September/October/November/December 2016
“WHY?” DYCUS ASKED LUCKEY, THE NIGHT HE AND EDELMANN RETURNED TO the Commune.
Luckey looked around the room—at Dycus, at Hammerstein, at Howland, at Shine—and saw the glares of anger, confusion, disappointment and sadness.
“What?” Luckey asked, trying his best to sound aloof. “Did something happen while I was gone?”
This broke the tension and led to chorus of reluctant oh-you laughter that gave Luckey a momentary sense of normalcy that he had never needed so badly before.
“Seriously,” Dycus said. “Why would you do that? Why would you take that risk?”
“I didn’t think it was a risk at the time,” Luckey replied.
“I don’t totally buy that,” Hammerstein said.
“Our conversation was off-the-record!”
“Why are we talking about the reporter?” Shine asked. “The risk was Nimble America.”
Luckey then explained how he had met the Nimble America guys, why he had decided to contribute to their organization and how ridiculously this story had been reported.
“Remember,” Luckey replied, “that there was a very small amount of time and energy put into the entire lark. What I’m saying is: if it’s just this tiny, stupid, little thing that you don’t think is going to matter, it starts to make more sense how it was handled. If that makes sense. Basically, it’s hard to look at it in a vacuum.”
“Maybe,” Howland said. “And look: we’re obviously very sympathetic to you, and the press has treated you so unfairly—so unfairly, so unfair. But you should have thought about what you did when you did it. And probably not done it.”
“Or at least provided a better explanation in your apology,” Shine said.
“Yeah,” Dycus agreed. “The first sentence of your apology post is one of the most insincere things I’ve ever read.”
“Come on,” Hammerstein said. “There’s no way he wrote that!”
Dycus turned to Luckey and asked him if he wrote that apology he posted.
“You know I’d tell you guys anything,” Luckey said. “But it’s better for all of us, I think, if we don’t talk about this.”
“We don’t need to talk about it,” Hammerstein said. “Because I know you didn’t write it.”
“What do you mean?” Dycus asked. “Why are you so sure?”
“Just count the spaces,” Hammerstein said. “Anytime that Palmer writes anything, he uses two spaces after a period before starting the next sentence. But whoever wrote that apology for Palmer only used one space.”
“Multiple women have literally teared up in front of me in the last few days . . .” Facebook engineering director Srinivas Narayanan wrote to a handful of high-level execs on September 27. “[But] the Palmer issue is only one problem. There are other big systematic issues. For example, some women feel that their coworkers don’t understand their challenges or worse, don’t care.”
“GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE,” BRENDAN IRIBE SAID, WELCOMING 2,000+ DEVELOPERS to the San Jose McEnery Convention Center to kick off Oculus Connect 3.1 “So a lot has happened in the community over the last 12 months. We’ve gone from devkits and prototypes to bringing millions of people into VR . . . And at the heart of it all, what brings VR to life is the content you create. The work that you’ve done has led to hundreds of VR experiences on the Oculus platform. From gaming and entertainment to education and science. The ecosystem is taking off thanks to you. Thank you!”
After a moment of applause, Iribe brought Mark Zuckerberg onstage and passed the baton to him to deliver the meat of the morning’s keynote.2
“So before we get started,” Zuckerberg began, “I just want to say how meaningful it is that you are all here with us today. I’m looking around and I see a lot of people that we’ve worked with for a long time. I see a lot of people who are in virtual reality right now. And I see a lot of people who have been in the industry for a very long time. And you’re all the reason why virtual reality is at the point it is today. So thank you so much and thank you for being with us today.”
HA!
Watching this presentation from a laptop in his home, Luckey couldn’t help but scoff at Zuckerberg’s comment. He understood why Facebook wouldn’t let him attend the event, but it still felt wrong not to be there, like he was a recently deceased organ donor, now in some sort of purgatory, watching someone else prance around with parts of his body.
