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

https://www.zig.art/p/its-time-to-reclaim-the-word-palantir

by IdahoSpring • 3 months ago

67 37 3 months ago

zig.art

bigyabai• 3 months ago

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

Carioca• 3 months ago

I mean, could be accurate if they deliver the drones broken

getmoheb• 3 months ago

Anduril was its reforged name, right?. It was Narsil before that

jdross• 3 months ago

Flame of the West? Seems like a pretty apropos name for an American defense company

ggm• 3 months ago

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.

arjie• 3 months ago

The 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.

threatofrain2• 3 months ago

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

colordrops• 3 months ago

so?

threatofrain2• 3 months ago

When we seek to "reclaim" something, will we be reclaiming from the offspring of Tolkien?

DonaldPShimoda2• 3 months 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.

mmooss2• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

I 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/

jdub• 3 months ago

That's not how trademarks work.

The Tolkien state (and related orgs) have registered "Palantir" under many (generally publishing/merchandising) domains, but Palantir Technologies has registered it under IC 009: computer software for collection, editing, analysis, viewing, [etc.] and a few others.

gamerslexus2• 3 months 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.

incr_me4• 3 months 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.

IdahoSpring2• 3 months ago

Did 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_me4• 3 months ago

Yeah, 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.

gamerslexus2• 3 months ago

He never writes about the erosion of race and the universalization of knowledge.

Who said that erosion of race and universalization of knowledge is a good thing? The article sure didn't.

If we agree that diversity is better than monoculture, we agree that we want more different subspecies with different ways of seeing reality.

tptacek3• 3 months ago

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.

IdahoSpring2• 3 months ago

Do you have a better resource? Interested. I saw it as an incomplete-exemplary list as well but curious if there are better mappings

pclowes3• 3 months 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.

tptacek3• 3 months ago

What part of it doesn't ring true to you?

DeathArrow• 3 months ago

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.

mmooss2• 3 months 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• 3 months 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• 3 months ago

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

b1temy• 3 months ago

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.

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

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