It's time to reclaim the word "Palantir" for JRR Tolkien

bigyabai

Palantir is decently self-descriptive, Anduril is the word that needs reclaiming.

ggm

Arguments 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.

threatofrain

Palantir already has the blessings of the Tolkien estate. All the Tolkien-sounding companies in recent news have the blessings of the Tolkien estate.

gamerslexus

> 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.

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.

tptacek

From 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.

DeathArrow

It 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.

deaux

It's time to reclaim the word "Meta" for Greek

b1temy

Someone 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.