Okay, it’s been a few hours, and now that my knee has stopped jerking with furious abandon, I’m ready to talk about Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR, to the tune of a cool $2 billion. If this is somehow the first you’ve heard about this, I’ll go ahead and give you a minute to peel your jaw off the floor.

All better? Alright, now I’m going to eventually talk about why I think this is actually a really great thing. But first, let’s get into why it feels bad. And wow, did I feel bad when I first heard the news.

On Backing The Little Guy

Oculus is maybe the craziest ‘scrappy company trying to change the world’ story in years. Seemingly out of nowhere, this 23 year old guy landed on Kickstarter with a crazy pitch: to bring actual, non-terrible (cf. Virtual Boy), virtual reality out of science fiction (and every nerd’s dreams) and make it reality. The Kickstarter was a wild success, and ever since then, the hype has just kept on coming, as more and more people have tried out the first developer kit (and subsequent prototypes and the new ‘Dev Kit 2’). As a proud owner of a dev kit myself, I can confirm that it really is incredible. It also has a unique brand of buzz, because its the first kind of media since we’ve had the internet that actually needs to be experienced in person. No youtube video, no blog post, no screenshot is capable of conferring the experience that virtual reality is promising. And that, all by itself, is pretty amazing.

So the product they’re promising is incredible, yes, and the passion with which they speak on it is deeply endearing. However, I think a big part of why it felt so good to support Oculus is that they seemed like the little guy, fighting an impossible battle against the Man. It harkened back to the (good old?) days when video games were getting made by passionate nerds in their basements and garages (like John Carmack!), eating ramen and dreaming big huge nerd dreams (okay, there are indie devs doing that today, all over the place, but stick with me here). I definitely felt that way about Oculus, and it felt good. It felt like I was in on a big secret, that I was on the ground floor of something truly groundbreaking, and it was all the better because most people didn’t know it yet.

That’s right, I, and probably everyone else that was psyched (and extremely self-satisfied) to be backing Oculus were VR Hipsters. God save us all…

On Hating Facebook

The other half of the ‘feel bad story’ is, of course Facebook itself. Looking back over the last several years and the company’s insane, meteoric rise to absolute supremacy of the social space, it’s easy to remember the missteps: the privacy blunders, the unpopular UI revamps, some unfortunate comments made by executives. Facebook is huge and powerful and pervasive, and companies like that are always easy to hate (Microsoft, anyone?). When a giant like this buys a lovable little guy like Oculus, it’s easy to knee-jerk your way into an end-of-the-world reaction.

The reality is way less one-sided (it always is). The excellent John Green speaks often about ‘imagining people complexly’ - not taking the easy, superficial judgment of a person, instead taking the time to think of them as a real life human being with tons of personality quirks and dreams and needs and baggage. Well, a corporation, even a Big Evil Corporation, is a giant seething mass of humanity, and to imagine a company as being any less complex than a person is to take the easy, cheap, superficial way (dare I say, the Reddit Way). Yes, they made missteps, and yes, the product they offer now may not be for everyone (though with nearly a billion users, someone must like it), but the fact of it is, Facebook is composed of hundreds of super talented, passionate people, and they can’t ALL be mustachio-twirling villains. The reality is, some not-insignificant number of people very high up in the company shared in the same Hipster VR passions we all did - they love Oculus, they love the promise of VR, and they’re willing to plop down $2,000,000,000 up front, and almost certainly billions more over the next several years, as Oculus gets custom hardware manufacturing set up, builds up their developer outreach and tools teams, and generally gets to focus on making something awesome, rather than something as awesome as they can make it given the money they have available.

The Good Thing

This leads me neatly into why this is actually a great thing. Oculus is an incredible company, their prototypes have been amazing, and the potential for virtual reality is astonishing. But! What they’re trying to do is going to be expensive. Really expensive. 10 figures expensive. Even with the substantial venture capital they’d gotten (and seriously, nothing says ‘strings attached’ more loudly than 100 million in VC funding), I’m willing to bet that their financial runway was actually pretty short, and were looking at some tough compromises to get their first consumer offering to market before it ran out. This is corroborated by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey himself, bravely getting beaten up on Reddit today*:

“This acquisition/partnership gives us more control of our destiny, not less! We don’t have to compromise on anything, and can afford to make decisions that are right for the future of virtual reality, not our current revenue. Keep in mind that we already have great partners who invested heavily in Oculus and got us to where we are, so we have not had full control of our destiny for some time. Facebook believes in our long term vision, and they want us to continue executing on our own roadmap, not control what we do.”

Facebook isn’t looking to make a quick dollar (like Oculus’ VC funders undoubtedly were). They’re making a long term bet that virtual reality is going to be big in the future. This is awesome. Now Oculus’ runway is very long indeed, and they’re going to be furnished with a huge set of resources to deliver a no-compromises product that’s going to blow people away.

So, I understand why it feels bad that Facebook owns Oculus now. They seemed like the little guy, and we all felt pretty awesome for loving (and often financially backing) this crazy little guy with an insane plan to change the world. But this was never the reality - Oculus stopped being the scrappy little guy the moment they got venture capital, and started being a scrappy little company with very little room to maneuver, and a huge chance of financial failure. Now, they’re owned by a big, powerful company who is willing to give them the time, money, and exposure (I didn’t even talk about exposure! Just imagine how many more people are going to hear about VR now, and putting aside my hipster hat, that’s just awesome) to really, actually change the world. Imagining this changed world as being one where you get Poked and Liked and Friend Requested and Farmville’d in VR is failing to imagine things complexly. It’s taking the shallow, superficial, easy view, and that, dear readers, is something we should all rally against.

footnote: If any companies would like to give me two billion dollars, I too, will happily go get yelled at on Reddit.