Palantir — Named After Tolkien’s Seeing-Stones

Palantir, which is this company, which is basically a company owned by one of the PayPal Mafia, which was after, during the origin story appears to be after it was discovered that after the Second Gulf War, the collection of intelligence on Americans was illegal and had been made illegal. So the government couldn’t do it. This was outsourced to this company Palantir, which has created this amazing structure where it collects vast amounts of data and has the computing power to interpret it using the neural network algorithms that have been created out of the offspring of PayPal. Palantir gets its name from Tolkien, from these magic stones. So the Disinfolklore analytical method is predictive in a way.

Source: In the Faery Tale Donald and Russia always win

Palantir’s origin story: created because domestic surveillance became illegal after the Second Gulf War, so it was outsourced to a private company. The Tolkien naming is not incidental — it reveals the founders’ self-conscious engagement with mythological framing.

← Previous: Russia on the Cutting Edge | Back to AI & Disinfolklore | Next: Owning the Memes of Production →