Blake J. Harris expected his new book The History of the Future—about Palmer Luckey, Oculus, and Facebook—to be another feel-good underdog story in the mold of his first book, Console Wars. But when Luckey took a mysterious ‘vacation’ in the wake of widespread internet outrage about his political activities, Harris’ life got very complicated very quickly.

“The book that I set out to write is not what actually happened, and I consider that a good thing, because I followed the story where it led me, even though it led me to some places that I never would have wanted to write about,” Harris says in Episode 358 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

In the fall of 2016, rumors spread that Luckey was secretly financing a political troll army. Harris determined that these claims did not reflect reality, but his efforts to set the record straight were met with indifference or hostility. As the outrage mounted, Harris’ own editor seemed to lose faith in his book.

“She said, ‘Who’s the hero of this story?'” Harris says. “And I said that the hero was Palmer Luckey and Oculus. And she said, ‘But it can’t be Palmer. He’s a Trump supporter.’ And I remember just being really struck by that comment.”

Harris had been granted extensive access to Oculus and Facebook, but when he asked too many questions about Luckey’s strange departure, Facebook stopped cooperating. Harris began to worry that covering this story would end his career. “Having written two tech books, it would be very hard for me to get access at a tech company nowadays,” he says. “I’m sure Facebook regrets working with me, because I found stuff that they didn’t want me to find, and then I reported it.”

Still, he’s glad he stuck with the story, which he feels is a valuable case study in the way that unfounded accusations can be amplified by the media. And while he personally disagrees with Luckey’s politics, he feels that concern for the truth should transcend party lines.

“My goal with this book is certainly not to make you feel bad for Palmer or to garner sympathy for Palmer,” Harris says. “I just think Palmer is an excellent proxy for this thing that happens all the time.”

Listen to the complete interview with Blake J. Harris in Episode 358 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Blake J. Harris on the media:

“Basically it was described that every terrible white supremacist, misogynistic, transphobic, awful, anti-Semitic meme that you’d seen online during the election season, Palmer was responsible for, that he’d been funding this group of trolls. That part of the story was not true at all. What was true was that he had given about $10,000 to a small Trump organization called Nimble America. … [Its] founders started this organization with the goal of putting up meme-like, catchy billboards across the country in battleground states, and they [only] put up one billboard—in Pennsylvania—which had the words ‘Too Big to Jail’ on it, and then a caricature of Hillary Clinton’s face. So I don’t think there was anything too unreasonable there. It seemed like a pretty typical campaign advertisement.”

Blake J. Harris on Facebook:

“The employees at Oculus and Facebook were told that Palmer had continually been making requests for vacation, as if it was his choice to not be there because he didn’t want to face the situation. … Sometime in the middle of October, one month after all this happened, Palmer at this point believed that he was about to be let back into the office. He was in a car with his friend—and early Oculus employee—Julian Hammerstein, and they were listening to a town hall while they were driving somewhere, and during this town hall an Oculus employee asked what was going on with the Palmer situation—when was he coming back to the office to finally answer questions from people? And they were told—and Palmer and Julian heard this during the town hall, as they were listening in—that Palmer had requested another four to six weeks of vacation. And Palmer was just so furious. Julian described Palmer just being apoplectic.”

Blake J. Harris on his critics:

“I don’t understand how someone could think that there was a strategic agenda-based goal on my part. That I thought, ‘Well, I’ve had a pretty good career to date. Let me align myself with this person that everybody hates, and try to show that he’s not really as bad as you think, or that he didn’t do these things.’ I kind of would ask [my critics], ‘What is that case? What would be the reason that I would choose to do that?’ And why would you think that that is more likely than me just following the story, and it leading to this narrative, as opposed to having a narrative and trying to figure out how to get there? Because I would say, my life would have been a lot easier, and my ability to sell future books probably would have been in greater standing, if I had gone with the narrative that Facebook was telling me.”

Blake J. Harris on Scruta Games:

“I want to give credit to Scruta Games. Because Scruta Games was—I believe—the first developer to say that they were not going to continue developing for Oculus unless Palmer was fired. And then they are the only person in this whole story that actually acknowledges that what was reported was wrong. I believe one week after they made those tweets—and their tweets are included in the book—they say that they realized that all that [Nimble America] was was that they put up a billboard, and that the media had misreported what happened. So if you have the people who are actually boycotting [Oculus] coming to believe that, ‘Oh no, we actually are not boycotting it because we were misled,’ that seems pretty significant to me.”

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