Book about Oculus: "Marky Z" and the boy from the caravan

"Treacherous asshole."

"We trusted our dreams to YOU, we paid you to build that, not Facebook."

"I hope the swimming pools full of money were worth selling the VR dreams of all the gamers in the world."

Such news - and those were the nicer ones - reached Palmer Luckey in early 2014 when he and his four co-founders sold their start-up Oculus to Facebook. At first there was talk of two billion dollars, later of three. The Oculus team was not only attracting money. It also hoped that his virtual reality headset Oculus Rift could be better and cheaper through Facebook's promotion.

Many fans, especially hardcore gamers, wanted nothing to do with Facebook. They were particularly angry at Luckey, who was then 21 and the face of the company. He was the one who was supposed to make Virtual Reality (VR) cool after the flops of the 1990s. A hardware hobbyist whose career began in a converted caravan (see photo gallery). Some fans had entrusted Oculus and him since 2012 on Kickstarter money.

photo gallery

20 pictures

From the VR Messiah to the Hatred Figure: The book "The History of the Future" by Blake J. Harris, which has just been published in English, also addresses this unwanted image change in Luckey's book. Harris has previously devoted a much-noticed book to the "Console Wars" between Nintendo and Sega, which will soon be filmed as a mini-series.

New company, new calculator

On about 500 pages, the American now tells how Oculus from cool start-up to Facebook daughter was: It learns that Luckey had become almost a Sony employee and what it does with a team when it suddenly becomes a global player of , so it is said at Oculus, "Marky Z" heard. One of the first steps, for example, was a switch to Apple laptops.

DISPLAY

Blake J. Harris
The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

Publishing company:

Dey Street Books

Pages:

528

Price:

EUR 18.99

English; bound

Buy at Amazon

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Blake J. Harris emphasizes that he was in charge of the book "Hundreds of Interviews." What he makes of it, reads like a mix of journalistic work-up and novel, "narrative non-fiction writing" Harris calls that. On the one hand, he quotes internal e-mails, on the other hand, many dialogues seem badly polished. Harris' explanation at the end of the book sounds: The scenes and dialogues are usually based on memories of the participants. The main features of the conversations, however, were and are backed up by research. A tweet by star developer John Carmack, who plays a major role in the book, seems to confirm that.

I got to review the first half of this book early on, before the breakdown between the author and FB comms. The things I had first heard, and I learned a bunch of stuff that happened outside my view. https://t.co/c8t41qksZn

Still, it is difficult to estimate how much care to take in reading. When Palmer Luckey and his girlfriend watch the Fireworks for US Independence Day, it is sometimes cheesy: "As the fireworks were even bigger and louder, Luckey stopped thinking about Oculus," it says. "There was no point in worrying about virtual reality if the one you have in front of you is so damned good, and so it was." It was [Palmer's friend, editor's note] . God bless America, Luckey thought, God bless our wonderful land. "

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20 pictures

Luckey's downfall on Facebook

"The History of the Future" is a detailed chronicle of the first Oculus years, but also the attempt to rehabilitate Palmer Luckey. Because of the fan-rage in 2014 had even more serious problems that have probably never been traced as detailed as Harris.

In 2016, in the US election campaign Trump against Clinton, the online magazine "The Daily Beast" had revealed that Palmer Luckey had supported a Trump-drumming organization called "Nimble America". The press coverage was devastating, with negative headlines such as "How Your Oculus Rift Secretly Finances Donald Trump's Racist Memes Wars." Luckey was staged as a stripper of a supposed "meme machine" Trump.

Practically, as Harris describes it, there was not much left of the action but pithy announcements and lurid postings of the Reddit account "NimbleRichMan". The whole action did not go down well with the Trump supporters on Reddit, many suspected a scam. And the alleged "meme machine" is said to have produced no more than the uplifting of Luckey's commitment than a single, compared to many other memes good anti-Hillary advertising poster ("Too big to jail").

"Nimble America was not responsible for creating or distributing any memes on the Internet," Blake J. Harris wrote in an article in 2017. There is no evidence that 'Nimble America' had a racist, sexist or anti-Semitic agenda, but the fact seems to be that Luckey donated $ 10,000 to 'Nimble America' - and what 'NimbleRichMan' wrote might not have been his own written, but at least released for publication under this pseudonym.

Holiday without return

Luckey initially disappeared after the incident "on vacation" - in his old job, but he was not really back. He still participated in a pending lawsuit against the game company ZeniMax and left Facebook in early 2017 - without official standstill.

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24 pictures

While some associate the decision with the ZeniMax litigation, which cost Facebook $ 250 million in the end, and Mark Zuckerberg said in 2018 that he has never fired anyone because of his political stance, Harris's tone is different.

A big topic in the book is a public Facebook posting in which Luckey declared his donation. In it he stated that he wanted to vote in the election for the Liberal Gary Johnson. Even then, many observers wondered: why Luckey then donates to Trump supporters?

According to Harris, Luckey had been a Trump fan for years - one who guessed that things were not going to go down well in Silicon Valley. Therefore, he did not want to see his real name published in the context of "Nimble America" ​​- a plan that "The Daily Beast" thwarted.

The text of Luckye's public statement came, according to Harris' presentation, "directly from Mark", ie from Mark Zuckerberg. Luckey had faced the choice: Either he publishes the given text or he has to give up his dream of remaining with Oculus for a long time. The only change that allowed Facebook Luckey was the removal of the sentence "In fact, I do not support Donald Trump in that election," they say.

In 2014, Luckey wrote in an e-mail about a controversial donation from the then Mozilla chief: "We do not control what employees say in their spare time." We do not become one of these megacorporations, the people fire, because they have opinions that contradict those of the company or the public. "

Luckey now has a new specialty

In January 2017, after the election but before the breakup with Facebook, Luckey donated $ 100,000 to Trump's Presidential Inaugural Committee, according to the Wall Street Journal. Today he is working with a new defense and border security company, but continues to be interested in the well-being of buyers of the Oculus Rift - which fits the image of the patriot, but also of the VR enthusiast Harris draws from him.

All in all, Harris' book is worth reading, despite some boring side stories in the middle section and some narrative kitsch. Exciting are passages about how Oculus-intern and later also with Facebook was argued about how open the own platform should be. Also in the relationship of Oculus and Valve and Oculus and ZeniMax the book gives interesting insights.

And last but not least, it reveals how Mark Zuckerberg tried to win over the Oculus employees before the takeover. Accordingly, he promised them, for example, a "turbo" to success and gave himself during a visit with McDonald's bag in the hand quite down to earth. "Wow, they thought," Harris describes the response of the Oculus staff, "tech moguls are just like us!"