To usher in the age of industrial and mechanized production.
<PERSON> was originally a Maia of Aule. Like his master, his interest lay in production and craft; but his sensibilities were less those of the individual smith or craftsman:
he loved order and co-ordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction.
to paraphrase - he loved the well-greased, well-tuned many-part machine production...
When he got into the ring fashioning business, he did not engage in it as an individual project, but rather set about to organize many smiths; and the result was a production line of rings, albeit a short-lived one. Now, true, the Elves made their rings more special and unique - but they are the least susceptible to <PERSON>'s influence, or in other words, the most traditionalist and the least compatible with activities of masses.
In Mordor, and by influence in Orthanc - there was mining, dust, soot; there was a huge black tower, reminisicent of a factory chimney. 736
And the population - they were not the noble-born, nor the yeoman farmers or the landed gentry, but the ugly race of Orcs, and to some extent migrants from the East and South, easier to control and manipulate.
Indeed, Mordor is the "nightmarish" version of late-19th-century industrial society: The innards of the dirty factory, with dirty huddled creatures skulking around, taking orders from their intendants, the fires of the forge and the towering chimney. That is the world <PERSON> was creating and that is what can be conceived as the movement he represents at the end of the Third Age of the Sun. This also explains why it's reasonable to describe his intentions as having "merely wanted to reform and reorganize Middle-earth".
Notes:
* This analysis does not at all square with his activities in the 1st age, the werewolves and vampires etc.
* This claim/vision/perception should really be developed more thoroughly, and perhaps literary criticis have done so; I'm just relating my own half-baked thoughts on this.
* I would contrast this aspect of LotR with the view of industrialization in <PERSON> Princess Mononoke, in which the Capitalist baron of industry, lady <PERSON>, is afforded a more humanizing, less monstrous characterization, while the mythic, pre-industrial have both nobler aspects and darker, atavistic ones. In both stories, the mythic and fantastic "side" has some sort of a pyrrhic victory and inevitably recedes. 88