Opinion | Hardware Is Back

Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today. "Software is eating the world," digital-tech pioneer Marc Andreessen proclaimed 15 years ago. American industries might once have been built out of steel, concrete and oil. But now, he wrote, digitally based companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google were "poised to take over large swathes of the economy." History, and the stock market, proved him right. In this century, our economy has seen a huge shift from businesses based in atoms, the physical materials that make up infrastructure and machines, to those made of electrons, the digital bits that comprise the virtual world. Just think of how digital movies streamed on Netflix have largely replaced giant rolls of celluloid projected in metroplexes. Today, we are pivoting back. Software is still vital, many tech leaders say, but so is the ability to build things in the unforgiving, material world. Ambitious young engineers now aspire to build more than the next dating or food-delivery app. They're designing electric aircraft, rockets and small nuclear reactors. Talk to today's startup founders and investors and you will often hear something like, "I want to work in atoms, not just electrons." Even AI, seemingly the ultimate electron-based industry, requires massive investments in chips, data centers and new power plants. Hardware is cool again. You can see this vibe shift play out over the course of one young man's career. Palmer Luckey, 33, embodies the tech industry's seesaw between electrons and atoms. As a teenage tinkerer, he developed the first affordable VR headset, initially using cast-off components. I met him in 2013 when Popular Mechanics, where I worked at the time, gave him an award for his Oculus Rift headset. Mr. Luckey showed up at our awards event in his trademark Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops and impressed everyone with his brains and lack of pretense. He had just turned 21. A few months later, Facebook would buy his company for $2 billion. As a mostly hardware guy in a mostly software company, Mr. Luckey didn't last long at Facebook. He thought VR games, rather than social interactions, should be the initial target for the product. Then, in 2016, word leaked out that Mr. Luckey had donated to an obscure pro-Trump nonprofit. His Facebook colleagues were scandalized. Soon he was out the door. It all looks a little silly in retrospect. But the incident was a preview of the kind of woke freakout that would drive other ideological nonconformists out of tech and media companies in the coming years. The grudge didn't last. Mr. Luckey recently defended Meta's VR rollback, and his current company works with Meta developing mixed-reality headsets for the military. The inventor's bad break at Facebook turned out to be a lucky break for the U.S. Rather than nursing his wounds, Mr. Luckey teamed up with other tech iconoclasts and launched the military hardware firm Anduril ("Lord of the Rings" fans will get the reference). When other tech firms were squeamish about working for the U.S. military, Anduril eagerly sought government contracts. The company started with a laser-based system to detect illegal crossings along the Mexican border. Soon it was building various clever military drones. Today, Anduril has a range of contracts with the Defense Department. The New York Times calls Mr. Luckey "the Pentagon's favorite tech guy." The company is developing autonomous submersible drones, an AI-enabled, pilotless jet fighter and other weapons inspired by science fiction. Mr. Luckey often says he wants to "turn warfighters into technomancers." All of this comes not a moment too soon for the American military. While the current war with Iran shows the crushing superiority of U.S. arms systems, our enemies are innovating quickly, especially in drone warfare. Meanwhile, our legacy military contractors move like molasses. The Pentagon is desperate to find suppliers that can innovate at Silicon Valley speeds. Anduril is one of several startups filling that gap. It is tempting to say that Palmer Luckey, a hardware geek who was briefly marooned in a mostly-software company, has returned to his nuts-and-bolts roots. The truth is more complicated. Modern warfare is increasingly software-driven. And most of Anduril's weapons systems involve integrating hardware and software in networks that process information faster than the enemy can respond. Last month, the Army announced a $20 billion contract with Anduril to build out an AI platform that will improve battlefield coordination and defend against drones. The software-first focus of the American tech industry helped the U.S. lead a global digital revolution. But the demands of the real world -- including building infrastructure, providing energy, and, yes, waging war -- demand mastery of the material world as well. The U.S. is lucky to have innovators who are adept at both. Mr. Meigs is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.