MARK ZUCKERBERG
Our industry has made more progress in the last couple of years than I think any of us could have really hoped for, right? When we bought Oculus a couple years back and planted a flag in the ground that we thought that virtual reality was going to be the next major computing platform; at that point, no one had ever shipped a modern consumer virtual reality product. No one had ever seen Touch or hand presence. And at that point, certainly, no one would have guessed that just now, two years later, there would be more than a million people actively using virtual reality products.
If Oculus were Luckey’s organs, then Touch would have been his heart. Obviously, numerous people had helped bring Touch to life—Nirav Patel especially—but, from the very beginning, Luckey had been the one beating the drum about the importance of hand presence. Even before Oculus’s Kickstarter campaign, he had been the one prototyping hand controllers. And with the Touch release now officially slated for release on December 6, it was one of those dangling carrots that had made this hiatus bearable for Luckey, because at least he’d be back for that launch.
“NOW,” ZUCKERBERG CONTINUED, “THE FIRST STEP FOR GETTING VIRTUAL REALITY out into the world is getting the basic hardware out there. And this is happening, right? And it’s happening, I think, at a faster rate than any of us had really expected. And, you know, we had a little bit of a slow start earlier this year on Rift, but now that’s rolling out quickly. And we’re going to get Touch in your hands by end of this year too. So we’re excited about that.”
Over the next fifteen minutes, Zuckerberg talked about demoing VR for world leaders, the potential of virtual education, and Facebook’s incredible growth (1.7 billion users now; and presently responsible for four of the six most popular apps), before getting to the crown jewel of his presentation: standalone VR.
“So today,” Zuckerberg explained, “there are two primary categories of virtual reality products: there’s mobile, like Gear VR, which is great and it’s affordable—you can take it anywhere with you that you want. The second category is PC VR and that’s like Rift. And that is the highest quality of virtual reality experience that you can get today. It’s really powerful. It is powered by a high-powered computer, which means that it’s a little bit more expensive—and because you’re tethered to a computer, you can’t really take it with you out into the world. So we believe that there is a sweet spot between these: a standalone virtual reality product category that is high quality and that is affordable and that you can bring with you out into the world. Because it’s not tethered to a PC and because it has inside-out tracking so it can track your position as you move through the world. So we’re working on this now. And it’s still early . . . so I don’t want to get your hopes up too much!”
The audience erupted with laughter.
From backstage, Nate Mitchell cracked up as well. Zuckerberg, in his opinion, was crushing it; and, with each passing minute, giving VR more and more of the credibility it needed to go mainstream. But as much at Mitchell was loving how this was playing out, it did feel a little odd not to have Luckey there.
“So,” Zuckerberg said, his voice echoing, “let’s take a look at where we are in developing this.”
On-screen, a minute-long video introducing “Santa Cruz” played for the audience.
“It is an honor to be on this journey with you,” Zuckerberg said, concluding his talk.
THE WEEKS AFTER CONNECT WERE TOUGH ONES FOR LUCKEY. NEW ARTICLES about him continued to pop up daily—calling him racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic—and he was having trouble keeping track of how many “friends” had unfriended him by this point.3,4,5,6,7 Meanwhile, he was still waiting for Facebook to give him the green light to return to work, but “a couple weeks” became “a couple more weeks” became “it’d be best to wait until after the election.”
Thus, Luckey was left with a lot of time on his hands and a level of uncertainty that he hadn’t felt since his days living in a trailer. To keep this anxiety at bay, he created a Google Doc called “Falsehood Collated.”
The purpose of this document is to clear my head so I can maintain sanity, plan for the future, document the past, and focus on facts while they are still fresh. Below is a thread that will be reiterated throughout this document, but bears mentioning at the start:
I donated ten thousand dollars to Nimble America. Nimble America put out a billboard. It showed a caricaturized portrait of Hillary Clinton alongside the text “Too big to jail.” They planned on releasing further billboards. The group (and the people who ran it) never trolled or harassed anyone, nor did they do anything racist, sexist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic at any point. There was never any kind of internet campaign to malign anyone (or, in fact, do anything beyond pushing billboards and t-shirts into the real world).
