[incr_me]

> ... the betrayal of the legacy of Tolkien ...

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.

[gamerslexus]

> He never writes about the erosion of race and the universalization of knowledge.

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.

[IdahoSpring]

Did you read the article? the proposal is to learn from the significance of the word and to use it as a generic term denoting it's original purpose, to define more than one firm's tech but a whole class of firms.

[incr_me]

Yeah, the author is claiming that Tolkien had a radical message: the palantir is meant to show us that the knowledge it yields is not neutral, not total, and is dangerous to wield politically. I'm saying that the author is wrong and that Tolkien's lesson has been thoroughly integrated into the thought of political actors. Peter Thiel and Obama and whoever else are all aware of the dangers of the palantir, and they act empowered by this awareness. There's nothing to reclaim.

[kennywinker]

I feel like we read different books. I read a story about the dangers of the desire for power and control over others, and of the outright evils of mechanization and destruction of nature.

The company palantir sells mechanized spying. Something that is clearly evil in a tolkeinian world view.

[cam_l]

I remember being asked in class what we all thought was the message of 1984.

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.

[DonaldPShimoda]

> I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press.

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).

[incr_me]

No, we read the same book, just in different ways. I'm interested in a symptomatic reading. To complain that Peter Thiel read Lord of the Rings incorrectly because he drew inspiration in Sauron instead of Gandalf is plain boring. Thiel, Obama, yourself, the OP author, and Tolkien himself "claim" Lord of the Rings. That needs explaining, and you cannot do that by reading in the way that you read Lord of the Rings.

[kennywinker]

Moral relativism at best. Plain evil at worst. Either way, just as boring as the reading you disdain. Good luck with that.

[incr_me]

No, it's that I think Thiel and Obama are both evil, even if the former is cartoonishly so and the latter is a gentleman. Both separatism (itself plain evil) and multiculturalism (itself morally relativistic) are ideological forms bounded by the limits of capitalism that cannot exist in any meaningful form in any sort of humane world. Is this really not interesting?