The palantíri as a microcosm of the internet
How many first age Noldor in the house missing those cool 56k palantír start-up sounds?
Sauron's ensnarement of Saruman and Denethor was always compared to the effects of propaganda on the mind. Although Sauron's use of the palantír was propagandistic in nature, I could never equate it to a movie theater with specific movies on showing, or a radio that you can tune to a station, or any other medium of propaganda existing during Tolkien's time. The palantír is more akin to a device that can connect to the internet, and Sauron simply used all the tools the big corporations nowadays use to build the perfect bubble of internet addiction and dependency.
Visual representation of Saruman using the Orthanc palantír
Saruman had a palantír but he was not recognized by the device as its owner. In essence, he was accessing a computer at a cyber cafe. He could access the internet, sure, but he had no control over which browser he used or what extensions were installed. After enough logins and data collection, Sauron built Saruman's informational bubble such that, every time Saruman searched for Mordor, all he'd get was:
- THE FACE OF THE FUTURE: 15 YOUNG URUKS TO KEEP AN EYE ON
- Witch-King: "Gondor? We're already planning the invasion of Valinor"
- 10 amazing pictures of the Mordor army
- It's a fact, boys: women love a man who can cook Harad dishes
- Gondor's tax policy -- blueprint of a failed state
- "He's the best mentor a ringmaker could ask for" - candid interview with the mouth of Sauron
- Mordor supporters scientifically proven to be prettier, live longer lives, enjoy better sex
- 50 times the strength of men failed in TA3000
- New power rising? Same as old power - opinion piece by Gothmog
- Sauron's strength weekly check-in - is the One Ring even needed at this point?
- Ad: sell out? Buy in? Betrayal not as morally repugnant as once thought, experts say
If this is what you consume every day of your life, it's no wonder you begin thinking you're fighting for a lost cause.
And that the other side is not only cool, but welcoming all-comers.
Denethor on the other hand didn't suffer all of this. Through some greyhatting, he got access to Minas Tirith's palantír's privs so he had full control over the browser. He installed some ad blockers, cookie deleters and ran a proxy, so he had better control over the content he was presented with.
The true greyhat.
The problem is that Denethor was in an internet of three people and was accessing Mordor, where, for all intents and purposes, Sauron is the webmaster. So if the old tricks wouldn't work on Denethor, the only other available option is to brufeforce the hell out of Denethor's connection: spam him with inane crap mixed in with clickbait, troll Denethor with purposefully low-hanging fruit to further annoy him, fill his inbox with Umbar sex solicitors while Shelob keeps querying him for cyb0r and when Denethor is done maneuvering through all that, he'll be too tired to notice the pictures of 10 million trillion orcs at the black gate are awful photoshop.
Depiction of the kind of stupid bullshit Denethor had to put up with at the end of a long palantír browsing session.
Credit to Denethor, he hung on for a pretty long time and managed to extract useful information from his palantír surfing. One can assume he even out-trolled Sauron sometimes considering how things went down in southern Ithilien. But it was a matter of time until all the square wave mp3s, gif spam, insults to Denethor's Numenorean lineage and despair porn took its toll on poor Denethor. Browsing the net incarcerated in the white tower for too long further loosened his grip on reality and eventually he lost all hope.
Saruman and Denethor were two individuals who aspired to know of everything that was happening in Middle-Earth, in hopes of consequently vanquishing their foes and gather the respect and admiration of their allies. The palantíri promised them unlimited access to the latest news of their world. In truth, they consumed so much information disconnected from context that they, paradoxically, became the two most misinformed people in Arda.
Knowledge and wisdom are fundamentally different things.
