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.
I feel like we read different books. I read a story about the dangers of the desire for power and control over others, and of the outright evils of mechanization and destruction of nature.
The company palantir sells mechanized spying. Something that is clearly evil in a tolkeinian world view.
I remember being asked in class what we all thought was the message of 1984.
I was like, obviously it was about the danger of giving up your power to other people and the corruption of that power.
My classmates were pretty convinced it was about how important it was to have power over other people.
First time I twigged onto exactly how dumb, short sighted, and self interested, otherwise intelligent people can be.
Edit: I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press. The eye focuses a spotlight on the thing it is looking at giving it great importance, but ignores everything else. It is not actually omnipotent, it is just propaganda and marketing.
> I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press.
Hmm I'd be interested to see a citation for that. As far as I know, Tolkien maintained for his entire life that The Lord of the Rings was not in any way intended as an analogy or allegory (but he admitted that, of course, it was obviously influenced by his lived experience).
No, we read the same book, just in different ways. I'm interested in a symptomatic reading. To complain that Peter Thiel read Lord of the Rings incorrectly because he drew inspiration in Sauron instead of Gandalf is plain boring. Thiel, Obama, yourself, the OP author, and Tolkien himself "claim" Lord of the Rings. That needs explaining, and you cannot do that by reading in the way that you read Lord of the Rings.
No, it's that I think Thiel and Obama are both evil, even if the former is cartoonishly so and the latter is a gentleman. Both separatism (itself plain evil) and multiculturalism (itself morally relativistic) are ideological forms bounded by the limits of capitalism that cannot exist in any meaningful form in any sort of humane world. Is this really not interesting?
