Palmer Luckey

There's a question here.

Are the people aligned with the government or are they opposed to the government?

And to what degree?

If you have them where they're neutral parties that accept each other's existence, that's one thing.

Let's say you have a country like Ukraine where implausibly to the Russians, they had formed a strong national identity and there were people who were willing to die in large numbers for their country.

That's a case where there's people who are very much aligned with the broader goals of their nation.

On the other hand, if you look at a lot of African nations, even a lot of Middle Eastern nations, you have a huge mismatch between what the political class wants and what the everyman wants.

And so I think a better axis is actually more like democratic versus autocratic technologies in that there are a lot of technologies that are much more useful for controlling your own population than for preserving their rights.

against hostile actors.

There's a lot of countries whose military effectively is an internal peacekeeping force to crush dissent.

That's actually what it's for.

And there's a lot of tools made by companies like SenseTime in China that are fundamentally, they are not useful for going to other countries and preserving our rights.

They're not useful for defending yourself from an invader.

They are only useful for controlling people in your nation.

This is one of the reasons that China is exporting these technologies in the same way that the Soviet Union exported AK-47s, which you could say are on this distributed and offensive side if you were to look at it that way.

But the reason they were actually doing that is they wanted to arm nations with the tools that they needed to keep their civilian population in check and keep them in power.

And they wanted to threaten them and say, hey, if you ever get out of line, we're going to stop providing you with these arms and systems you need.

And then you're going to immediately get a violent revolution and you're probably going to get killed.

It was a great motivation for people to stay stuck to the Soviet Union.

This idea that we are the thing that allows you to keep your people in check.