A friend sent me a story this morning and we had the same reaction at the same time: this is a Bond villain plot. Not “reminiscent of” a Bond villain plot. Not “vaguely evocative of”. It is one. A startup called Reflect Orbital has just received FCC clearance to launch a giant mirror into orbit that reflects sunlight down onto the night side of the Earth. If you’ve seen Die Another Day, you’ve seen this pitch before: Gustav Graves’ “Icarus” satellite, a mirror in space that beams concentrated sunlight wherever its owner points it. In 2002 this was the scheme of a man so cartoonishly evil he was played with a permanent sneer. In 2026 it’s a Series A.
The company calls it “sunlight on demand”. Astronomers call it a catastrophe: a proposed constellation of tens of thousands of these things that could brighten the night sky several-fold, wash out telescopes, confuse migrating animals, and strobe pilots as the mirrors repoint every few minutes. The FCC, for its part, approved only the radio spectrum; the mirror itself, the actual point of the thing, sits in a regulatory void nobody formally reviewed. The Commission stated outright that the risks raised about the solar reflector are “unrelated to the Commission’s role in authorizing use of radiofrequency spectrum”. The agency has, meanwhile, opened an actual rulemaking proceeding titled “Spectrum Abundance for Weird Space Stuff” (SB Docket No. 26-54, adopted 26 March 2026; Federal Register entry here), which tells you everything about how prepared our institutions are for this genre of ambition.
But this post isn’t really about the satellite. It’s about why the satellite is boring.
The imagination deficit
Here is the thing that struck me hardest: they named it Eärendil. Tolkien’s mariner who carries a Silmaril across the sky, the star of high hope, the light of Elbereth given to Frodo in the darkest place. It’s one of the most carefully constructed images in twentieth-century literature, a light that means something precisely because it is distant, rare, and not for sale.
And a startup borrowed it as a brand name for a Mylar billboard that sells moonlight to solar farms.
This is what I mean by banality. It’s not that the engineering is unimpressive. An 18-metre origami mirror that survives launch and holds a beam while moving at orbital velocity is genuinely hard. It’s that the imagination is second-hand. The plot is lifted from a Bond film. The name is lifted from Tolkien. The business model is lifted from Starlink. Even the villainy is a knock-off. The people building the future can no longer generate their own images of it; they can only strip-mine the ones artists made, sanding off the meaning as they go. Tolkien’s star of hope becomes an ad-supported utility. Icarus (Icarus!) becomes a pitch deck, apparently with nobody in the room who remembered how that story ends.
We did this to ourselves
None of this should surprise us, because for thirty years we have systematically told young people that the humanities are a luxury, art is a hobby, and philosophy is what you study if you want to serve coffee. We gutted arts funding in schools. We ranked degrees by starting salary. We built a monoculture that funnels the most ambitious minds of a generation through the same CS programs, the same accelerators, the same reading lists. Which is to say, no reading lists at all, unless you count blog posts about founder mode.
Then we act shocked when the output is derivative.
The humanities were never decoration. They are our rehearsal space for consequence: the accumulated record of every outcome we’ve ever imagined, every hubris we’ve ever named, every ending we’ve already written for the story that begins “what if one man controlled the sunlight?” Science fiction spent a century running red-team exercises on exactly these ideas. Myth spent millennia. When you cut a culture off from that inheritance, you don’t get bold new visions. You get people rediscovering the plots of old movies and mistaking them for product roadmaps, because nobody in the building has the vocabulary to say we have seen this before, and it was the villain’s idea.
tech − art == banal. It’s almost arithmetic. Subtract the humanities from technical capability and what remains isn’t evil, exactly (evil at least requires imagination). What remains is something flatter: enormous power in the hands of people whose entire conceptual universe is other tech companies. Every product a “Starlink for X”. Every ambition a constellation. Every name looted from a mythology its users have never read.
Canonized the man, deleted the message
Here’s the part that makes the whole thing genuinely absurd: the industry has already heard all of this, repeatedly, on stage, with slides. Steve Jobs liked to end keynotes standing in front of an image of two street signs reading “Technology” and “Liberal Arts”, and explain that Apple lived at that intersection. At his final product launch, visibly ill, the closing thought he chose to leave the industry with was that “technology alone is not enough”, that it’s technology married to the humanities that produces work worth caring about.
And this wasn’t inspirational-poster stuff for him; it was an origin story. The Mac had beautiful typography because a college dropout wandered into a calligraphy class at Reed (a course with, by his own account, no conceivable practical application) and carried what he learnt about letterforms around for a decade until it became the first computer that treated type as something other than a grid of green rectangles. The most commercially consequential design decision in personal computing traces back to the single most defunded, most sneered-at, most “what are you going to do with that?” corner of a liberal arts education.
The industry’s response to this was remarkable. It kept the keynote theatrics, the turtleneck, “one more thing”, the reality distortion field, the shipping culture, the secrecy. Every stylistic tic was cargo-culted into a thousand founder personas. The one conviction he kept returning to, the actual load-bearing idea, was quietly rezoned. Nobody drops in on the calligraphy class anymore; there’s a bootcamp to finish. The intersection of Technology and Liberal Arts has gone the way of the mid-century American downtown. Somebody decided the through-traffic mattered more than the neighbourhood, and Technology Street is now a ten-lane elevated expressway: enormous volumes, tremendous speed, nowhere to cross on foot. The bookshop and the theatre that used to sit on the corner were declared blight and bulldozed for the on-ramp, and the traffic engineers still can’t work out why nothing interesting happens around here anymore.
The tell
The tell is always the naming. Cultures that make art name things out of their own imaginative surplus. Cultures that don’t, borrow. Eärendil. Icarus. Prometheus. Palantír. An actual company named itself after Tolkien’s surveillance orb that corrupts everyone who looks into it, and the founders thought this was cool, which it is, in the way a skull ring is cool, if you haven’t read the book.
The engineers aren’t the problem. Engineers have always been at their best when embedded in cultures that fed them stories, doubt, and consequence; the Apollo program was staffed by people who read. The problem is upstream: an education system and an investment culture that treats the entire imaginative record of the species as a rounding error, and then wonders why the future keeps arriving as a rerun.
If we want technology that isn’t a knock-off of a knock-off, the fix isn’t another coding bootcamp. It’s putting art back in the room, not as ethics-washing, not as a mural in the lobby, but as a load-bearing part of how technical people learn to think. Because the alternative is what we have now: a sky full of mirrors, a culture with nothing left to reflect.
Dave5 
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