Meta Muzzled Child Safety Findings On Virtual Reality Platforms, Researchers Tell Congress
'I wish I could tell you the number of children in VR experiencing these harms, but Meta would not allow me to conduct this research.''I wish I could tell you the number of children in VR experiencing these harms, but Meta would not allow me to conduct this research.'America last: Is Big Tech hiding jobs from US citizens to hire cheaper foreign labor from India and China?
Reports indicate that the American tech job market is slowing down significantly, making it increasingly more difficult for qualified individuals to find employment. However, a team of technology professionals contends that jobs are out there; they are just not being advertised to American talent.
The Economic Policy Institute found that the top 30 H-1B employers hired 34,000 new foreign workers in 2022, yet laid off at least 85,000 between 2022 and early 2023, further fueling concerns that companies are booting Americans for foreign nationals to keep wages lower.
'We were shocked to discover these discriminatory practices are still widespread across major American companies today, keeping Americans out of jobs in their own country.'
Indian nationals accounted for roughly 71% of H-1B workers in 2024, while Chinese nationals ranked second, with 12%. Indian and Chinese nationals also represent the largest groups of foreign-born STEM workers, according to the American Immigration Council.
The background
Reports like this sparked action from fed-up tech workers who decided to establish Jobs.Now, an online job board featuring a list of positions sourced from "legally mandated PERM labor market test locations" in newspaper classified advertisements.
PERM is a permanent labor certification issued by the Department of Labor, allowing employers to hire foreign talent to work in the United States. This certification sets workers on a path to receive a green card. Many of these candidates are already working for the employer on temporary visas, such as the H-1B or the Optional Practical Training programs.
The tech workers were driven to start the online job board after Apple and Facebook settled worker discrimination lawsuits with the Department of Justice.
In 2021, Facebook agreed to pay $4.75 million in civil penalties and up to $9.5 million to eligible victims after it was accused of “routinely” refusing to “recruit, consider, or hire U.S. workers” for positions it had reserved for temporary visa holders.
Similarly, in 2023, Apple agreed to pay $6.75 million in civil penalties and establish an $18.25 million back pay fund for victims after the DOJ claimed the company “illegally discriminated in hiring and recruitment against U.S. citizens and certain non-U.S. citizens.”
RELATED: The real labor crisis? Too many visas, not too few workers
“We were shocked to discover these discriminatory practices are still widespread across major American companies today, keeping Americans out of jobs in their own country,” Jobs.Now told Blaze News. “We started Jobs.Now to fight against these illegal practices and help Americans find good jobs.”
Sneaky tactics
Jobs.Now warned that some companies — particularly those seeking to fill engineering, data science, finance, accounting, and biotechnology positions — will try to hide opportunities from American workers to favor their existing H-1B employee and provide lower wages.
Under PERM laws, a company seeking to hire a foreign national must demonstrate "that there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified, and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment and that employment of the foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly employed U.S. workers."
To demonstrate this, the employer must advertise the position in two Sunday newspapers and select three additional recruitment steps, which can include advertising the position at job fairs, the employer's website, an online job board, and on radio and television, among other options.
'Jobs.Now highlights those ads, but that doesn't mean the company is running a new search. It's just about meeting the compliance rules.’
The employer can hire a foreign national via the PERM process only if there are no other minimally qualified U.S. citizens or existing green card holders available.
"As a result, they put ads in newspapers with obscure application methods aiming to hide the listing from Americans, so they will not receive applications and will be able to sponsor their preferred immigrant candidate for a green card to fill the job," Jobs.Now told Blaze News.
Jobs.Now explained that it has found some job postings that feature "hidden" characteristics — including "not being posted on the company website, not being posted on mainstream job boards, and requiring email or paper mail applications" — that could result in fewer American applicants.
Jobs.Now has also highlighted postings that refer individuals to send their applications to immigration professionals and law firms, rather than human resources workers.
