In my last newsletter about The Lord of the Rings, I ended up cutting a large chunk from the beginning which focused on the political backdrop that hung on the world stage when The Fellowship of the Ring entered the cultural scene. (Hint: The film came out in December of 2001).

In a recent Today, Explained podcast, Constance Grady talked about the many ways people projected their fears around 9/11, and the absolutism of Bush’s war on terror, onto this epic story about a battle between pure good and pure evil when the movie came out. (It probably didn’t help that everyone knew the second installment, to be released the following year, would be called The Two Towers.)

If, to many people at the beginning of the 21st century, The Lord of the Rings was a story about us vs. them, where “them” was at best Al-Qaeda and at worst the vague idea of Arabs in general, I wondered: With what current events would we entangle the themes of this story if the movies came out today? What fears and anxieties would the people of 2025—and perhaps even the filmmakers themselves—project onto this enduring, malleable text?

I don’t know how Peter Jackson would do it, but I know my adaptation would make a big deal out of the palantír, the magical orb that lets characters do the fantasy equivalent of FaceTime with Sauron.* Current evil enterprises notwithstanding, the palantíri (yes, that’s the correct pluralization) evoke a power imbalance between technology and its users that resonates glass-shatteringly with the media landscape we are currently suffering through.

In theory, a palantír is a neutral object that lets people communicate instantaneously from great distances. In practice, it’s a tool Sauron uses to deceive, manipulate, and corrupt the unlucky few who get their hands on one. He can do this because he is, apparently, the only character aside from Aragorn who actually knows how to use the thing (or the only character with adequate power/prestige to control it; I haven’t read The Silmarillion but I know there’s Lore explaining who the rightful users are, yadda yadda).

Likewise, in theory, a smartphone is a neutral object that lets users communicate instantaneously from great distances. It also grants us immediate access to all the world’s information, plus it has a clock and a calculator and a camera. All of these things could (and should) have been good. But in practice, using a smartphone today—specifically, accessing the internet from it—does not connect you to other people or expand your vision endlessly outward but instead dumps you into a hall of funhouse mirrors. It does not show you reality, but rather endless different versions of what it thinks you want to see—distortions of your own reflection.

In the LOTR books, we don’t learn about the existence of the palantír until The Two Towers, when Pippin discovers in the wreckage of Isengard the stone Saruman had been using to communicate with Sauron. To Gandalf, the presence of the stone helps explain Saruman’s actions. As he later reflects to Pippin:

“Easy it is now to guess how quickly the roving eye of Saruman was trapped and held; and how ever since he has been persuaded from afar, and daunted when persuasion would not serve. … How long, I wonder, has he been constrained to come often to his glass for inspection and instruction, and the Orthanc-stone so bent towards Barad-dûr that, if any save a will of adamant now looks into it, it will bear his mind and sight swiftly thither?”

Regardless of the motivation that initially brought Saruman to use the stone—whether he merely sought knowledge or was already on the hunt for power—he would have approached it as a tool: Something he could use to advance his aims. Instead, by using the palantír, he became Sauron’s tool. One could argue he got addicted to looking into the orb in the same way many of us are addicted to looking at our dopamine rectangles. One could argue Sauron fed him a narrow, distorted version of reality in exactly the same way that Meta and TikTok and X are feeding social media users narrow, algorithm-driven versions of reality today.

A few years ago, I might have stopped the comparison there. The methods were the same, but the aims were different: Sauron wanted an army out of the deal, while Mark Zuckerberg merely wanted to profit off of our attention. But it has become increasingly clear that tech billionaires desire more than just eyeballs on screens. With widely varying degrees of subtlety, these people are working to reshape the world in their image. Whether that’s Elon Musk doing blatant Nazi propaganda or conservative billionaires buying up more and more mainstream media platforms, or even the people blowing air into the AI bubble trying to convince us that the supremacy of their technology is inevitable, these hellions contrive to capture our imaginations as well as our attention. One might say they are attempting to raise their own orc armies. (We are the orcs.)

If I were adapting the Lord of the Rings movies today, I would make exactly the same choice Peter Jackson did: I’d introduce the palantír earlier than Tolkien does in the books, show it at work upon Saruman, make its corrupting influence clear from the beginning. I’d probably take it even further, with long tracking shots of Saruman gazing into the blackness of the seeing-stone and uneasy background music to clearly signal that this device is rotting his brain. I would not be subtle.

In The Return of the King, we learn that Denethor has also been dabbling with a palantír. It’s unclear how many times, or for how long, he has looked into the seeing-stone, but it is strongly suggested that the palantír is responsible for his choice to take his own life.

By the time battle is raging on the Pelennor Fields, Denethor is in a pitiable position: His favorite son is dead, his city is under siege, his backup son appears to also be dead. But what drives him to despair is what he sees when, literally in the middle of said siege, he goes to check on his palantír real quick: Sauron shows him a fleet of ships coming up the Anduin River, presumably to add to Sauron’s forces. Deciding the situation is hopeless, Denethor calls it a day and instructs some servants to build him a pyre.

From atop this pyre, holding the palantír aloft, he says to Gandalf:

“I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. … For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory. … The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves.”

