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In This Issue
Vol. 28 Issue 4
PROFILE ON: THE US UNICORN SINGLEHANDEDLY BUILDING THE FUTURE OF AUTONOMOUS WARFARE
- THE RISE OF SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
- THE “WHY” BEHIND ANDURIL
- LATTICE OS
- ACQUIRED AUTONOMY
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Why Read: Inside the strategy and tactics of the Western world’s most advanced situational-awareness company.
The Rise of Situational Awareness
What do TikTok and Hikvision have in common with Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey’s newest venture?
Situational awareness.
For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), TikTok is a powerful window into global culture, creating the potential for the party to observe – and shape – the perspectives, ideas, and social norms of the app’s 1B+ users through its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance. Hikvision security cameras, on the other hand – many of them equipped with facial-recognition technology – create a network of eyes on the ground around the world. (Research in 2021 by industry research group Top10VPN found 4.8 million networks of Hikvision devices in 191 countries outside China.)
Many of China’s top companies, aided in their growth by CCP efforts, if not owned outright by state-connected firms, have this function at their core.
You cannot control what you do not observe.
Enter Palmer Luckey, the erstwhile founder of Oculus VR, who was summarily fired after Facebook acquired the company back in 2014 for $2 billion.
But while Mark Zuckerberg has been banging his head against the metaverse for the last 10 years, Palmer has been building something that is literally world-changing: a company that facilitates full-fledged autonomous warfare and situational awareness. Anduril Industries.
