually dangerous people who think about mass death, who think about violence, who think of gaining the military strength needed to enable the path forward. This impulse comes, at a deep level, from the need for revolution. The desire and thirst for a fascist revolution, is what is driving Palmer. What is driving me is a desire and thirst for a people’s revolution. This space is up in the air due to the fall of America, already well underway. The falling capitalist state permits the encroachment of two possibilities: fascist revolution or people’s revolution. That is why you are starting to see us appear and position and that is the underlying current. Palmer is a highly dangerous person. I am a highly dangerous person. Unfortunately, he is the one with the drone swarms. And he is with the fascists. And I have no drone swarms. And no party. 

It’s mysterious to me that though all of this is in plain view, there is a continued insistence on acting like he is a joke and like, a failure or something for parting ways with Meta, which would have happened under any and all conditions not for the least of which was, Palmer could have run that company in his fucking sleep. It’s really common for founders of acquired companies to leave and the circumstances surrounding that may change and the feelings of the parties are often ugly, but nonetheless, extraordinarily common and something that is counted on and we attempt to mitigate via gold handcuffs, etc. Known issue, next. 

Palmer has legitimate reason to have serious beef with Meta: Meta handled the whole thing absolutely appallingly and unprofessionally. More fundamentally, Oculus was worth far, far, far, far more than the 2 billion he got for it in the Meta sale. Considering that acquisition happened in 2014, and just about 10 years later you are seeing the entire tech industry prepared to launch a paradigm change that Palmer animated, it becomes clear just how deeply he has been ripped off, and that has happened in financial ways, that has happened reputationally, that has happened in his exit from Meta itself. 

“Founder of acquired startup leaves mega-corp to start new company backed by first company’s investors” is simply not a headline. Which is exactly what happened here. Exceedingly common thing yet much has been made of this. I sometimes wonder if the hatchet job done in reporting about Palmer Luckey is some kind of Meta media op because Zuckerberg got jealous. Seriously. Palmer is absolutely formidable and that is why a16z has repeatedly backed him, both at Occulus, in the sale to Meta, and then in Anduril. 

My professional assessment of Palmer’s executive skills, well, I think exceedingly highly of him on a number of metrics. Palmer has a strong need for accurate information and his own natural thirst and desire to live in a non-lie based environment, actually translates into Anduril’s focus on delivering reliable and accurate information in a combat zone. One of the things that Anduril proposes is an overhaul in how information is collected, processed and delivered to people in the battlefield.

So, he is an honest person in many respects. It has put him through somewhat of a irritating torment to watch misinformation about him proliferate. I hope it can bring him some comfort to remind him that the arch of history is long and you will be remembered as you are in the end: for killing. 

Palmer is incredibly charismatic, which I think is very important in his role because he is basically selling mass death. He, and his company, have taken the incredibly smart tack of presenting as a benevolent force that is not only protecting us from the enemy but also allowing us to leave the details up to them and avert our eyes. Palmer is going to tell you: look, the world is a scary place, the communists are coming, but don’t worry. I’ve got us. I’ve got you. You are safe. We will protect you. 

This framing has emanated out of Palmer’s conceptions of himself and his work and suffuses the presentation of the brand. Quite brilliantly, Anduril was recently featured on a list of CNBC “Disruptor 50 companies”, and put out a tweet saying “It’s our mission to protect everyone else on the list”. This is obviously a concept that relates to something deep inside people in the midst of constant instability in America; which is, they are scared, they feel unsure, and they’d really just like it if someone could tell them that everything is going to be okay. 

And Palmer can deliver that to them and very convincingly. 

A16z has a good eye and they understand the power of charisma and have used it very effectively. You often see Palmer on the campaign trail because he is extremely effective in front of a camera or on a stage and a lot of the a16z crowd comes across as gangsters or lizards, so you can see why he’s such an important marketing asset. In my opinion they trot him far too much to cover up for lack of a deep bench of people who are able to navigate the extremely delicate problem space of war in a public forum and in contexts like tech conferences. But it is a very powerful thing to be able to project a level of reasoned confidence, of benevolence and of, let’s face it, a man being a fucking man and saying look, I will protect us. This all plays extremely well. And all of the sudden you find yourself being like, yeah, build the drone swarms. Fucking build the new nuclear bomb. Love the new submarines. 