"To maintain business continuity, or the wage arbitrage of hiring lower-paid immigrant workers, companies prefer to keep these existing employees rather than seek American citizens as required for permanent roles," Jobs.Now stated. "They commonly treat PERM labor market tests as compliance exercises where they fill out paperwork, rather than actual hiring processes. As a result, they often direct applications to immigration professionals or law firms rather than ordinary recruiters."
Clashing views
While Jobs.Now highlights the labor market tests as being treated as mere formalities rather than genuine efforts to recruit American workers, recruiter Mark Fabela affirmed that these postings are meant to satisfy regulatory requirements and are "not about launching a broad hiring campaign." Though, perspectives differ on whether this complies with the law.
"Instead, it's about documenting for the Department of Labor that no qualified U.S. workers stepped forward during the recruitment phase. That's why you see the mandated postings in newspapers and other outlets," Fabela told Blaze News. "Jobs.Now highlights those ads, but that doesn't mean the company is running a new search. It's just about meeting the compliance rules."
"By the time these ads appear, the role is often already filled by someone, usually an H-1B worker the company is already employing," he said, dismissing Jobs.Now's claim that the posts aimed to hide jobs from Americans.
‘Only after no US worker can be found will the PERM application be approved. Whether the foreign worker is already performing the job is immaterial.’
However, other experts challenge Fabela's perspective, asserting that the law requires genuine efforts to hire Americans, even through the labor market tests posted in the newspaper.
“Employers must conduct good-faith recruitment of U.S. workers and offer that position to any qualified and willing U.S. applicant,” Dr. Ron Hira, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Howard University, told Blaze News. “Only after no U.S. worker can be found will the PERM application be approved. Whether the foreign worker is already performing the job is immaterial.”
Hira called the law “crystal clear” but noted that even the DOL “has been guilty of administrative malpractice in enforcing PERM regulations.”
RELATED: AI, global power, and the end of human jobs — are we ready?
“For the past few decades, DOL has turned a blind eye to rampant employer discrimination against U.S. workers in the PERM recruitment process,” he explained. “Everyone, including DOL, knows that discrimination is more common than not in PERM applications.”
The DOL admitted in a 2020 report that the PERM program “relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria.” It also stated that it has “limited authority over the H-1B program as it can only deny incomplete and obviously inaccurate applications and conduct complaint-based investigations, challenges in protecting the welfare of the nation’s workforce.”
“Therefore, the PERM and H-1B programs remain highly susceptible to fraud,” the DOL concluded.
Hira called for Americans to petition the Trump administration “to start enforcing the plain language of the law.”
‘Americans don't have a real shot at these jobs; they were already displaced long ago when the employer hired the worker on a temporary visa.’
Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, echoed Hira's concerns about enforcement failures, calling the PERM process “a charade.”
“The reality is that nearly all of these employers already have a foreign worker in the job and are just seeking to check off the boxes that the law requires,” Vaughan told Blaze News. “Americans don't have a real shot at these jobs; they were already displaced long ago when the employer hired the worker on a temporary visa.”
Congress fueled some of these issues by adjusting the eligibility criteria for green cards to more closely align with those for temporary visas, Vaughan explained.
“That means there are more temporary workers now seeking to get green cards to stay permanently, and they are willing to work for less money on that promise. However, they have a long wait for the green cards, and the employers don't want to have to consider Americans for these jobs, since they promised them to the foreign workers, and they can get away with paying them less,” Vaughan stated.
Concerning any “good faith” efforts to find Americans to fill these positions, Vaughan reasoned that there is “little enforcement of the requirement” because employers have found ways to circumvent rules.
Fabela acknowledges that issues exist within the current process, including a lack of modernization with the print newspaper ad requirement. He also noted that some job requirements are so "overly narrow" that they "effectively match one candidate's resume." The most concerning issue is "wage-level manipulation," according to Fabela.
"Bad actors will write dumbed-down job descriptions in a way that understates the role's actual skill level. That allows them to pay experienced candidates significantly less while still clearing the prevailing wage test," Fabela told Blaze News.
