There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear. There's a man with a drone over there...
For what it's worth, Tablet magazine, August 2024:
American Vulcan
The facts of Palmer Luckey’s life are so uniquely bizarre—combining elements of fantasy with lunacy and also world-altering change—that they could be printed on magnetic poetry tiles, rearranged in an endless number of indiscriminate combinations by a drooling baby, and yet every time, still manage to convey something significant and true.
Let me show you: Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base—which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.
Or: After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system—a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.
Another: In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth—Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that—by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER)—kills you in real life when you die in a video game.
Would you like one more? Of course you would: In his private underground workshop garage on Lido Isle in Newport Beach, California, Luckey has built an unenclosed toilet on the wall of his workspace. As the transcript of our recorded conversation later confirmed, I alarmed Luckey’s press handler by becoming fixated on this toilet, repeatedly telling him that it was “awesome,” “so fucking awesome,” and “probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Luckey rescued me from this preoccupation by capering up to the second floor of his lair to show me the dance studio, the sewing room, and the traditional Japanese-style apartment he built for Nicole, who as it happened gave birth to their first child the very next day.
It took me several hours of trailing Luckey—hours filled with air and sea drones, autonomous air vehicles, surveillance and electronic warfare systems currently deployed in Ukraine, a 1966 Mark V Disney Autopia, a 1,600-pound, 670-horsepower, augmented reality headset-operated Autozam AZ-1, which is wrapped in an anime decal of the character LLENN (“In the real world she is very, very tall and nobody thinks she’s cute,” he explained, “so she spends all her time in virtual reality where she can play as a very cute small girl, because that’s what she in her heart wants to be”)—to understand that my monomania for the exposed toilet was just the normal person’s relief at the sight of something ordinary in the fulminating life-world of Palmer Luckey. Aside from having a family and liking Taco Bell, toilet-use might be the only other thing we have in common....
....MUCH MORE
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