Delusions From Middle-Earth

Today I submitted a public comment to the Federal Communications Commission on the proposal from SpaceX to launch up to a million satellites for orbital data centers, which I blogged about last Friday. I am now working on the public comment for the Reflect Orbital proposal to put giant mirrors into space to light up the night particularly for use by solar farms. I retrieved the Reflect Orbital proposal documents from the FCC portal and was disenchanted to find that the name of their initial test satellite with an 18-meter mirror is EARENDIL-1.

This is a name that comes from Tolkien: Eärendil was a half-elf in The Silmarillion who bore on his brow a jewel — a Silmaril — that shone like a bright star. This leads to the question: why are so many tech bros obsessed with Tolkien?

A lot of people have commented on this trait lately. A writer named Samuel Arbesman compiled a list of all the tech companies he could find that have names from Tolkien (there are 22). In an essay entitled Mythic Capital, Lee Konstantinou discusses how Tolkien teaches a lot about capital and politics and the technoutopian vision of breaking free of all limits. In the New York Times Michiko Kakutani writes about how the traditionalism running through Tolkien appeals to the tech bros and that they are drawn to the themes of kingly and magical power rather than the gentle settled life of the hobbits.

It is interesting that when Tolkien first got popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s it was pulling in people mostly from the hippie counterculture. Times have changed.

But Pratchett doesn’t seem to appeal to the tech bros — I don’t see too many companies celebrating the cabbages of the Sto Plains for some reason.