Following revelations that Oculus VR founder and multimillionaire Palmer Luckey donated money to Nimble America, a nonprofit pro-Trump political organization, articles condemning the tech wunderkind have been dime a dozen. Nimble America’s crimes include creating and disseminating memes favorable to Donald Trump and hostile to Hillary Clinton, and funding trolls.
Many of the reports about Luckey’s involvement with the organization tie him to the alt-right fringe. His critics have been quick to condemn him. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Anil Dash, who dedicates his Twitter feed to promoting “social justice,” tied Luckey to the actions of racists and called for Facebook to halt all development for Oculus Rift in order to hurt him and his company.
The media has been relentless in its open condemnation of Luckey. But as Cathy Young writes, much of the attacks against him are based on unsupported or entirely false allegations.
Even those close to Luckey were not spared. His girlfriend, Nikki Moxxi, became a part of the narrative after Gizmodo denounced her for being a “Gamergater.”
An article by Jeff Grubb for VentureBeat may very well be the worst of the lot. Short on facts and high on outrage, Grubb’s evidence against Luckey is based on his personal interactions with the VR visionary on Facebook. The piece can be best summed up as “I had an argument with someone on Facebook so I decided to have a cry.”
“I’m not surprised Palmer Luckey is funding pro-Trump ‘shitposts’,” writes Grubb, who provides a the screenshot of an argument in which Luckey criticized an article about police deaths conflating long-term trends with short-term ones. The piece in question states that police deaths have declined under President Barack Obama without accounting for the gradual decline in violence against the police over several decades.
Rather than dispute the argument on rational grounds, Grubb chose to go for the jugular by tying Luckey’s logic with that of the alt-right. In addition, Grubb argues that Luckey’s mannerisms and posting style is “common among angry reactionaries,” particularly his syntax and use of terms like “LEO” to refer to the police.
“That’s a term that is primarily used by people who work in law enforcement or in industries related to that field,” wrote Grubb. “But because those industries are indistinguishable from the National Rifle Association gun-advocacy group, the term LEO has spread into common use among people defend the actions of police officers in comment sections and on Twitter.”
Never mind the fact that movies, TV shows and the media in general have popularized its use in the past decade.
His other argument is even more of a stretch, stating that using the “>” symbol to quote someone else belongs exclusively to 4chan. The fact that Luckey uses it is proof positive that Luckey is a regular contributor to the anonymous image board.
“In an effort to mock one of my other friends, the Oculus founder used 4chan’s ‘greentexting’ syntax to imply she was being ridiculous,” writes Grubb. “Greentexting is when 4chan users put the ‘>’ symbol in front of their text to turn it green. This signifies the user is telling a story or the user is quoting someone else to highlight how silly they are. It’s something you likely wouldn’t use in an argument about the murder of police officers unless you were someone who regularly contributes to 4chan.”
While it’s true that 4chan refers to the use of “>” as greentexting, the syntax is also used everywhere else—on Twitter, Reddit, and e-mails. Its use goes all the way back to the distributed discussion system Usenet, where users often employed such syntax to either directly quote or connote what others are saying in a sarcastic manner. And Usenet is ancient by Internet standards.
Jeff Grubb and his baseless hitpiece against Palmer Luckey may fall on the “right side of history” for contributing to the popular narrative, but that doesn’t make his arguments any less ridiculous. The fact that Grubb can base a brief interaction and cite it as if it were some kind of evidence of Luckey’s complicity in promoting racism on the Internet is Kafkaesque. It’s the kind of evidence one might have presented at the Salem witch trials, and that seems to be enough to indict someone’s character in [current year].
