Today's world is the legacy of Tolkien. We've come to understand the world through the categories of Tolkien, without which we could not bear to act. We can act out a disavowal of Palantir, but we'd be disavowing Lord of the Rings at the same time. It's not like Tolkien ever overturned the palantir, he only went as far as to show the palantir to be politically dangerous, much like Bush and Obama saw sanctions against Iran. Tolkien never achieved a full critique. He stops at the point of a liberal plurality of knowledge (hobbits have experiential/ethical knowledge, elves have cultural preservation, wizards have lore/interpretation) so that no single group has a monopoly on truth, and they're all locked within their racial categories. He never writes about the erosion of race and the universalization of knowledge.
You should read Tolkien to understand Palantir. This business of "reclaiming" amounts to disavowal of reality.
Who said that erosion of race and universalization of knowledge is a good thing? The article sure didn't.
If we agree that diversity is better than monoculture, we agree that we want more different subspecies with different ways of seeing reality.
The company palantir sells mechanized spying. Something that is clearly evil in a tolkeinian world view.
I was like, obviously it was about the danger of giving up your power to other people and the corruption of that power.
My classmates were pretty convinced it was about how important it was to have power over other people.
First time I twigged onto exactly how dumb, short sighted, and self interested, otherwise intelligent people can be.
Edit: I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press. The eye focuses a spotlight on the thing it is looking at giving it great importance, but ignores everything else. It is not actually omnipotent, it is just propaganda and marketing.
Hmm I'd be interested to see a citation for that. As far as I know, Tolkien maintained for his entire life that The Lord of the Rings was not in any way intended as an analogy or allegory (but he admitted that, of course, it was obviously influenced by his lived experience).
What I find interesting, is that a few months after joining, he scrubbed all posts, descriptions, and mentions of the word "Palantir" in his profile, and replaced it by saying he works at an unnamed company as "a Forward Deployed Engineer". Judging by his activity reacting to other posts, it seems he coworkers also use the same term and removed mentions of "Palantir".
I find it interesting, I suppose it was to avoid backlash from others, or perhaps other companies would be hesitant to hire someone from Palantir (?). Or perhaps just a company policy to avoid scammers from finding employees.
But in any case, the hiding of the word is something I find interesting.
> Palantir Technologies is in no way affiliated with, or endorsed or sponsored by, The Saul Zaentz Company d.b.a. Tolkien Enterprises or the Estate of J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Tolkien state (and related orgs) have registered "Palantir" under many (generally publishing/merchandising) domains, but Palantir Technologies has registered it under IC 009: computer software for collection, editing, analysis, viewing, [etc.] and a few others.
Is that true? I can't find any articles corroborating this claim. As far as I can tell from some brief googling, there is simply no legal course of action to take to prevent companies from using these names (or names from other works of fiction), even if the Tolkien Estate would like to.
Do you know a source that says that? I've wondered about it but never heard anything, and I just did a very quick look and found nothing that explains how and why that is handled.
Also, if the Tolkien estate is still in JRR's decendants' hands, I think it's the third generation at least (counting JRR as the first).
On the LOTR theme there's an old re-reading which projects the Orcs as exploited workers, the elvish wars as battles amongst ubermensch.
"The Stack":
Space: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Maxar, Voyager
Cloud: Palantir, IBM, Cisco, Meta, AWS, Microsoft
Surface: Data Centers, Urban Surveillance, Mobile Fortify, Axon
Energy: The Nuclear Co, Valar Atomics, Oklo, General Matter, Helion
Finance: Paypal, Coinbase, Ramp, Stripe, Erebor, Ripple
---
This doesn't make any sense at all. Many of the categories aren't even internally consistent, and the space->cloud->surface->energy->finance "stack" is incoherent.
I should like this, because one of my longstanding hangups is people hyperfixating on Palantir (the company), which is a database consultingware company and a JV version of Oracle in all the senses we care about --- civil tech punditry has an awful habit of focusing on these lurid instances when they're really just banal examples of something tech giant companies do generally, which has the effect of letting companies like Oracle and Cisco (both of whom have demons resumes) off the hook.
But if the author can't lay out a reasonable map of the industry and the forces acting on it, I have trouble taking the rest of it seriously.
Are you sure about this? I would kick the tires on that theory a bit.
I don't doubt they're more efficient than Oracle; you'd kind of have to be, right?
Tolkien was a devout catholic and a conservative.
Tolkien was a serious Catholic, but not at all of the same politics and perspective as the people using the names he created in his books. For one thing, in Tolkien's stories power corrupts and is the greatest threat to good people. Also, didn't some of the current businesspeople say they favored Sauron?