The American military and its industrial base have a rich history of recruiting through propaganda and manipulation. By providing support to movies like Top Gun in exchange for editorial control, the Department of Defense (DoD) makes military service look adventurous, comradely, and righteous. And they use the debt and hardship of young Americans to make service seem like a good life decision.

In recent decades, the military has landed on another propaganda tool to attract tech talent: nerd fantasy. The military and its private sector counterparts increasingly use references to movies like Star Wars and books like The Lord of the Rings to launder their image. Surveillance companies and military contractors Palantir and Anduril are named after The Lord of the Rings. The Defense Digital Service (DDS), a DoD team of self-proclaimed “tech experts tackling the DoD’s toughest problems,” unofficially call themselves the “Rebel Alliance.”

Many DDS employees, including its first leader Chris Lynch, left to found the company Rebellion Defense, which fills DoD contracts to build AI for “battlefield decisions.” The company has referred to itself as “an unconstrained ‘Project Maven’” — the military AI contract that Google dropped after employee protests. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a board member, and the company’s valuation is over $1 billion (although it may be struggling to live up to that price tag).