Jobs.Now also highlighted issues with the manipulation of the "overly broad" prevailing wage standard, which "allows companies to slot jobs into categories that could include far less advanced roles, which have lower wage standards."
America First reforms
Amid an uncertain tech job market and ongoing criticisms of the PERM process, advocates like Jobs.Now are pushing for reforms to address the root problems and restore priority to American workers.
Jobs.Now is calling for changes to H-1B and PERM regulations, as well as the cancellation of the OPT visa program, to open more job opportunities to American workers, including entry-level recent college graduates.
‘We think the regulations must be changed so that labor market tests give American citizens the right they deserve to be considered first for jobs in America, rather than the formality they are currently treated as.’
Companies should also be required to prove that there are no qualified American candidates available for a position before issuing an H-1B visa, Jobs.Now stated.
The tech workers behind the job board website are advocating for companies to be required to post all labor market tests on their website’s career page, accept digital applications, and post on high-traffic job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed, rather than newspaper classifieds.
RELATED: America last? Foreign workers fill jobs while Americans are left out
“In short, we think the regulations must be changed so that labor market tests give American citizens the right they deserve to be considered first for jobs in America, rather than the formality they are currently treated as,” Jobs.Now told Blaze News.
Fabela agrees that the H-1B program is flawed and in need of reform to prevent abuse. However, he noted that he is “unapologetically pro-H-1B," expressing concern that China would win the tech race “without firing a shot” if the U.S. closes the door on foreign talent.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has vowed to clamp down on employment bias by increasing investigations, compliance checks, and litigation.
“The EEOC is putting employers and other covered entities on notice: If you are part of the pipeline contributing to our immigration crisis or abusing our legal immigration system via illegal preferences against American workers, you must stop,” EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas stated in March.
“The EEOC is here to protect all workers from unlawful national origin discrimination, including American workers,” Lucas remarked.
The DOL did not respond to a request for comment.
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Rabid Leftist Arrested For Threatening To Assassinate Trump And The Media Is Not All Over It
The threat of homicide is more sobering considering Trump was nearly assassinated twice last year.The Russia hoax and COVID lies share the same deep-state fingerprints
“Conspiracy theory” is the go-to smear against those of us who questioned any aspect of the government’s authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, the smear serves one purpose: to divert the public’s attention away from the truth.
“An attack on ‘conspiracy theories,’” Rothbard writes in “The Anatomy of the State,” means that the subjects of a regime “will become more gullible in believing the ‘general welfare’ reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions.”
The democratization of information means that censorship just doesn’t work as well as it used to.
“A ‘conspiracy theory,’” he continues, “can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state’s ideological propaganda.”
The more I dig into the origins of the COVID pandemic, the more “despotic” our state seems to become — and the more “conspiratorial” I get.
Unsettling the system
I am trying to put together the final pieces of the puzzle of what I consider among the greatest public policy scandals of my lifetime — not only who did it, but more importantly, why would they do it?
A few months ago, I spent a day with Matt Taibbi, the iconoclastic muckraker and “Twitter Files” reporter, for the latest episode of my BlazeTV investigative series, “The Coverup.”
As he dug through the trove of emails and texts, Taibbi discovered the conspiracy to blacklist and silence Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the subject of the first episode of “The Coverup” and now the head of the National Institutes of Health. Taibbi soon learned that the same tactics and tools — and even many of the very same deep-state actors — have their fingerprints all over both the Russia collusion hoax and the COVID cover-up.
A precedent for censorship
Recently released documents from Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard reveal that the so-called Russia collusion hoax wasn’t just wrong — it was deliberate. The Obama administration orchestrated the fabrication, pushing U.S. intelligence agencies to leak a report suggesting Vladimir Putin had helped Donald Trump steal the 2016 election.
That leak, repeated endlessly by the press, fueled a national narrative branding Trump’s presidency as illegitimate — despite those same agencies having already dismissed the claim.
This kind of manipulation would be outrageous if it weren’t so familiar.
