Innumerable start up ventures from the often morality-free seeming tech bros that control most of our digital lives seem to be named after Lord of The Rings stuff. Business Insider gives us a few examples:

  • Erebor - a bank
  • Anduril - defense tech
  • Palantir - how to describe? BI says “a government-focused software giant”.
  • Mithril Capital - an investment firm
  • Durin - mining
  • Rivendell One LLC - a trust that manages Peter Thiel’s shares.
  • Lembas LLC - an investment firm
  • Valar Ventures - a venture captial firm
  • Sauron Systems - a home security system

But often in doing so, some of these pretention and shallow thinkers betray their actual ignorance of the book, or, if it’s not that, well, it’s a bad sign for other reasons.

The latest one that crossed my radar was Sauron Systems.

They’re trying to build:

…what they envisioned as a military-grade home security system for tech elites.

…a system combining AI-driven intelligence, advanced sensors like LiDAR and thermal imaging, and 24/7 human monitoring by former military and law enforcement personnel.

Like all good tech start up products, apparently it doesn’t actually exist yet other than as something investors can throw money at.

It is also named after the famously evil baddie from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and elsewhere in Tolkien’s literary world.

So who or what exactly is Sauron? According to Wikipedia:

Tolkien stated in his Letters that although he did not think “Absolute Evil” could exist as it would be “Zero”, “Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible.”

He explained that, like “all tyrants”, Sauron had started out with good intentions but was corrupted by power. Tolkien added that Sauron “went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination”,

Bold, and I suppose potentially honest, of a surveillance company to represent itself as an entity well known for it’s evil-doing.

Some might say that “started out with good intentions but was corrupted by power” and “went further than human tyrants in pride and the lust for domination” isn’t a particularly terrible description of a few of Silicon Valley’s wannabe digital empires.