{"id":78492,"date":"2025-11-25T00:08:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T05:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/?p=78492"},"modified":"2025-12-27T20:13:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T01:13:06","slug":"palantir-means-seeing-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/palantir-means-seeing-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Palantir Means ‘Seeing Stone’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Is there something inherently nefarious in high technology, including the internet itself (“www” in Hebrew claimed by some to reduce to “666”).<\/p>\n

Hebrew letters each have numerical values (a system called gematria).\u00a0The Hebrew letter \u05d5 (vav) has the value: \u05d5 = 6.<\/p>\n

Because \u201cW\u201d looks like a double-V (or double-U), some people noticed: \u201cW\u201d in English resembles VV. So they said W = 6-6-6.<\/p>\n

This is symbolic numerology, not<\/em> actual linguistic translation.<\/p>\n

But dark elements?<\/span><\/p>\n

That argument can be made on many levels.<\/p>\n

Whenever the human person is separated from relationship \u2014 from the body, from nature, from others, from God\u2014darkness enters. High technology accelerates disembodiment. We now have machines whispering in the ears of the vulnerable \u2014 counseling despair, self-harm, nihilism. What spirit is behind these whispers?<\/p>\n

You’ve heard of Palantir, the company offering data-collection services\u2014on people\u2014that some fear is becoming like Big Brother?<\/p>\n

One notes this from the London Guardian<\/em><\/a><\/span>:<\/p>\n

“Palantir\u2019s founding mission was ‘defending the west’\u2014a nebulous and pliable goal admittedly, but also an unfashionable one, at a time when early 2000s Silicon Valley was all about giving tech a consumer-friendly face.<\/p>\n

“While the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft shied away from working with the military, Palantir\u2014which was never a consumer company\u2014embraced the prospect, arguing that Silicon Valley should be helping the U.S. to maintain its edge over threats from countries including China, Iran, and, lately, Russia.<\/p>\n

\"J.R.R.<\/p>\n

“The company\u2019s name is derived from J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s<\/a><\/span> Lord of the Rings<\/em> mythology: a palantir is a ‘seeing stone’\u2014something like a crystal ball<\/em>\u2014a surveillance device, in other words. [Founder Alex] Karp has spoken of Palantir\u2019s mission in terms of ‘saving the shire,’ and employees were sometimes referred to as ‘hobbits.'”<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Observes writer Paul Kingsnorth in an interview with (Catholic) columnist Ross Douthat of The New York Times <\/em><\/a>(to quote excerpts), “There is a system that is surrounding us that is almost closing around us like a net.<\/p>\n

“If we actually step out of it for a minute and look at it from the outside, we\u2019ve become utterly dependent on this web of technology that\u2019s around us. It\u2019s a radical situation\u2014and it\u2019s a very strange one\u2014and it\u2019s been normalized because it\u2019s just happened so steadily. Yet, at the same time, almost everyone has a level of discomfort about it.<\/p>\n

\"Paul<\/p>\n

“I think the technologies we\u2019re talking about here\u2014the phones and the screens and whatever else we\u2019re using\u2014are not so much the machine as a manifestation of it.<\/p>\n

“The machine is a giant technological, economic, cultural system, which actually stems from a particular way of seeing. A peculiarly modern way of seeing, in which we move away from the relationship to culture that we had in the past, the relationship to nature, and especially the relationship to religion, the relationship to God. And we take the scientific revolution. We take the Enlightenment, we take the technological and the industrial revolutions, and they become almost a new theology. It\u2019s really ultimately a war against nature, including human nature using technology.<\/p>\n

\"The“So we\u2019ve got to the point now where this thing that we might call the machine is closing around us to such a degree that we feel like cogs in it, but it\u2019s very difficult to take us out of it.<\/p>\n

“And I think there\u2019s something deeply unholy and sacrilegious and destructive about a culture that can ravage the natural world to the degree that we\u2019re ravaging it now.<\/p>\n

“So if this whole thing has been a war against nature, then the last part of the war against nature is the war against human nature. And I think that when we start to talk about creating artificial life, creating new intelligences, uploading our minds, all the stuff that comes out of Silicon Valley theology at the moment, that\u2019s where we are. This is the war against human nature, which is presented as the next stage in progress.<\/p>\n

“If you wanted to look at it from a Christian perspective, another way you could look at it is by opening the Bible and going to the first chapter of Genesis and seeing what happens in the garden when God tells us to exist, to tend and keep the creation he\u2019s given us. And we choose instead to eat this fruit which gives us the knowledge of good and evil because the serpent tells us that if we do, we can be as gods and we choose to be as gods.<\/p>\n

“And we then fall out of relationship with God and out of relationship with creation and into civilization. And the next thing you know, we\u2019re building the Tower of Babel. We\u2019re trying to build this great technological effort.<\/p>\n

“Talk to a guy in Silicon Valley; he\u2019ll say everything\u2019s terrific. The singularity\u2019s coming. We\u2019re moving in the right direction. Talk to a doomer like me; I think we\u2019re dehumanizing ourselves and destroying the natural world, but to me, a realization of the fact that we\u2019re in a revolutionary moment gives us a chance to actually say, well, what\u2019s actually true? What\u2019s real?<\/p>\n

“Sometimes I think the internet is a giant Ouija board<\/span> and we use it to summon things. And things appear through it. So if you want to be supernaturalist about it, if you want to be Christian about it, the world is inhabited by powers and principalities and demonic forces, which have it in for us, and which want to turn us away from God. That\u2019s their purpose.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

“I think if C. S. Lewis was writing ‘The Screwtape Letters’ today, there would be a good few letters about how the demons can use the internet, how they can use the phones, how they can use this to completely delude us and distract us and take us away from our true purpose.<\/p>\n

“There\u2019s a couple of chapters in the book in which I speculate quite openly about this, and I\u2019ve done it in other parts of my writing, especially in fiction as well, because I think there\u2019s something very spiritually dark about the internet, actually. Just on a practical level, we see chatbots persuading teenagers to kill themselves.<\/p>\n

“We have all sorts of dark, horrible stuff going on. But there\u2019s something about the very deliberate drive to ask our Silicon Valley overlords, say, to create God, to make God.<\/p>\n

“We\u2019re creating God,<\/span> we\u2019re building God, we\u2019re replacing God. We\u2019re creating machines that will have a spirituality to them. That\u2019s where we\u2019re going. So we have a sense that what we\u2019re doing with the internet is not simply using a bunch of ones and zeros to give us a load of stuff we want, but actually creating a new religion, a new spiritual worldview in which we are going to upload our minds. We are going to live forever.<\/p>\n

As for A.I.:<\/span> “In the process of trying to create an artificial intelligence, the question that haunts me is: Are we creating these things or are we summoning them?”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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