Wagner, Tolkien, and the Tech Bros
A few days ago, Michiko Kakutani (I didn’t even know she was still around) had a long piece in the Times on the Silicon Valley power elite’s embrace of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Kakutani expresses repeated puzzlement over Silicon Valley’s besottedness with these texts. Tolkien had a horror of technology and power politics, after all, which is clearly expressed in the trilogy, and his world seems as far away from Silicon Valley as his was from the Norse sagas he drew upon.
I find myself puzzled by Kakutani’s puzzlement. It can hardly be a secret that The Lord of the Rings mirrors in many ways Wagner’s Ring Cycle and that Wagner also expressed horror for technology and power politics, not just as a person but in these operas. That hardly stopped the Nazis from embracing Wagner and the Ring (it wasn’t just his antisemitism that they were picking up on).
And while Tolkien repeatedly denied any of Wagner’s influence, the fact remains, as Alex Ross argued in a smart piece two decades ago, that Tolkien studied Die Walküre before writing his trilogy, that the idea of a ring that controls people was Wagner’s invention (and not part of the Norse sagas both writers drew from), and on and on. The parallels and influences between Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Wagner’s Ring Cycle are many.
It would have made for a better piece had Kakutani identified the parallel and made the comparison between the two artists and their reception, for she might have given us a much deeper sense of how the tech bros and their followers, like the Nazis, can see themselves in one light, even as they are doing everything possible to extinguish it.
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7 Comments
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The real tragedy is that we’re not getting Aragorn or Frodo; instead, we’re all going to be killed by Elmer Fudd.
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Todd
>snicker!<
Sorry, just had a vision of Elmer/Trump dancing around singing "KILL DA WABBIT!"
Remember what happened at the end of that cartoon, too . . . !
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William Roark
Hi Corey,
I was not aware that the Silicon Valley Tech-Bros were infatuated with The Lord of the Rings. So, it is most interesting to read what you have here, but I still feel unedified as to why the fascination is there to begin with (HAL 9000 or dystopian Star Trek, or even Star Wars, sure. But The Lord of the Rings?), given the contrast you note, with Tolkien critical of technology, etc. I can see the Nazis sympathetic to such with their embrace of the rural as natural and the urban as decadence as a part of their blood-and-soil ideology and perhaps the medieval hierarchicalism (with its seeming Nordicism / Germanicism) that can be channeled into Nazi ethnonationalism. But the tech-bros.? Kind of lost on that one.
So, here’s to a future post delineating that, or directing us for those who’d like to know where we might be more fully informed on the fascination. Appreciated!
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I think the relationship between Tolkien and the techies is just the result of timing and geekery in mass (North American) culture. I’m about the same age as Thiel and Musk, and I remember fantasy novels, led by LoTR, being ubiquitous at book stores (and that later got me into tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, which was also on an upward trajectory as it became more ensconced in mass culture). The story was made into animated movies I remember seeing (the Hobbit first as a TV special then later bits and pieces of Bakshi’s attempt). They probably watched plenty of sci-fi, too, but fantasy was really going gangbusters.
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Years ago Musk was naming ships after ships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture books. Banks would have despised Musk.
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Michael Brown
Fo sho. I feel certain ,though, that Banks would have fun making a snarky reference to Musk in the name of a Culture ship. Say, Torturer Class GCU That Musky Pong.
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As an insightful literary critic, Kakutani is a wonderful kiddy-size starter bicycle for any subscriber to the NY Review.
That folks like her are just noticing the pervasive influence of these popular mythologies on techbros is very surprising, though. I’m a rough contemporary of the techbros, and I’ve lived and worked in Silly Valley for several decades. This influence has been obvious since at least the 80s, and the days of Whole Earth Catalog, “Dune” and the West Coast human potential movement. I frankly think it ought to be taken on by someone with a history degree, not a lit critic. “World-building”, which is to say creative development and projection of some notion about the systems of forces at play in human history, has been a core enterprise of fantasy literature (and science fiction, considered as a sub-genre of SF) since authors like Tolkein and Asimov discovered guys like Spengler doing essentially the same thing, and decided it was OK to make it a sport for amateurs.