The reference to “shitposting in real life” on their website is a tongue in cheek reference to a term that means making internet posts with zero information or worth, which is obviously not the actual goal of any campaign with intent to persuade. A wide variety of media outlets and social media influencers have ignorantly and/or maliciously accused myself and Nimble America of trolling, harassment, astroturfing, and copying the Clinton campaign’s well-known paid anonymous internet posting efforts through Correct the Record, unpopular with internet users on both sides of the aisle. Nimble America handled their launch poorly and lack organizational skills, but they are just regular guys who don’t like Hillary Clinton and do like Donald Trump, a set of opinions shared by roughly half our country.
The narrative that is being created and shared by media outlets does not align with reality, but is widely accepted by a public that cares enough to follow it and drive clicks to it, including FB employees and former FB employees. There are a handful of outlets making fair criticisms related to credibility of the people involved, potential scamming, and the perception that I should have stayed out of things entirely as a public figure, but the vast majority of the ongoing backlash is driven by a false narrative that goes far beyond the truth.
The unfortunate result is that a handful of press outlets and influencers have managed to construct and push a narrative of several huge lies and countless small lies that are being widely accepted by the greater public, which lacks the interest or ability to do their own research.
The public cannot be blamed. The public owes me no benefit of the doubt, and unlike the journalists involved, they have no duty to uncover or report the truth. It takes an order of magnitude more effort to disprove bullshit than to spread it—many of the lies being spread seem insignificant on their own, to the point where refuting them all publicly would be an endless task that is easy to portray in a petty light, giving them cover to distract from their big lies and move the goalposts as far as they can.
Unfortunately, hundreds of small lies stacked together and re-reported endlessly are more powerful than most would expect. Tackling this is easier when you can engage with people on a human level, but impossible when elevated in the minds of many to supervillain status. Meme supervillain . . .
The rest of this doc—an ever-growing list—compiled examples of the most egregious articles, with brief notations about what they got wrong.
Amazingly (except, of course, not amazingly at all), there wasn’t a single outlet that published any of these alleged memes. One would think that if Luckey had really been the kingpin behind a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic troll army, there would have been articles (slideshows even!) ranking the most heinous memes that Nimble America created, endorsed, or spread.
To this point, exactly one week after the Daily Beast’s original “Meme Machine” piece, Scruta Games—the first developer that had threatened to cancel support for Oculus unless Luckey stepped down—published a series of interesting tweets:
If Scruta Games, a small independent game studio, had reached this conclusion, then surely the media outlets that had reported on Luckey and Nimble America must have realized the same. And yet, whether they did or not, there were no corrections, clarifications, or retractions of the stories that had been printed. Instead, because Palmer Luckey = Racist Supervillain made for a clickable narrative, additional inaccurate stories continued to sprout. Luckey added them to his Google Document of lies.
“I just finished reading the Google Doc,” Joe Chen said, speaking with Luckey by phone. “It’s crazy to see it all compiled together like that.”
“Yep,” Luckey replied.
“It’s especially crazy,” Chen said, “because the nonembellished version would been enough to get clicks. If they’d just said something like: Palmer Luckey appears to like Donald Trump. But instead they throw in white supremacy and trolls and all this other shit.”
“Never mind doxing Nicole,” Luckey added. “And spreading info about her living situation. Especially things like the fact she lives with me, which is not popular with conservatives in mountain towns.”
“How is she doing?”
“She is not used to the internet hate machine like I am.”
“I know. I just . . . it’s just hard to believe that people can get away with this stuff.”
