Palmer Luckey sounds like a fictional character:
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.
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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.
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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.
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Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron — which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.
Something here about how the world is built by outliers.
Bomag,
For sure. Normies maintain, it’s ingrained in their psychology, and Weirdos transgress, almost by instinct. I’m sure there’s some way to calculate what sorts of errors a society will make based on where the power is at any given moment, between the Normies and the Weirdos.
And then there’s the interplay between the two; does the dominance of one precipitate or even create the other?
It’s not instinct — or, at least, it’s not solely instinct.
Today, that transgressive and inventive type is very rare. This is simply because the education and labor systems do everything they possibly can to stymie the development of that type of individual.
Modern society — with its emphasis on formal education, credentialism, “collaborative” research, slaving away in PhD programs until you’re thirty, and wagecucking until you’re an old graybeard to pay back your student loans — is a production line for dull normies, and it deadens the inventive and adventuresome spirit.
When rare people come to possess that spirit, they tend to come from unusual backgrounds, and from outside the common education system. (Hence the recent debates on what alternative educational methods might produce such people, e.g. with “aristocratic tutoring.”)
120 years ago, it’s not hard to see where Luckey would have fit in: Somewhere alongside George Westinghouse. Today, though, the man is almost entirely unique.