- Palantir, the data-mining business co-founded by Peter Thiel, was named after a magical, all-powerful seeing stone in “Lord of the Rings.”
- Among the story’s villains, the wizard Saruman, uses a palantir to surveil his enemies.
- The stone’s power and endless understanding corrupt Saruman and allow him to be controlled, resulting in his downfall.
- The story’s heroes are likewise charged with leaving their opponents’ line of vision by means of the palantir in order to complete their objective of ridding Middle Earth of the wicked One Ring.
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Palantir, the secretive and controversial Silicon Valley data firm, is preparing to go public in what might be one of the greatest IPOs in tech’s history.
It was established in 2003 by a few of the “PayPal mafia,” including now billionaire investor and Trump advisor Peter Thiel. He, along with the rest of the Valley’s inner circle, harbors a deep-seated fixation with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”— so much so that Palantir’s founders chose a name influenced by a magical things in the fantastical universe.
New Line Cinema/Business Insider.
The palantiri are a collection of unbreakable crystal stones utilized in Tolkien’s fictional Middle Earth as a means of “far-seeing” interaction.
The wizard Saruman utilizes among the all-powerful seeing stones to surveil his foes and is ultimately corrupted by the unbounded understanding that it supplies him. Sauron– the primary villain in the books and the movies– reaches Saruman through the palantir and manipulates him into doing his bidding.
Critic and leading Tolkien scholar Jane Possibility Nitzsche wrote that Saruman utilizes the stone to “look for Godlike understanding by looking in a short-sighted method” into the palantir. By going with “simple knowledge” rather of actual knowledge, the wizard eventually met his downfall.
New Line Cinema.
In the movie, you might likewise remember Peregrin “Pippin” Took mischievously nabbing a palantir while Gandalf and the others are asleep. He and the rest of the story’s heroes continually dodge their opponents’ line of sight in order to complete their main mission: damaging the One Ring and ridding Middle Earth of such a source of evil.
Palantir, the tech company, creates software that offers its customers an extensive, searchable database to discover what they’re trying to find. So naming the business after a things that provides a broad scope of sight may seem fitting.
But Palantir has drawn criticism for partnering with police consisting of ICE. Its ICE agreement came under analysis recently from 15 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who likewise questioned whether Palantir was sharing people’s health data with ICE. Palantir rejected that it shares information in between the different federal companies. An HHS representative also denied that the data was being shared.
Palantir isn’t the only tech business connected to Thiel that bears a LOTR-inspired name and has drawn criticism.
He was an early financier in military-contracting start-up Anduril, which was called after the magical sword in the series that was wielded by the trilogy’s hero, Aragorn. The company, established by Palmer Luckey in 2017, was recently awarded a contract with United States Customs and Border Protection to construct a virtual “wall” as a way to avoid illegal crossings into the US. The system will use surveillance towers to discover motion.
Fans of the cherished books have disagreed with companies that have actually names influenced by “Lord of the Rings” and deal with border authorities like CBP.
” It’s really not even near to the point, but in between this and [Palantir], wtf is up with tech brothers using Lord of the Rings names for their big information services for the military?” a Twitter user said in 2015. “Did I miss out on some pro-war/surveillance message in Tolkien’s work?”
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source https://jobsearchtips.net/palantirs-name-origin-was-influenced-by-lord-of-the-rings/
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