Five years after the COVID lockdowns stripped millions of Americans of basic liberties, we’re still uncovering how the deep state used propaganda to silence dissent. Throughout the pandemic, scientists and doctors raised alarms about the damage lockdowns would cause — and did cause. Some of the world’s most respected experts signed the Great Barrington Declaration to oppose the government’s heavy-handed response.
But the public never heard from them. Bureaucrats and media allies moved swiftly to smear, suppress, and sideline these voices using one of the oldest authoritarian tactics: control of information.
In fairness, public health agencies didn’t have to twist many arms. The legacy media followed their lead willingly — even when the guidance contradicted itself or defied basic logic.
But unlike the days of Project Mockingbird, when the CIA could shape coverage by nudging the New York Times or CBS, controlling the old guard wasn’t enough. The rise of social media — decentralized, fast-moving, and open to anyone with a computer or phone — posed a new challenge. The administration needed a more aggressive strategy to dominate the narrative.
Strong-arming social media
In episode 5 of “The Coverup,” I ask Taibbi how they pulled it off. As one of the first journalists to dig into the Twitter Files, Taibbi exposed the machinery behind the censorship regime. Americans suspected that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were suppressing dissent during COVID. But the Twitter Files confirmed what many feared: They weren’t acting alone. They took orders from the FBI directly.
And these weren’t polite requests, either. When the government “suggested” something, tech companies treated it as a command.
It all traces back to — surprise, surprise — the Russia hoax.
In 2017, Congress hauled tech executives into hearings and accused them of letting Russian disinformation run wild. Essentially, they were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: Allow the government to play a role in content moderation or prepare to be regulated into submission.
RELATED: On the 9th anniversary of Russiagate, the hoax is finally crumbling
Their surrender gave U.S. intelligence agencies de facto control over what Americans could say online. The feds told platforms which posts to delete, which users to silence, and how to suppress the rest. You could post your opinion — as long as no one could see it. “Shadow bans” became the preferred method of censorship: clean, quiet, and deniable.
The silver lining
Thanks to Taibbi — and a handful of journalists who still value truth over access — we now see how the government sold Americans on fiction. Russia hacked the election. COVID came from a bowl of bat soup. Question either and you’d vanish from the digital public square.
Millions believed these lies. And under their influence, they did real damage — locking down schools, closing businesses, and sowing doubt about fair elections.
But truth has a way of leaking out.
It’s taken time, but the lies are unraveling. And that’s the silver lining. In a world where information moves faster than censors can keep up, suppression doesn’t work like it used to. So long as we have truth-tellers willing to dig and defy — like Taibbi — the regime won’t have the last word.
We won’t get fooled again.
Episode 5 of “The Coverup” premieres Thursday, July 31.
Zuckerberg to dump hundreds of billions into new Manhattan-size projects
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to risk it all and hopes to bounce back from recent AI-related shortcomings with what he is calling "hundreds of billions" of dollars' worth of investments.
Llama — Meta's answer to public AI models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek — was not nearly as successful as the Facebook founder hoped, and with Zuckerberg still pushing his dream of augmented reality, he is hoping to get ahead in the field of "superintelligence," popularized a decade ago by the tech philosopher Nick Bostrom and embraced in recent years by the likes of Zuckerberg.
'We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.'
By most accounts, including sources he has cited, Zuckerberg has started a new team of top AI talent, paying them as if they were star NBA players.
SemiAnalysis said the typical offers Zuckerberg is throwing out are about $200 million over four years, 100 times more than the usual payout in this field. There have even allegedly been some billion-dollar offers that were turned down by top researchers and engineers from competitor OpenAI.
The new team will focus on AI systems that can perform intellectual tasks at a level meant to compete with the smartest humanity has to offer against machines, with the hope of surpassing human abilities.
This superintelligence team is coupled with gigantic investments in another adjacent sector, which has turned into an arms race in the tech sector.
RELATED: Trump bets big on AI to make America dominant again
"For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry," Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, his X-like platform. "We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence."
To do this, Zuckerberg will throw money at the procurement of data centers, in the hope of competing with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle, the biggest names in the game.
