The promise of beginnings: Unpacking ‘diversity’ at Oculus VR

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the inaugural year of Launch Pad, a diversity initiative by Meta’s virtual reality (VR) subsidiary, originally known as Oculus. As industry-led discourse presented VR as a vision of opportunity and change in the tech industry, Launch Pad presented a vision of social progress through improved diversity. However, a variety of contextualizing factors within that first year complicate these visions of progress, including the gendered and racialized norms of the tech industry, the politics of Oculus’s co-founder and the mixed feelings of the first beneficiaries of the program. I argue that even if Launch Pad is a good faith effort to address historical and current forms of marginalization and underrepresentation in the tech industry, such efforts must go much further than mentorship and tokenized inclusion, requiring a genuine recognition of the need for systemic change.

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