“Hang on,” Luckey said, searching for something on his computer. “Okay, here it is. I have a sticky note on my desktop that has a quote from Trump: ‘We have a media that is so dishonest,’ Trump said. ‘These are among the most dishonest people you will ever, ever meet.’”
Chen laughed.
“Yeah,” Luckey said. “Even people who I assumed were friends. Or at least reasonable. No reaching out to me. No questions. Just immediate calls for my termination. Right after they block me on social media. Assuming that the media must be more honest than their friend.”
“Who surprised you the most?” Chen asked.
“I won’t say,” Luckey answered. “I don’t want to throw people under the bus like they did. Especially since there is a decent chance some of them will change their mind. Probably won’t ever be good friends with anyone who mindlessly calls for my termination, but still.”
“I’m sorry, man. I don’t know what else to say. I just feel bad.”
“Not that I expect people to suicide their careers for me, but worth noting that essentially nobody was willing to stand up for me. This reaction shows why that is the right decision. Never stand up for what you believe in when the media disagrees with you. Never stand up for someone they are hell-bent on crucifying. And don’t ever dare call them out as liars.”
“I’m sorry, man,” Chen said. “This really sucks.”
“Oh well,” Luckey replied.
“One more thing; if you can’t answer it, you can’t answer it: When you posted that apology—the day after all this went down—why didn’t you just come right out and say: Yeah, I like Trump. Here’s why . . .”
“Long story,” Luckey said. “I can’t really talk about that right now. But you know my creed: Do the right thing, not the popular thing.”
“That’s why you’re you,” Chen said, hoping that this might lift Luckey’s spirit. “So when do you think they’ll let you get back to work?”
“After the election,” Luckey replied. “Hopefully things will have settled down by then.”
“Yeah. That sounds about right. Unless . . . well, what if Trump wins?”
Just a few weeks from the election now, the odds of Trump winning appeared to be laughably low—so low, in fact, that in anticipation of a Clinton presidency (and in fear of further firearms regulations), Luckey spent most of election day hanging out, and shopping at, Ade’s Gun Shop, Ammo Bros. and a handful of other gun shops in the Orange County area.
On election night, Luckey hopped on a plane back up to San Francisco. By the time his flight departed, it was clear that the election was going to be much closer than originally thought: Clinton was still the front-runner, but Trump appeared to be doing better than expected in the battleground states of Ohio and Wisconsin.
The trip from Orange County to San Francisco is short—about ninety minutes—but for many aboard that flight it would feel like the shape of their country had changed beneath them. Upon landing and even before Luckey’s phone booted up, he noticed many passengers sobbing around him. It appeared that, holy shit, Trump was actually going to win this thing.
Moments later, Edelmann picked up Luckey at the airport—a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat waiting for him in the passenger seat—and the two of them celebrated Trump’s unlikely victory by grabbing drinks at a spot called Yard House, Edelmann throwing back beers, and Luckey downing delicious lemonades.
What if Trump wins? Luckey recalled Chen having asked a few weeks earlier. In theory, nothing should have played out differently. Luckey had done everything Facebook had asked of him, and it was time they let him back to work. In practice, however, things became much more complicated. If the reaction of those on Luckey’s flight was indicative of the mood at Facebook, then the majority of employees at Oculus felt some combination of shocked, devastated, and/or horrified.
This cocktail of emotions seemed to crystalize in the creation of a quickly popular internal Facebook group called “Refocusing Our Mission.” As per the page’s introductory message—“The results of the 2016 Election show that Facebook has failed in its mission”—the conceit of this group was that Trump’s victory was some sort of proof that Facebook needed to change its ways.
Although it’s natural to empathize with the frustration that those joining this group must have felt, a handful of Facebook employees—people from both sides of the political spectrum—felt that something was very unnatural, creepy even, about seeing the election results as proof that Facebook had somehow failed. Because, frankly, it provided a pretty ugly answer to the question people continued to ask more and more: What is Facebook? Well, according to the founder of “Refocusing Our Mission” and the hundreds of employees who quickly joined and engaged, Facebook was basically some sort of social engineering tool—an invisible hand meant to guide its users toward the “correct” political beliefs.