"We're actually building several multi-[gigawatt] clusters," Zuckerberg wrote, referring to the data centers. "We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years."
These data centers are gigantic. Zuckerberg showed a graphic displaying the Hyperion Data Center, which will call Richland Parish, Louisiana, its home and is almost the size of Manhattan.
According to Netizen, Zuckerberg will bring 500 jobs to the region, paying about $82,000 per year.
RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg's multibillion-dollar midlife crisis
At the same time, Meta spokesperson Ashley Gabriel told TechCrunch that Prometheus is located in New Albany, Ohio.
These massive data center complexes will run the advanced AI models at an unprecedented scale, which of course will require massive amounts of energy to power them.
If Meta is to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in this space, they likely need to poach significant amounts of power from local sources, which has already become a big issue on the Eastern seaboard. Alternatively, Meta might need to build its own small modular nuclear reactors, which, while costing billions, could power the data centers while pleasing the surrounding community at the same time by lowering their energy prices through providing auxiliary power.
"We're dealing with enormous quantities of energy demand," Blaze Media's James Poulos said. "AI inference consumes a lot, and training even more. There's no clear way to come close to meeting anticipated needs without something like a national nuclear industrial program. And that's before you start tallying all computational demands on electricity generation."
According to a recent International Energy Agency report, next year's increase in consumption across AI, crypto, and data centers "could amount to between 160 and 590 TWh compared with 2022. This is equivalent to the electricity consumption of Sweden (low estimate) or Germany (high estimate)."
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Steve Deace vs. Big Tech censorship — the battle everyone should be following
One of the keys to success in digital content creation is mastering search engine optimization — a powerful strategy that boosts a creator’s visibility. SEO involves using targeted keywords in video titles, descriptions, and tags, along with engaging thumbnails and captions, to help search engines like Google and YouTube rank content higher in search results, driving more viewers to discover it.
Here’s how it works: A YouTuber films a cooking video demonstrating a pasta recipe. To reach a wider audience, she applies SEO by crafting a keyword-rich title and description with phrases like “easy dinner ideas” and “quick pasta dish” and adding relevant tags to her video. If she does this well, she increases her video’s chances of ranking higher in YouTube search results, attracting more viewers in a competitive digital landscape.
But what happens when Big Tech shadow cabals in collaboration with federal entities decide to erect virtual barriers that prevent certain topics from appearing on search result pages — regardless of how adeptly the creator used SEO and other content-optimizing digital tools?
BlazeTV host Steve Deace has been living out the reality of that question for years.
Topics — especially “controversial” ones — YouTube, Apple iTunes, and Google have deemed problematic are quietly buried under an avalanche of other content. This censorship has been happening for years, so conservative content creators got smarter and found loopholes around the algorithms by avoiding key words and phrases they knew would be flagged and squashed.
However, Big Tech companies are now “transcribing everything that's said on podcasts,” meaning creators cannot avoid the consequences of discussing forbidden topics.
“So let's pretend we spend an entire entire show just debunking the demonic ideology of transgenderism, but we market it in a way that it says nothing about trans in order to try to get around the algorithm. Well, now that they're transcribing that for us, we can't get around that,” says producer Aaron McIntire.
Creators can appeal YouTube’s decision to demonetize their show, but success is rare. “There's basically no recourse whatsoever,” says Aaron.
“I would venture a guess we are the largest show in America with by far the most anemic YouTube traffic,” says Steve. “They're making it so we can't connect with our audiences, and if we can't connect with you, we can't hit the numbers we want to get the monetization we need to keep even doing this at all.”
Steve has been battling Big Tech censorship behind the scenes for years now. Recently, however, his fight experienced a new development when he contacted First Liberty — “the leading constitutional conservative political advocacy organization in the country” — which determined that Steve, indeed, had grounds to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.
To hear where Steve is at in the process of fighting Big Tech censorship, watch the episode above.
Want more from Steve Deace?
