> ...about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb.
Wasn't the the problem that Sauron had one so he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?
Wasn't the the problem that Sauron had one so he could corrupt the other users through the orb, but the orb itself was not corrupting?
Surveillance has lots of good and bad uses, and is morally neutral itself. Powerful but neutral. The problem comes when the users use it for bad purposes, and in fact it is so tempting that they can't help using it for more and more bad purposes. If every palantir (either one) user was a "good guy" who refused to use it for bad purposes, it would be a potent force for good, and that's why they were created in the first place.
This is trivially true to most common moral understandings. If my neighbor installs a camera pointing through my window and into my shower, applying some fancy technique to see through clouded glass, most of us would justly think that was immoral of him, even in complete absence of any other immoral actions facilitated by that surveillance.
Your neighbor's surveillance of you is bad because they're violating your privacy, and using the tool of surveillance to do it. If you lived in a foggy area and they were monitoring their front walkway with a camera that was good at seeing through fog, and they happened to get a corner of your property in the camera's field of view, then you might have something to complain about but I wouldn't call it morally wrong.
I agree that surveillance is a tool of control. So are fences. It's ok to control some things.
I also agree that surveillance gets into sticky territory very, very quickly. I definitely don't have a clean dividing line between what I'd like the police to be able to see and what they shouldn't. (Especially when the temptation to share that data is so strong and frequently succumbed to.) I would probably say in some useless abstract sense, mass surveillance is also morally neutral. But given that it's proven to be pretty much impossible to implement in a way that doesn't end up serving more evil than good, I wouldn't object to calling it immoral.
A more obvious parallel is violence. To trip over Godwin's law, shooting Hitler would have been a moral action, but not because "shooting people" is amoral. Shooting a random person is definitely immoral. We constantly do immoral things for the greater good, but it is a mistake to thusly assume those actions are amoral.
id say the control is immoral, in all forms. Voluntary agreement and consent are fine but then its not surveillance, its people saying where they are. the patient wants the doctor to know where they are and what they are doing, and not just letting the doctor decide on their own what to know.
the worker wants the foreman to know that they are present and working, in fulfilment of their contract together. its not surveillance either.
the jewelry store itself is immoral, but private property and control thereof is a tradeoff we've made
In this view, maybe an ultra radical solution to privacy issues is : no privacy at all, for no-one. Complete and total transparency of everyone to everyone. Now the question is how to implement that ? That's obviously impossible, because someone in power will always have something to hide. So maybe if true democracy where everyone holds exactly the same amount of power that could work ? Same issue, because it is impossible to implement too. Oh well.
Good fences make good neighbors... If I could put a notion in his head: Why do they make good neighbors?
Tolkien's Palantirs let you see and communicate and influence across vast distances. That's no more immoral than a videophone. Of course, that's also not surveillance; that'd be a telescope. But surely telescopes aren't immoral?
[1] I mean, I would, but (1) you can't create a mass surveillance system from a morally neutral or positive place, and (2) it seems nearly impossible to implement a mass surveillance system without creating more harm than benefit. So it becomes a boring semantics argument as to whether mass surveillance is fundamentally immoral or not.
In the LotR, Aragorn bends a palantir to his will and uses it for good with great difficulty. He manages to do that, because he is (in addition to everything else) the trueborn king and the palantiri are his birthright. Denethor, on the other hand, succumbs to corruption. While he is a powerful lord with good intentions, he is only a steward, not a king. The right to use the palantiri is not inherent in his being, because he only wields power in someone else's name.
It implies that there will always be people ordained through some manner which are incorruptible and therefore can use these things to "fight evil". The usual suspects in our world are people in Government, and by extension in military and law enforcement.
One example of someone actually destroying such a device after they finished using it rather than letting themselves be corrupted by it was Batman after he finished using it to locate the Joker. But of course this was in a fictional movie, and in no way represents the real world.
you can't do surveillance and not learn the bad knowledge, and once youve created the bad knowledge its just a matter of time before it gets into nefarious hands.
a "bad guy" could still hack the "good guys" or palantir itself, and get access to all the bad data the "good guys" have created.
Interestingly enough, the stones could not lie. They only showed real things. Sauron's corruption was achieved through a lack of context. Just like Palantir (the company) can do with data. A dataset can be completely truthful, but lead to a false or manipulative conclusion.
But to the original point, yeah, the name Palantir is spot on for what the company intends to do, anyone who even has remote knowledge of Middle Earth wouldn't dare touch that company with a 10 foot pole.
It's worth noting that by the War of the Ring (the Lord of the Rings story) Sauron had possessed a palantir for around 1000 years. Anyone who knew what a palantir was should have known that they were not to be trusted.
As for how that relates to Palantir the real-life corporation, I'll leave that up to your interpretation.