 With Palmer you get way less psyops than in many parts of the venture capital apparatus, because he is going to sit there are he is going to tell you a few things: 

1. China might beat us 

2. Therefore we need new weapons and new wars 

3. Buy the war from me

There is obviously a lot of room between those three bullet points, but Palmer can make it sound utterly reasonable to go from 1 to 2 and then 3. That in and of itself is a feat. Like many of my favorite tech executives, he is reasoned, considerate, assertive, thoughtful, and thinks a great deal in trade-offs between two things. He is very much at ease and importantly, is NOT aggressive. Is NOT aggressive. This cannot be said of many other executives in the a16z portfolio and I think that is very important, to not have an aggressive mannerism at least in public when what you are presenting is basically a never-ending hell of war. In an executional environment I am sure he is absolutely terrifying but he is certainly adept at navigating a public audience. 

How did we get here? What can Palmer, embodying his company as an executive, tell us about the state of war, the context of war, and what is actually going on here? 

Palmer was a child prodigy. The issue of what to do with a child prodigy is of interest to me because there are actually quite a number of them in the industry and I’ve met several of them. Cases like “got accepted to college, age 13”.  I myself, was not a child prodigy. And so it was that Palmer had incredible success overall and my success has been moderate at best lmfao. But yes, many of our leading tech executives were child prodigies and that includes Sam Altman of OpenAI as well. And unfortunately in both of that cases we end up with child prodigies raised by venture capital, put into their arms at a very young age, who grew up to be technofascists leading the way into a bleak, mass-death apocalypse.  

Tech is very interested in extreme intelligences of various kinds, and the child prodigy is extremely sought. Both of these people got their start at a very young age and basically grew up in the arms of the venture capital conspiracy. Palmer has known a16z since he could drink for the first time. This is highly relevant as venture capital and big tech encircles the school system. One of the side effects of taking a larger position in the school system is that this increases tech’s chances of finding these kids at younger and younger ages and more broadly, so they can be folded into the industry. 

I bring this up in particular because the recent global launch of the Apple VR headset saw that they are taking direct aim at children and specifically targeting them, as we see again and again in consumer launches. The Disney partnership and discussion of educational / scholastic applications, means that this technology — envisioned by Palmer Luckey in his first startup Oculus — is heading right into kid’s young and impressionable brains, which we already know can be highly damaging to them and we know that the iPhone before it has totally failed to address that risk. My point is, before letting the tech mechanism get more young people, we should look at what has come of the teens they have been entrusted to raise. 

Palmer’s just a few years younger than me. He was nine years old when 9/11 hit. And then, like everyone in our generation, we watched the United States start an illegal war under false premises that killed many, many people and carved deep suffering and lasting dysfunction and instability around the globe. 

We actually have a new report out about the mortality associated with the war on terror: 

“Brown University researchers, in a report released Monday, draw on U.N. data and expert analyses to attempt to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — impacts ‘so vast and complex that’ ultimately, ‘they are unquantifiable,’ the researchers acknowledge. 

The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate. Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were ‘indirect deaths’ caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health conditions.”

Anduril’s chief strategy officer worked for Colin Powell during these years of war. 

This is important because the vision of war that is coming to the fore in the venture capital consciousness, is one that also comes out of the context of war as the war on terror. And one which we lost and badly. Palmer, with a strong interest in computers and gaming, would have been playing military strategy games while watching American troops fail and fail and fail for years on end. 

And that’s how we got here. 

In many ways, the vision of war they have now is also a vision that could have “won” the war on terror for America. Drones — both surveillance and weaponized — would have made it much easier to get to targets in remote, unknown areas. Artificial intelligence could have helped collate the huge amount of information coming in to deliver it to troops who were in the field and facing ambush at all times. The use of autonomous vehicles would have meant less boots on the ground, and therefore less American lives lost.