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Trump’s Trade Negotiations Should Include A Push For Free Speech
There should be more to economic and trade policy than merely the price of goods.How the online smut king built porn into an addiction machine
He didn’t just build a business. He rewired a culture.
Fabian Thylmann, a German tech bro with a knack for algorithms and a nose for profit, quietly stitched together the Franken-monster we now call mainstream porn. Through sites like Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube, he industrialized arousal, stripped sex of intimacy, and flooded the internet with content so extreme it would once have sparked criminal trials — not subscriptions.
Zuckerberg rewired friendship. Thylmann rewired arousal. Same operating logic. Different limbic system.
And he didn’t need to lobby Congress or march in the streets to do it. He just made it seamless, instant, and free. In doing so, he planted the seeds of a crisis that most still refuse to name: spiritual, psychological, and deeply human.
Porn used to be something you paid for. You had to seek it out, sneak around, find a booth, a VHS, a magazine. Shame was built into the transaction. And that shame — though mocked today — acted as a kind of firewall. A crude one, maybe, but it kept excess in check.
What Thylmann did was blow that firewall to pieces.
He made porn frictionless. No age checks. No barriers. No cost. Just one click, and a bottomless stream of fantasy opened up. This wasn’t the first major shift, of course. The sexual revolution of the 1960s had already begun loosening the cultural restraints around sex. Playboy glamorized it. VHS commercialized it.
But the internet weaponized it. And when broadband arrived, everything changed. Suddenly, porn wasn’t just available — it was in your pocket, in your home, on demand. What was once scarce became infinite. What was once taboo became trend.
But this wasn’t just some sleazy revolution. It was digital engineering. Thylmann didn’t create porn. He optimized it. Aggregated it. SEOed it. Data-mined it. His genius was in realizing that porn wasn’t about quality, but quantity, velocity, and accessibility. He gamified libido. Every refresh brought novelty. Every novelty promised more. Your brain lit up. Your dopamine spiked. Then it crashed. So you clicked again.
Sound familiar?
In social media circles, Mark Zuckerberg is the man who flattened privacy and turned connection into a data stream. If Zuckerberg digitized the social graph, Thylmann did the same to human desire. He made sex transactional, algorithmic, on demand. Zuckerberg rewired friendship. Thylmann rewired arousal. Same operating logic. Different limbic system.
Pornhub became the Facebook of adult content, driven by likes, shares, autoplay, endless scroll. But instead of poking your crush, you watched her digitally morph to perform acts she never consented to. Instead of a timeline, you got a torrent. A ceaseless glut of extreme material that, over time, pushed boundaries farther and farther from anything resembling love or connection.
The results are showing. More people are shunning relationships altogether. Birth rates are collapsing across the developed world. Marriage is seen by many as outdated, even oppressive. Loneliness has quietly become an epidemic.
And yet we’re consuming more porn than ever before. This isn’t coincidence. It’s correlation, maybe even causation. Because once you normalize stimulation without intimacy, the real thing starts to feel like too much effort. Or worse, irrelevant.
And here's the part I find most concerning.
RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg is lying to you
The average users aren't just bored teenagers or lonely office workers. They’re addicts. Casualties of an attention war they never volunteered for. Brains flooded with stimulus, bodies disconnected from meaning. It's not just that they can’t feel pleasure without porn. It’s that they don’t even know what they’re looking for any more.
Because Thylmann didn’t just give people porn. He changed what porn meant. He shifted the baseline. What was once hard-core became soft-core. What was once shocking became normal. What was once illegal became monetized. And in the process, he helped raise a generation that sees intimacy as cringe.
And yet — unlike Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos — Thylmann is far from a household name. He’s not invited to testify before Congress. He isn’t asked about ethics, mental health, or the bodies left in the wreckage. He made hundreds of millions, sold off MindGeek, and vanished into obscurity. No lawsuits. No reckonings. No Netflix docudrama. Just silence.
Meanwhile, the machine he built keeps running. Now with AI. Now with deepfakes. Now with models who don’t exist but still get millions of views. The line between fantasy and reality isn’t blurred any more. It’s erased.
