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It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bigyabai 5mo agoPalantir is decently self-descriptive, Anduril is the word that needs reclaiming.
- ggm 5mo agoArguments about symbols and words are Godwin's law transcribed. It's a descent into past times and the current meaning of things more benign at the origin. On the LOTR theme there's an old re-reading which projects the Orcs as exploited workers, the elvish wars as battles amongst ubermensch.
- arjie 5mo agoThe Last Ringbearer is some more fan-fiction in the LOTR world that does this as well. I found it fairly entertaining, though I think LOTR as it stands is extraordinary, especially when told from the lens of not being the main story but a later side questy bit.
- threatofrain 5mo agoPalantir already has the blessings of the Tolkien estate. All the Tolkien-sounding companies in recent news have the blessings of the Tolkien estate.
- colordrops 5mo agoso?
- threatofrain 5mo agoWhen we seek to "reclaim" something, will we be reclaiming from the offspring of Tolkien?
- walrus01 5mo agoBeing biologically descended from Tolkien doesn't mean they're necessarily nice people, or aren't simply motivated by earning as much revenue from the legacy as possible.
- DonaldPShimoda 5mo ago> Palantir already has the blessings of the Tolkien estate. 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.
- mmooss 5mo ago> Palantir already has the blessings of the Tolkien estate. 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).
- olalonde 5mo agoI don't think that's true. You generally can't copyright a single word and even if the word was trademarked, there would be little risk of confusion. > 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. https://www.palantir.com/terms-and-conditions/ https://www.palantir.com/terms-and-conditions/
- gamerslexus 5mo ago> The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy's hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- incr_me 5mo ago> ... 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.
- IdahoSpring 5mo agoDid 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 5mo agoYeah, 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 5mo agoI 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- tptacek 5mo agoFrom an illustration in the middle of the piece: "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.
- IdahoSpring 5mo agoDo you have a better resource? Interested. I saw it as an incomplete-exemplary list as well but curious if there are better mappings
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- pclowes 5mo ago> which is a database consultingware company and a JV version of Oracle in all the senses we care about Are you sure about this? I would kick the tires on that theory a bit.
- tptacek 5mo agoWhat part of it doesn't ring true to you?
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- DeathArrow 5mo agoIt seems that people who try to reclaim Palantir either haven't read Tolkien or they haven't understood him. Tolkien was a devout catholic and a conservative.
- mmooss 5mo ago> 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?
- Hizonner 5mo ago"Conservative" can mean a lot of things. Tolkien didn't have anything particularly useful to contribute to politics and nobody should be using him as a guide to anything... but nonetheless there'd have been no limit to the layers of Tolkien's contempt for somebody like Peter Thiel.
- deaux 5mo agoIt's time to reclaim the word "Meta" for Greek
- b1temy 5mo agoSomeone from my high school added me on LinkedIn and works at Palantir. 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.