We will have to see how effective this model is, which is coming out from the war on terror, and how it will contour the future, and it perhaps indicates that the expectation is to fight in more and more wars that resemble the war on terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. With all the talk about fighting communists, you can bet on the global south being a primary battlefield. 

The problem with all of this, of course, is that the root cause of these wars and the root causes of why they were won or lost, why they started in the first place, goes back again and again and again to imperialism, to bloodlust, to greed, to CIA infiltration, to the incredibly poverty and suffering created by capitalism. 

But all Palmer can think about is weapons. 

Please know that Silicon Valley is designing wars and are designing war strategy and designing simulations, prototypes, tactical procedure, and operating mechanisms, and choosing target countries. This puts them directly in the strategy seat and in fact, they are already shopping around a plan for a massive escalation and for a re-armanent; a re-armament that is posed as deterrence. What they are selling at least from this angle is basically resistance to China and competition with China, in the form of a whole new world of war. 

Palmer Luckey has taken issue at times with the characterization of him as a child killer by the few people on the anti-war train who are aware of these developments. 

My first question would be: have you killed any children? Like literally, have any of the battlefield and combat technologies that Anduril has sold and operated, known or unknown to us, resulted in the death of children? 

Are you planning to keep us updated on the status of this ongoingly? Are you providing a guarantee that you, your team, and your weapons will not kill any children? 

Because the thing is, is one thing we know about war and particularly America-flavored war, is that a lot of innocent people die. That has always been the case. It is the case now. And it will be the case in the future. 

Palmer, your contract for the “virtual border wall” was signed in 2020 after a pilot program. 200 surveillance towers for detecting migrants. Your technology is still in use at the US/Mexico border to round up migrants and refugees to my knowledge. Your sister company, Palantir, has also been used for this. 

In the 2022 fiscal year, more than 890 migrants that we know of died along the border. In 2022, 2.2 million migrants were apprehended at the border by U.S. Border Control. The detention centers that your technology rounds up migrants for, have been universally condemned for human rights violations and this has been widely known since you first made the deal. Just last month, an 8 year old girl and 17 year old boy died in migrant facilities. Were your towers the ones who rounded them up and put them in there? 

Child sexual abuse in the facilities has been rampant and widely reported. You have been delivering children into the arms of known rapists, people you knew would rape them, because that was public information and an acknowledged threat throughout.

Victims of child sexual abuse have up to a 3.5x increased risk of death than non-victims. This conflict zone has been a consistent source of aggression, death and abuse by US authorities and your technology has a played a vital role for this kill and rape apparatus. 

Can you really claim you do not have child blood on your hands already?  And this is just the beginning of your career. The path you have set has lots more dead children on it. 

That is the SPECIFIC crime I am charging you with, Palmer: aiding and abetting murder, torture, human rights abuses and child rape in connection with the internationally condemned human rights abuses at the US/Mexico border. 

You are building lethal technology for a genocidal, imperial state, America. And for Marc Andreessen, a fucking fascist, and his ambitions for the seat of power. You know what that is. You know the death to innocent women and children that comes with all of this. You knew you were getting in the blood game; so why do you back from being called a killer as you sell literally weapons of mass destruction? 

The charges on your head will continue to mount. You know better than I do the mass death that is being planned, by the profound escalation that your work embodies. As you rise to global power, more and more bodies stack up at your feet for your convenience. 

Do you really stand up and say you are not a killer? LOL. You are beyond a killer. You are a serial killer and eventually you will be a mass murderer. You picked death. Own it. Own the truth about death which is raped women and children and innocent people being tortured on earth, locked in cages, their countries destroyed, and killed, and cast away like fucking nothing, because human life means nothing to you, war criminal. 

Lay. Down. Your. Arms. 

Maybe the reason there have been all these ops lying about you, is to cover up for who you really are. Maybe all these ops came from you after all. 

I would die to stop you, I would kill to have you on our side, if you were a communist I’d take the frontlines for you, if you were a good person I’d take your orders. But here we are. I wanted so much better for our generation but I guess you fucking didn’t. You’re still fighting in the boomer war and you always will be. That is what you came from and that is who you are.

You sold us all out. For pennies on the dollar. Just like Oculus.