Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Chris Unger/Getty Images
Typically, when a major consumer technology company announces a partnership with the military, it does so carefully. In some cases, it might be worried about pushback from the public, the press, or its own employees and will word things cautiously, change policies quietly, and keep the spectacle to a minimum, like a university might (see Google). In cases where military ties are more established and less sensitive, firms will adopt the bureaucratic communication style of their customers, talking in anodyne terms about reaching “key milestones” in the effort to “establish an enterprise-level tactical cloud” (see Microsoft).
Then you have Meta:
Here we have Mark Zuckerberg standing with Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and onetime Facebook employee, now CEO of defense-tech company Anduril. “Anduril and Meta are partnering to design, build, and field a range of integrated XR products that provide warfighters with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield,” the companies announced in a joint statement. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that,” says Luckey. Meta isn’t treading carefully here; in fact, it’s pointedly doing the opposite. Mark Zuckerberg is ready to commit his company, the sprawling empire spawned from Facebook, to the project of turning American “warfighters” into “technomancers” with a range of technologies, including, as Luckey outlined on the Core Memory podcast, a project called Eagle Eyes:
It’s the thing that everyone’s always wanted. People have called them different things. They’ve called them Call of Duty goggles. They’ve called it the helmet from Halo. It goes all the way back to Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers, the idea of mobile infantry that’s equipped with heads-up displays that are doing ballistics calculations and thermal vision and night vision … The idea is to give war fighters superhuman vision, superhuman perception, superhuman hearing, and allow them to communicate with each other and large teams of autonomous systems.
Meta isn’t quietly accumulating cloud contracts through defense subcontractors or merely relaxing its policies to allow the military to build on its open-source AI models. It’s unapologetic about working with the U.S. military and wants everyone — but especially the still-skeptical leadership of the current administration — to know it.
At the same time, it’s quite apologetic about something else: Luckey’s firing from Facebook in 2016 following reports that he had funded a pro-Trump “shitposting” PAC that had put up a billboard calling for Hillary Clinton to be sent to jail. The company has since tried to patch things up — Luckey accepted a recent public apology from Meta executive Andrew Bosworth for what he once called an “assassination by social media.” And Zuckerberg told Tablet magazine that he was “sad when Luckey’s time at Meta came to an end.” Their partnership serves both as a signal that Meta is truly different now — although one might wonder if Zuckerberg’s commitment to return to Meta’s “roots around free expression” would extend to a current executive funding an anti-Trump “shitposting” PAC — and as spiritually downstream of the Trump administration’s postelection pardon spree. (Only, in this case, the ancien régime and the liberating revolutionaries aren’t led by different people but rather the same guy who seems to have just changed his mind again, just in time.)
The project also solves a specific problem for Meta: In the time since the company rebranded around the concept of the metaverse, it’s spent nearly $100 billion on VR and AR technologies, making plenty of technical progress in wearable hardware and optical research with little to show for it in terms of revenue. Through Anduril, which earlier this year substantially took over Microsoft’s stalled $22 billion contract to build “HoloLens” headsets for soldiers, Meta has somewhere to focus some of this output, or at least eventually, maybe, get paid for it. Early versions of Microsoft’s augmented-reality hardware, which had a tendency to make soldiers feel like throwing up, trace back to a contract the company won in 2018, when Oculus was still a relatively small unit within Facebook; in 2025, Meta, formerly FaceMash, is probably the most obvious private-sector partner for such a project.
Meta’s mil-spec turn might be opportunistic and conceptually strange, but it’s not surprising. The tech industry has long-standing ties to — and roots in — defense, and it’s been a safe assumption for half a century that any sufficiently successful mainstream tech firm will eventually start bidding on defense contracts. Still, the recent recomposition of the military-industrial complex to include mainstream internet giants is weird to watch. Google went from a cool little search engine to, among other things, a comprehensive partner to the DoD and NSA; Amazon, the dot-com online bookstore, now has huge contracts with the military as well. Before, say, Facebook’s IPO in 2012, it might have seemed absurd to speculate about how Mark Zuckerberg might one day figure out how to pivot to defense, but the company’s growth into a 2020s omni-firm — an AI company, a device company, a research institution — made it all but inevitable. In the short term, this is the material culmination of big tech’s public right-wing turn, a phenomenon with complicated causes but at least one clear goal; on a longer timescale, it’s a return to Silicon Valley’s roots.
Still, tech’s reembrace of defense contracting comes at an awkward time. All the firms lining up to work with the current administration are also racing to build powerful, general-purpose AI systems that make social-media-era notions of privacy seem quaint. Their sudden release of fears about narrow liberal and employee backlash is happening at the same time as they’re summoning, in a much wider part of the population, much broader anxieties about AI. Will people care if their omnipresent voice assistant is run by a company that also works for the NSA or ICE? Will their bet on depoliticizing defense contracting in the hyperpolarized second Trump administration backfire? Will the public start to perceive some of the most present companies in their lives less like Apple and more like Raytheon? Zuckerberg and the rest of the militarizing tech-industrial complex are well on their way to finding out.
