I am going to attempt to tie many different points together seamlessly. You will think each time I speak about something new, that I will not be staying on track…but, I am. You will be able to tie together the pieces I might have failed to explain adequately if you read actively.
JRR Tolkien’s “Palantiri”.
Alex Karp. Peter Thiel. JD Vance. One ring to rule them all?
Important for us to know basic JRR Tolkien to understand the motivation behind this evil (because the founders of Palantir & all of Silicon Valley’s gangly betas are obsessed with LOTR for all the wrong reasons):
A palantír is one of several indestructible crystal balls in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, created by the Elves of Valinor in the First Age to allow communication and distant viewing of events across Arda or in the past.
These stones, made of dark crystal and ranging in size, required great mental strength to use effectively and could connect with other palantíri for two-way vision.
The Men of Númenor received at least eight Palantíri from the Elves in the Years of the Trees. However, only seven of these stones survived the Fall of Númenor near the end of the Second Age when Elendil (benevolent god in this fantasy) rescued them from the city as it sank into the sea.
The Master-stone of Osgiliath, the strongest of the Palantíri, disappeared during the Fall of Númenor, never to be seen again. The other seven seeing-stones traveled with Elendil to Middle-earth.
Four Palantíri were brought to Gondor at the end of the Second Age. Among these was the Master Stone of Osgiliath, which was a massive Palantír kept beneath the Dome of Stars for over a millennium.
However, during the Third Age of Middle-earth, a civil war arose in Osgiliath, and the city became flooded by the waters of the River Anduin, which carried the Palantír away forever.
The Ithil-stone was placed in Isildur's city of Minas Ithil. However, the city was overrun by Sauron's forces and the Palantír fell into the Enemy's hands.
This was Sauron's seeing-stone during the War of the Ring, which he used to corrupt Saruman and dismay Denethor, who unwisely used their own Palantíri during the conflict. Saruman's Orthanc-stone corrupted him and was eventually recovered by Gandalf, Aragorn, and their allies after the wizard's death.
The Anor-stone was in Denethor's possession during his stewardship of Gondor and he clutched it as he burned himself upon his funeral pyre. The stone survived but was no longer usable after this event.
By the end of the War of the Ring, the Ithil-stone was most likely destroyed, leaving only one functioning Palantír in Middle-earth.
These ancient artifacts caused both great knowledge and great harm to enter the realms of Men and were perhaps better off lost than in the possession of those who would use them for their selfish desires…
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp are not enamored by the moral qualms Tolkein so adequately forces you to wrestle with, they are rather enamored by the evil in lord of the rings…the ring, the stones, the “power”…they are the losers!
Remember…the rightful king Aragorn, destroyed Sauron (evil), and the 7 palantiri (surveillance system) with the sword of god. While the master stone remains…
Stay with me…
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.” — Ayn Rand
Palantir
The company, founded by Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp in 2003, is named after a series of dark seeing stones that can be used for long-distance communication and to look across long distances to gather intelligence on happenings through Middle-earth. It’s not hard to see how the name relates to the company.
Peter Thiel literally can’t stop naming tech companies after lord of the rings lore. He also loves to hosts “bible studies” that specifically only talk about the anti-christ…not exaggerating.
Looks like it sold out lol…wolf in sheep’s clothes.
What makes Palantir different from other tech companies is the scale and scope of its products. Its pitch to potential customers is that they can buy one system and use it to replace perhaps a dozen other dashboards and programs, according to a 2022 analysis of Palantir’s offerings published by blogger and data engineer Ben Rogojan (surely Ben Rogojan is unbiased!..haha).
Crucially, Palantir doesn’t reorganize a company's bins and pipes, so to speak, meaning it doesn’t change how data is collected or how it moves through the guts of an organization. Instead, its software sits on top of a customer’s messy systems and allows them to integrate and analyze data without needing to fix the underlying architecture. In some ways, it’s a technical band-aid.
In theory, this makes Palantir particularly well suited for government agencies that may use state-of-the-art software cobbled together with programming languages dating back to the 1960s.
Palantir’s software is designed with nontechnical users in mind. Rather than relying on specialized technical teams to parse and analyze data, Palantir allows people across an organization to get insights, sometimes without writing a single line of code. All they need to do is log into one of Palantir’s two primary platforms: Foundry, for commercial users, or Gotham, for law enforcement and government users.
Foundry and Gotham are similar: Both ingest data and give people a neat platform to work with it. The main difference between them is what data they’re ingesting. Gotham takes any data that government or law enforcement customers may have, including things like crime reports, booking logs, or information they collected by subpoenaing a social media company. Gotham then extracts every person, place, and detail that might be relevant. Customers need to already have the data they want to work with—Palantir claims to not provide any itself.. (surrrre it doesn’t HAHAHA).
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Gug Letter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.