Or to put it another way: since Zuckerberg often described Facebook as “like a utility,” then this reaction was the equivalent of AT&T declaring that Mondale losing to Reagan meant it was time for them to rethink the mission of this whole phone line network thing.
Beyond the Refocusing Our Mission group, there was perhaps no better personification of Facebook’s activist-driven mission than a popular, postelection internal post—published to a different internal group called “Facebook (the company) Is Broken”—by an employee in Community Operations:
I have never felt more ashamed to be working here. This isn’t a completely new feeling. I work in CO where we see the dark side of the business . . . where we censor people and claim openness, where we apply US centric policies and claim being global, where we express concern on a daily basis but never really do anything about it.
But now it is different. The world is crumbling around us and we are silent . . . History will not be good to us . . . We are part of this.
I will never forgive myself for being part of this . . . I will never forgive myself for caring about things like steady income and mortgage when people are dying in my region and are being kicked out of countries.
I will never forgive myself . . .
Luckey’s exile continued into late November when, finally, he was informed that the internal investigation had found no incidents of inappropriate conduct. I know! Luckey wanted to shout. You should have listened to me when I told you that two months ago! But, at this point, that was water under the bridge. All he really cared about was getting back to work.
With the ZeniMax trial coming up in January, Facebook wanted him focused on that rather than Oculus business. He was, however, allowed back into his office for a couple days in early December.
Upon his return, Luckey was greeted with a mixed reaction. Many colleagues—especially those who had been with Oculus preacquisition—were happy to see him and talked about how much the company had missed his leadership; but at the same time, there appeared to be just as many employees whose body language made it clear that they were disgusted by Luckey’s mere existence. To some degree, Luckey couldn’t blame them. He’d have hoped that they would have cared enough about the truth to do a little research and come to realize that much of what had been written about him and Nimble America were just plain lies. But at the same time, he could also appreciate that investigative journalism was not one of their responsibilities; and even if it were, he was confident that a sizable portion of these disgusted colleagues would still probably consider him an enemy simply because he was supporting Trump at all.
Either way, Luckey wanted a chance to win those people over. He wanted a chance to explain himself to anyone at the company who had a question about his character or his political views. That’s why he was dying to do the Q&A that Facebook had told him he would be able to do when things calmed down. But apparently things weren’t yet calm enough, because a Q&A to discuss what had happened was still not in the cards.
In the meantime, however, Luckey was now allowed to send an email to all his Oculus colleagues. And while he tried to keep it short and sweet, he wanted to make it abundantly clear that he wasn’t the bigoted monster that had been described in all those stories; and that, for as long as it was up to him, he was going to be at Oculus for a long, long time.
FROM: Palmer Luckey
DATE: December 4, 2016
I am returning to the office on Monday and wanted to take a moment to say a few words to the team.
First, there’s something I want to make very clear: I have never supported nor do I believe in racism, bullying, misogyny, anti-Semitism or hate speech of any kind.
A lot of people on the team have taken time to give me their feedback, and I appreciate it. This situation is difficult. I learned some tough lessons, many of them very publicly, which were hard not only on me but on teams and people associated with me. I apologize to everyone who was impacted.
External media coverage painted a picture that didn’t accurately represent my values or actions. I remain committed to supporting a tremendous team that represents a diverse set of people, views, and beliefs. I know the past couple months have caused some employees to question that commitment. Please know that I will continue doing my part to make Oculus an inclusive place to work.
I am 100% committed to Oculus, and humbled to be part of what is clearly the smartest and best team in the VR industry. I plan on spending the next 50 years building and winning the future of VR, AR and whatever comes after. If anyone wants to ask questions, give further feedback, or just catch up, I would love to meet with people. Reach out and we will make it happen.