Many Silicon Valley oligarchs are slaves, to adapt Keynes, of defunct science fiction and fantasy writers. Their worldview is dominated by the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) they consumed as boys and tweens; hence their impoverished (and impoverishing) characters, the stunted natures of lost boys who never really grew up.1 Two exceptionally exceptional Valley firms are Anduril and Palantir, the one “founded” (dread word) by Palmer Eldritch Luckey and partly funded by wannabe-Argentinian super-patriot Peter Thiel, the other co-founded by Thiel MR SUBLIMINAL Don’t sue me, bro!. “Anduril” and “Palantir” are both appropriated from J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings (LOTR, which I too read as a tween boy, and now regard as one of world’s best works of travel writing, albeit travel in a made-up world).2 In this short post I want to focus on Palantir.
Reader, in what follows I have to assume a basic knowledge on your part of LOTR’s Middle Earth, especially including hobbits (here Pippin, homeland The Shire), the good wizard (Gandalf the Grey), the good wizard gone bad (Saruman, who lives in the tower of Orthanc), Gondor (the good realm, though flawed, capital Osgiliath (destroyed), on the Anduin River) and the evil Dark Lord (Sauron, the Enemy, who lives in the Dark Tower, Barad-dur). Here is Tolkien’s exposition, in Volume Two of the palantiri (sing. palantir), Middle Earth’s internet equivalent (though the network architecture is different). I’ve tried to hack out as much exposition as possible (but for those who haven’t read Tolkien, the writing is really good, unlike the writing in so much of today’s SFF, so that’s not so easy. Bear with me). In what follows, a palantir is called a “Stone,” though it’s shaped like and has the heft of a crystal ball.
“I was just running over some of the Rhymes of Lore in my mind,” answered the wizard. “Hobbits, I suppose, have forgotten them, even those that they ever knew.”
“No, not all,” said Pippin. “And we have many of our own, which wouldn’t interest you, perhaps. But I have never heard this one. What is it about — the seven stars and seven stones?”
“About the palantiri of the Kings of Old,” said Gandalf.
“And what are they?”
“The name meant that which looks far away. The Orthanc-stone was one.”
“Then it was not made, not made” — Pippin hesitated — “by the Enemy?”
“No,” said Gandalf. “Nor by Saruman. It is beyond his art, and beyond Sauron’s too. … Even in Gondor they were a secret known only to a few….
Foreshadowing!
“What did the Men of old use them for?’ asked Pippin, delighted and astonished at getting answers to so many questions, and wondering how long it would last.
“To see far off, and to converse in thought with one another,” said Gandalf. “In that way they long guarded and united the realm of Gondor…
“Each palantir replied to each, but all those in Gondor were ever open to the view of Osgiliath. Now it appears that, as the rock of Orthanc has withstood the storms of time, so there the palantir of that tower has remained. But alone it could do nothing but see small images of things far off and days remote. Very useful, no doubt, that was to Saruman; yet it seems that he was not content. Further and further abroad he gazed, until he cast his gaze upon Barad-dur. Then he was caught!
“Who knows where the lost Stones… now lie, buried, or drowned deep?
Foreshadowing!
But one at least Sauron must have obtained and mastered to his purposes. “Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle’s foot, the spider in a steel web!”
So it is easy — if a bit ominous to see how a Silicon Valley oligarch and SFF fan boi would choose the name “Palantir” for a ginormous surveillance firm (especially if you assume that the Stone in Osgiliath, the one the others were “ever open to the view of,” was relocated to Palantir corporate headquarters).
Now, we see only two palantiri in LOTR narrative, one of which, the one Saruman had in Orthanc, ended up in Gandalf’s care, and one other, which we only find out about in Volume Three. It turns out that the Steward of Gondor, Denethor by name, had also — remember the foreshadowing? — ended up with a palantir, which he too kept secret, and — get this! — he looked into it, also “cast his gaze upon Barad-dur, and was also “trapped and held,” just like Saruman had been! Well, Denethor was the Steward of Gondor, not the king, and since Volume Three is entitled The Return of the King3, you know Denethor was about to be demoted. So — Wagnerian plot, twist here — he sets himself on fire on his son’s old-soaked funeral pyre — Gandalf having previously removed his son from it — holding his palantir:
Then suddenly Denethor laughed…. Then coming to the doorway he drew aside the covering, and lo! he had between his hands a palantir. And as he held it up, it seemed to those that looked on that the globe began to glow with an inner flame, so that the lean face of the Lord was lit as with a red fire, and it seemed cut out of hard stone, sharp with black shadows, noble, proud, and terrible. His eyes glittered.
‘Pride and despair!’ he cried. ‘Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou know- est, Grey Fool…. All the East is moving. And even now the wind of thy hope cheats thee and wafts up Anduin a fleet with black sails. The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves.’
‘Come hither!’ he cried to his servants. ‘Come, if you are not all recreant!’ Then two of them ran up the steps to him. Swiftly he snatched a torch from the hand of one… Before Gandalf could hinder him he thrust the brand amid the fuel, and at once it crackled and roared into flame.
Then Denethor leaped upon the table, and standing there wreathed in fire and smoke he took up the staff of his stewardship that lay at his feet and broke it on his knee. Casting the pieces into the blaze he bowed and laid himself on the table, clasping the palantir with both hands upon his breast. And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, he saw only two aged hands withering in flame.
So ends the product life-cycle of this palantir.
Now, it would be churlish of me to wish or even fantasize that any Tech Lord meet Denethor’s end. However, I can wish that Silicon Valley’s surveillance fantasy ends as Tolkien’s palantir did: All their surveillance screens show only “two aged hands withering in flames.”
NOTES
1 “How Silicon Valley Borrowed Ideas From Sci-Fi and Bastardized Them” [Salon (2026)].
2 If you want a more dystopian realistic view of the future — some would say “dark” — try Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy: Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, all great, and each better than the last. The third is the one with the successful revolution, so naturallly Netflix the first into a series. I’m not seeing an Valley company names taken from the trilogy, not even Mandrake Corporation, though Yelp has an unclaimed listing for it in — wouldn’t you know it — Reston, Virginia. News you can use!
3 Phrases and locutions “Lo!” and “Behold!” start creeping into Tolkien’s hitherto pitch-perfect prose in Volume Three. They are one of the things that Volume Three’s penultimate chapter, “The Scouring of The Shire,” is scoured of.