The next frontier? Porn that responds to your face. To your eye movements. To your breath. Porn that learns from you in real time, as any good algorithm does. And before long, porn that no longer needs human performers at all. Just prompts. Just code. Just you and the machine. Alone, but overstimulated. No wonder Thylmann slipped away.
Don’t kid yourself: This isn’t a sideshow. This is the main event. Porn is one of the internet’s biggest industries. Bigger than Netflix. Bigger than Twitter. It's more embedded in the culture than anyone wants to admit. And it runs on the same logic as every other platform: Feed the algorithm, numb the user, profit off the wreckage.
And in a culture where people are increasingly skeptical of connection — where ghosting is easier than loving and self-gratification more efficient than vulnerability — this model isn’t just profitable. It’s invincible. You don’t need to destroy intimacy. Just replace it with something faster, cheaper, and easier to control.
The irony is as obvious as it is alarming. In a world that's never been more "connected," people are starving for connection. Drenched in sex, but untouched by intimacy. Constantly stimulated, but rarely satisfied.
And if you trace that back to a single point of failure — to the moment when arousal became automated and sex became content — it leads to a quiet little office in Germany and a man named Fabian Thylmann.
'Insane radical leftists' are gone: Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey reunite for US military project
Billionaire entrepreneur Palmer Luckey says Meta is a very different company than it used to be, and he's ready to work with Mark Zuckerberg again after being fired from Facebook in 2017.
Luckey, the creator of virtual reality goggles called Oculus Rift, was fired by Facebook allegedly for donating $10,000 to a pro-Donald Trump group. Almost 10 years later as founder of Anduril, a military tech company, Luckey announced on X that he was ready to reunite with Zuckerberg to create VR and augmented reality systems for the U.S. military.
'The people who conspired to oust me, they're not even there anymore.'
"Anduril and Meta have teamed up to make the world's best AR and VR systems for the United States Military," Luckey wrote on X, alongside a photo with Zuckerberg. "Leveraging Meta's massive investments in XR technology for our troops will save countless lives and dollars."
Luckey revealed the first project would be a military helmet called Eagle Eye, equipment that would give Army soldiers access to advanced augmented reality systems that makes them "superhuman."
"My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that," Luckey said in a press release.
RELATED: Oculus creator fires back at 'politically obsessive journalists' as hit-piece culture dies
On the podcast "Core Memory," Luckey explained what was long thought to be the real reason behind his exodus from Facebook: an impending revolt from an army of tech-leftists ideologically opposed to his political donations.
"Meta is a very different company than it was nine years ago when they fired me," Luckey told the host. "I don't mean in tenor or tone. I mean it's literally different people."
Luckey claimed that while Zuckerberg still likely approved of his firing, it was more so his subordinates who orchestrated his removal.
"When your people that you task with making decisions come up and say, 'This is what we've decided we have to do. There's no other way out of this huge PR and internal problem. Our employees are insane radical leftists who are going to quit en masse if we don't get rid of Palmer,' like, what are you really gonna do?"
"The people who conspired to oust me, they're not even there anymore," Luckey added.
RELATED: Back to the future? Palmer Luckey's Chromatic does nostalgia right
Return's James Poulos asked if America is actually ready for the advanced "techomancers" Luckey speaks of.
"It may be too late to ask. The specter of China’s immense production capabilities and verve for systematization presents America with a much different threat profile than its two great Axis enemies," Poulos stated.
“It would be a harsh lesson indeed to discover that the only way to compete militarily with China is to lose our own identity here at home. That’s a problem no tech alone can solve," he added.
Luckey seemingly found solace in the reconciliation with Meta and its now apparently right-wing CEO Zuckerberg. Almost talking himself into it, the Anduril boss said it was likely more productive for him to accept that he "won the persuasion argument" and should be happy he received apologies from Meta's top brass.
"If people end up coming to your side, you shouldn't shove them back and say 'Hey, f**k off. You had different beliefs 10 years ago.' You should say, 'Come on in, the tent's big, and I'm happy to have you.'"
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