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Comment by misuba | Hacker News Reader

At least they have the decency to tell you who they work for right in their name.

It always kind of amazed me as a pick for a company name. Like, they realize palantirs are a tool of the bad guys, right? They're not a good thing! It's like naming your company "Stormtrooper", or "Dementor".

Actually the palantiri were created by the elves as communication tools, even before the sun and moon were created, and used by the good guys for several thousand years before they fell in the hands of the bad guys about halfway through the third age.

Just like how a lot of computing was built by the good guys as communication tools/for fun, before the sun and moon were created back in the 1970's, and used by the good guys for several decades before computing fell into the hands of the bad guys aka surveillance state.

I've always interpreted it to mean that Thiel dislikes bullshit, so he's kinda sheepishly telling everyone who is sufficiently detail oriented/nerdy exactly what his new company is all about, right there in the name.

The explanation I've seen is that a palantir itself is value-neutral. However, because Sauron and Saruman each had one and used them regularly, using any of them became risky, because they were a channel through which information and influence could leak.

But that, in turn, is arguably a great metaphor for the chilling effects of advanced persistent threats and abuse of surveillance capabilities by our ostensible/former allies.

There's a company in Boston called Vecna [0]. I always thought it was odd to name a company after a famous evil lich [1]. Though now that I'm reading the company's About page, I see both names were probably inspired by the Czech word for "eternal".

[0] http://www.vecna.com/about-vecna/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vecna

I think it is happening unconsciously. Like say Chertoff named his naked-airport-scanner company Rapiscan. I think on some level they do it because they can, and that serves as a signal -- we are so awesome we can even use a name like that and still be successful.

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