The Tech Right · Investigation · 2003–2026
Did we read the same books?
A pack of surveillance, weapons, and money companies took their names from Tolkien — whose life's work was one long warning that the hunger to watch, arm, and dominate is what turns a person into the villain.
FACT
§2 · Thesis
The tech right keeps branding its surveillance-and-weapons empire with the props of Tolkien's villains — from a book about giving power up.
What Tolkien wrote and which companies took which names are FACT. The 'they missed the point' read is labeled commentary; the founders' 'the names are apt' defense is carried.
The number
7+companies, one book
Palantir, Anduril, Erebor, Valar, Mithril, Lembas — and a home-surveillance startup literally named Sauron. Most trace back to one man's reading list.
Benzinga / Quartz / Crikey
§5 · Graded Claim
Tolkien's central theme — 'the Machine' — was that the will to dominate corrupts.
FACT
In his own letters Tolkien called the recurring evil 'the Machine': using power and devices to dominate other wills, 'the corrupted motive of dominating.' The One Ring is the purest form — a tool of control that can't be used for good, which is why Gandalf and Galadriel refuse it. The heroes win by giving power up.
§5 · Graded Claim
A palantír, in the books, is a trap that ensnares its user and feeds them to the enemy.
FACT
Of all names for a surveillance firm, 'Palantir' is the sharpest self-own. Every named user of a seeing-stone is destroyed or deceived: Saruman is corrupted, Denethor driven to madness, and the stones become the Dark Lord's channel to manipulate the people who thought they were watching. The all-seeing tool sees you back.
§5 · Graded Claim
The villains industrialize and dominate; the Shire is the thing worth saving.
FACT
Treebeard says the traitor-wizard Saruman has 'a mind of metal and wheels' and 'does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him.' He turns Isengard into a war factory; the book ends with the hobbits healing an industrial-scarred Shire. Tolkien's sympathies are with the small, green, and free — not the towers and machines.
§5 · Graded Claim
The roll call: surveillance (Palantir), weapons (Anduril), a bank (Erebor), two funds (Valar, Mithril), and even a 'Sauron.'
FACT
Palantir (Thiel/Karp/Lonsdale/Cohen) sells surveillance software to spy agencies, the Pentagon, police, and ICE. Anduril (Palmer Luckey) builds autonomous drones and border towers. Erebor (Luckey/Lonsdale, 2025) is a bank for defense and crypto. Valar and Mithril are Thiel funds; Lembas is a startup (and a former Thiel holding entity); and a luxury home-surveillance startup went with 'Sauron' — the literal all-seeing Eye.
§7 · Why it matters now
What the other world-builders warned about.
George Lucas told James Cameron the Empire was America and the rebels were the Vietcong — 'the little guys won, the highly technical empire lost, that was the whole point' — and said flatly that 'democracies aren't overthrown; they're given away.' Handed over, with applause, to whoever promises safety. Hard not to read against a present where the tools of the state are handed to private empires — some named after the bad guys. The throughline of the Tech Right hub; the surveillance half lives in Surveillance States.
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