Here's a fun fact from 2016: at Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company founded by young Palmer Luckey, every employee receives a copy of Ernest Cline's VR-centric novel "Ready Player One."

Now let's bring that fun fact up-to-date: last year a Texas district court ruled that Oculus owed ZeniMax half a billion dollars because Luckey violated a non disclosure agreement. Parent company Facebook is under intensifying scrutiny because of how easily organizations like Cambridge Analytica — who claim to have influenced the 2016 presidential election — can harvest data from Facebook users. A year ago today, Facebook announced that Luckey was leaving the company he founded in the wake of the Zenimax ruling and a scandal concerning Luckey's secret bankrolling of a pro-Trump organization dedicated to influencing voters through "meme magic." A few months after Luckey's departure, The New York Times reported on Luckey's new venture: surveillance tech that could be used on the US-Mexico border in place of Trump's desired wall. On top of that, Luckey's new company employs multiple ex-Palantir employees and plans to develop military applications for AR and VR.

Oh, and a Warner Brothers-produced movie adaptation of "Ready Player One" directed by Steven Spielberg is now in theatres. Who made the list for the movie's Hollywood premiere? Palmer Luckey, of course.

Amazing night at the @readyplayerone premiere in Hollywood! Almost as good as the book – there is a reason we gave it to all employees at Oculus. Seeing the OASIS on the big screen felt like a vivid vision of the future, @erniecline should be proud. pic.twitter.com/Mm8uYrC4AM — Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) March 27, 2018

If it wasn't clear from the laundry list above, 25-year-old Luckey is way more comfortable wearing his politics on his sleeve since leaving Facebook. Five days prior to the Hollywood premiere of "Ready Player One," Luckey attended a young conservatives summit at the White House (Ernest Cline gets Luckey's thumbs-up and so does Trump). He also hasn't given up his love of memes: Luckey seems to be fond of the racist "Ugandan Knuckles" meme spawned by trolls on VRChat, a popular Oculus and HTC Vive chatroom application with nascent similarities to "Ready Player One's" OASIS VR world.

In the venture capital world Luckey's name is still tarnished. Earlier this month TechCrunch reported that Luckey invested heavily in the VR startup Upload after the company was hit with multiple allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct . A former Upload executive discussing the toxicity of both Upload's founders and Luckey called him a "Nazi sympathizer." Upload has denied receiving funding from Luckey.

In spite of Luckey's vocal political beliefs, it's not surprising that he was invited to the "Ready Player One" premiere.

First, pretending that Hollywood is a homogeneous liberal bubble feeds into conservative narratives and ignores the reality of rich people putting aside their political differences to hang out all the damn time. Second, even if Oculus didn't gift new employees copies of Cline's novel, you could see how it makes sense to invite VR industry figures to the red carpet for the biggest movie about VR since the dawn of consumer-grade headsets. Also, Luckey still got an invite to last year's Game Awards. Just because his only Valley friends are other disgraced founders and Peter Thiel acolytes doesn't mean everyone in entertainment wants to keep their distance.

The vast majority of reviews suggest that in the translation from book to screen,"Ready Player One" keeps the same perspective on the future of VR and geek ascendancy that Luckey adores. Alex Nichols, writing for The Outline last August, neatly summed up how the worldview of "Ready Player One" scores high with the likes of Luckey:

In the real world, VR sales have repeatedly underperformed expectations, and what few consumers there are remain uninterested in 3D social networking. This is probably why Palmer Luckey, the pro-Trump tech billionaire who sold Oculus VR to Facebook in 2014, forced his employees to read Ready Player One. For the megalomaniacs of Silicon Valley, Cline provides a comforting fantasy: the world has gone to hell, all the resources of the underclass have been redirected to a few emotionally stunted computer geniuses, and what do they do with their world-historical dominance? They find new ways to recreate Star Wars.

After the premiere, Luckey tweeted that seeing "Ready Player One" on the big screen felt like a "vivid vision of the future." There will be more to bemoan in a VR-saturated future than an overabundance of nerdy references if Luckey's plans pan out. Who knows whether Luckey thinks the impoverished masses and hyper-corporate antagonists of "Ready Player One" fit with his ideal future, but right now his company is working towards bringing VR to warfare and policing.

He may have hope for gaming and social applications of VR, but Luckey's day job — and his potential post-Oculus legacy — is all about bending VR tech to gross ends. Just as a gamer, Luckey is aligned with the obnoxious, racist trolls of VRChat. Judging by his actions regarding VR's commercial and social potential, Luckey has more in common with the villains of "Ready Player One" than he does with the story's scrappy protagonist or its legendary VR visionary.

Cline's book and movie don't examine the darker implications of an advanced VR-addled society's chronic obsession with pop culture nostalgia, and that's fine. At the SXSW premiere of "Ready Player One," Spielberg said it's a movie, not a film — i.e. don't think too hard about this one, y'all. When VR's most toxic figurehead shows up at your movie's premiere, though, it's hard not to see that as an endorsement of him and his loathsome ideas.​