Of course, the reader knows that what Denethor has seen in the stone is a misrepresentation. The good guys are aboard that fleet, and their arrival will soon turn the tide of the battle. This is the oddly constrained power that Sauron wields through the palantír: He can’t straight-up lie to people, but he can carefully select which scenes from the real world to show them, guiding them to draw conclusions that serve his needs. In Denethor’s case, those conclusions led to his tragic end. His mind was so warped by the version of reality presented to him through the palantír that he gave up hope and took his own life. He essentially doomscrolled himself to death.

When I think about the sad end to Denethor’s story, I can’t help but think about teen girls on Instagram whose mental health daily deteriorates thanks to the ceaseless onslaught of videos about people who are prettier and thinner and happier than they are. I think about young men on Discord going down rabbit holes that lead into vast cave systems where it is perfectly normal, even laudable, to write messages for each other on bullets that end up in people’s bodies. I think about the echo chambers, the halls of mirrors, we all enter when we open a social media app, and I think about what they are amplifying for us, what they are hiding from us, where they will lead us next.

So far, I’ve only been considering the palantír through the lens of traditional media (and “traditional” social media), which operates much in the way Sauron does: Everything it shows us is, ostensibly, true, but it is the careful selection of what it shows us that shapes our perception of the world. Tolkien may have held some concerns about war propaganda, disseminated through radio and film, in the back of his mind when he was writing his trilogy. We’ve had broadcast media institutions—Fox News in particular—showing us increasingly skewed versions of reality for decades. And algorithmic social media feeds have wildly accelerated the pace of this reality filtering, so that at times it seems like I’m living in a completely different world from the people who are convinced that Emmanual Macron’s wife was born a man or who think it’s a good idea to drink raw milk.

But a new power is rising that is even more sinister and corrosive than Tolkien may have been able to imagine. One that does not merely offer distorted representations of reality but does away with the concept of reality altogether. I am, of course, talking about AI.

If I were adapting The Lord of the Rings into movies today, the manipulative capacity of the palantír would not feel adequately high-stakes. I might worry that contemporary viewers would find this plot device underwhelming, unthreatening. Why, after all, would Sauron stop at showing Denethor the ships coming up the Anduin when he could artificially insert orcs on board who are armed with, like, bazookas? Why would Aragorn, when he briefly wields a palantír in an attempt to manipulate Sauron himself, merely show his face when he could instead project an image of someone who is ludicrously buff and also has bazookas?

The social internet is already an insanity machine. Under its influence, we are trapped in halls of mirrors, ever distracted by the images we struggle to recognize as our own reflections. But now the mirrors have started to play their own movies, produced not by minds but by the reflections themselves. And every movie we watch somehow spawns the creation of another, which is even more senseless and disconnected from reality than the last one. And we are being told to believe that this terraforming of our media landscape is, if not good, then at least inevitable. AI is the future because people are pouring billions of dollars into its advancement. People are dumping buckets of money into AI because it is the future. And we can be forgiven for missing this specious, circular reasoning because we’re so profoundly distracted by all the fucking AI-generated content spilling over the walls of our consciousness like so many orcs at Helm’s Deep.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Saruman tells Gandalf:

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. … We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it.”

This is the same version of Pascal’s wager that some tech evangelists are making, hilariously, with AI, arguing that we’d better get on board just in case this technology really does change everything for the better (or, even more hilariously, just in case we birth a supreme computer intelligence that we hope will treat us kindly in the new age). Like Saruman, these people have gazed too long into the insanity machine. They have seen the visions of the future that Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman have produced and uncritically accepted them as the only possible way forward. And, like Saruman, they have assumed that they can profit from the triumph of these visions.

But we all know how it turned out for Saruman.** To believe what the palantír tells you is to become a tool for the unseen person running the show at the other end. You did not build this hall of mirrors; you do not know its tricks nearly as well as its creators do; you cannot beat them at their game.

Or, as Gandalf puts it:

“Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.”

Footnotes

* Yes, I know the Amazon prequel series deals with this theme a little bit. But that series was simply so bad that I have no desire to engage with it, or even acknowledge its existence, whatsoever.

** If you’ve only seen the movies, you might think that Saruman dies in Isengard. His fate in the books is much funnier: He leaves Orthanc in disgrace, wanders around Middle-earth for a bit, tries to become something of a hobbit mob boss in the Shire, and then he dies.

Related Reading

• “The resurgent war on knowledge, academics, expertise, and critical thinking that AI is currently supercharging has its roots in the hugely successful recent war on ‘critical race theory,’ ‘diversity equity and inclusion,’ and LGBTQ+ rights that painted librarians, teachers, scientists, and public workers as untrustworthy.”

• “Generative AI will automate a large number of jobs, removing people from the workplace. But it will almost certainly sap humanity from the social sphere as well. Over years of use—and product upgrades—many of us may simply slip into relationships with bots that we first used as helpers or entertainment, just as we were lulled into submission by algorithmic feeds and the glow of the smartphone screen.”

• “What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. … In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar?”

• “I hate these bastards. I’ll never forgive them for what they’ve done to the computer.”