Note to Mark Zuckerberg: Being Compared to Sauron Is Not a Compliment

N ear the end of The Return of the King, the third part of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is a strikingly prescient passage for a work of high fantasy published in 1955. What remains of the Fellowship of the Ring after its quest — to destroy the Ring of Power forged and formerly coveted by the Dark Lord Sauron — has gradually parted ways in a journey back across Middle-earth. “Close to that very place where Pippin had looked into the Stone of Orthanc,” Aragorn, now King of Gondor (and Arnor), leaves the hobbits. They are “grieved at this parting” from their friend and guide, inspiring hobbit Pippin to “‘wish we could have a Stone that we could see all our friends in . . . and that we could speak to them from far away!’”

The “Stone” is one of the palantiri, mystical communication devices resembling crystal balls. Once used by men to stay in touch with each other and watch over their realms, the stones had been almost entirely corrupted or lost. Only one remains usable. It is kept by Aragorn, heir to the stones’ original owners.

There’s a double irony to Pippin’s desire for his own palantir. The first is that Pippin had used one . . . and, in so doing, communed with Sauron himself, a traumatic experience. The second is that the technophobic Tolkien predicted something like the modern Internet, with its many ways to stay in touch remotely — something he’d have hated. Tolkien himself decried “external plans or devices (apparatus)” and praised “the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power stations.” Not the sort of person who would have excitedly signed up for, say, a Facebook account — much less created Facebook itself, as Mark Zuckerberg did.

Curiously, in a recent interview, Zuckerberg noted that his employees sometimes compared him to Sauron. Per Consequence:

Zuckerberg brought up the moniker after he and [Tim] Ferriss began discussing how he manages his energy in the workplace while constantly being barraged with news and information. “Maybe I’m not strong-willed enough or calm enough to do just straight-up meditation,” Zuck said. “I actually need to put myself in a situation where it’s difficult to not focus on that thing.”

He continued: “Some of the folks I work with at the company — they say this lovingly — but I think that they sometimes refer to my attention as the Eye of Sauron. You have this unending amount of energy to go work on something, and if you point that at any given team, you will just burn them.”

“Lovingly,” he says. Sure. Sauron, who sought nothing more than to subject all of the known world to his domain — what a nice comparison. To be fair, this specific likening here seems more as an attestation to his ability to focus entirely on one thing, as the Eye was known to do, than as a wholesale analogy.

But sometimes, it’s possible to focus on the wrong thing. Another passage, again from The Return of the King, shows this. It never occurred to Sauron, so obsessed with power and its wielding, that someone who came into possession of his powerful Ring, which contains much of his essence, would try to destroy it. Indeed, thanks to Pippin, Sauron was convinced that Aragorn had the Ring, and that Aragorn’s ruse of marching to the border of Sauron’s domain was a genuine attempt on Aragorn’s part to wage open war rather than a distraction. Reacting to Frodo Baggins, the hobbit chosen as Ringbearer, as the hobbit falters in his quest near its very end and yields to the Ring’s temptation, Sauron is, weirdly, at his most recognizably human:

And far away, as Frodo put on the Ring and claimed it for his own, even in Sammath Naur the very heart of his realm, the Power in Barad-dûr was shaken, and the Tower trembled from its foundations to its proud and bitter crown. The Dark Lord was suddenly aware of him, and his Eye piercing all shadows looked across the plain to the door that he had made; and the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash, and all the devices of his enemies were at last laid bare. Then his wrath blazed in consuming flame, but his fear rose like a vast black smoke to choke him. For he knew his deadly peril and the thread upon which his doom now hung.

From all his policies and webs of fear and treachery, from all his stratagems and wars his mind shook free; and throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired. For they were forgotten. The whole mind and purpose of the Power that wielded them was now bent with overwhelming force upon the Mountain . . .

We’ve all been there.

At any rate, Zuckerberg now seems to have turned his focus to luring the human race out of the physical world and into a simulacrum known as the “metaverse.” Hence his rebranding Facebook’s corporate identity as Meta. Tolkien did not foresee such a thing, though, again, it seems safe to imagine that he would have disliked it. He would have been right to do so. The physical world will always be superior to any virtual or digital alternatives.

We needn’t go to the lengths about which Tolkien mused in our opposition to such a prospect.

However, we can turn with interest to another strikingly prescient passage from The Lord of the Rings. In The Fellowship of the Ring, the work’s first volume, Bilbo Baggins, older cousin to Frodo and since the events of The Hobbit possessor of the Ring, willingly yields it up, becoming the first creature in Middle-earth history ever to do so (Frodo’s hobbit companion Samwise Gamgee becomes the second). But he does not do so without a struggle. Bilbo, pressed by Gandalf, a wizard of noble intent, about leaving the Ring behind to Frodo as Bilbo goes on his own journey, responds pettily to Gandalf’s inquiry about where the Ring is:

“In an envelope, if you must know,” said Bilbo impatiently. “There on the mantelpiece. Well, no! Here it is in my pocket!” He hesitated. “Isn’t that odd now?” he said softly to himself. “Yet after all, why not? Why shouldn’t it stay there?”

Gandalf looked again very hard at Bilbo, and there was a gleam in his eyes. “I think, Bilbo,” he said quietly, “I should leave it behind. Don’t you want to?”

“Well yes — and no. Now it comes to it, I don’t like parting with it at all, I may say. And I don’t really see why I should. Why do you want me to?” he asked . . .

After a back-and-forth, and nearly leaving on his journey while taking the Ring with him, Bilbo finally agrees to leave it behind:

“You have still got the ring in your pocket,” said the wizard.

“Well, so I have!” cried Bilbo. “And my will and all the other documents too. You had better take it and deliver it for me. That will be safest.”

“No, don’t give the ring to me,” said Gandalf. “Put it on the mantelpiece. It will be safe enough there, till Frodo comes. I shall wait for him.”

Bilbo took out the envelope, but just as he was about to set it by the clock, his hand jerked back, and the packet fell on the floor. Before he could pick it up, the wizard stooped and seized it and set it in its place. A spasm of anger passed swiftly over the hobbit’s face again. Suddenly it gave way to a look of relief and a laugh. “Well, that’s that,” he said. “Now I’m off!”

Those of us who nowadays struggle to look away from our phones or other devices for more than an instant, who seek desperately an escape from the flood of notifications and obligations such devices transmit and exacerbate, can surely relate to this; Zuckerberg himself laments that we are constantly “being barraged with news and information” — an irony, given his role in facilitating said barrage.

And if successful in freeing ourselves, even for a short while, from the domain of distractions, we will also be able to relate to Bilbo’s subsequent feeling of relief. That is, unless we let the Saurons of this world have their way. But defying their intentions is the one thing they would never suspect — and the one thing that can defeat their dark designs.