Building the Torment Nexus

Science fiction has a long and unnerving record of depicting futures that subsequently arrive. Currently, I’m interested in whether this represents sophisticated extrapolation or something darker—a species imagining the consequences of tendencies we seem unable to prevent ourselves from enacting. A pre-cog death wish, if you will.

You’ve probably seen memes along these lines, including Venn diagrams of 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale, Terminator, etc., with a big YOU ARE HERE in the middle. There’s also Alex Blechman’s legendary 2019 tweet: “Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale / Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.”

Definitely funny. And quite disturbing.

A cursory scan of mostly 20th-century literature and cinema makes the case. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, published in 1895, imagines humanity’s class divisions evolving into separate species: the beautiful Eloi above ground and the industrial Morlocks below. E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” from 1909, has humanity living in subterranean rooms, physically isolated but connected through screens to a vast technological system providing communication, information, entertainment and material necessities. That was 1909!

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, from 1921, presents mathematical regimentation, surveillance and radically curtailed privacy. George Orwell’s 1984 probably needs no introduction. Published in 1949, it imagines omnipresent surveillance, manipulated history, permanent political enemies and the state’s attempt to control not just behavior but reality itself. Pretty Trumpy.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 appeared in 1953, and we’ve been referencing it ever since. Most recall it primarily as a book about censorship, but it also includes ubiquitous screens, diminished attention spans, spoon-fed entertainment and a population increasingly uninterested in difficult thought.

Then there’s ecological science fiction. J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World from 1962 imagines climate transformation producing a flooded tropical planet. Frank Herbert’s Dune from 1965, now thoroughly embedded in pop culture, gives us resource dependency, imperial extraction, religious mythology and charismatic political power. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up take on overpopulation, mass media, corporate power, information overload, pollution, ecological collapse and political denial.

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, has received renewed attention, perhaps because its climate disruption, inequality, privatization, homelessness, drugs, gated communities and political and social breakdown look a lot like contemporary America.

Artificial intelligence makes the question especially uncomfortable. Harlan Ellison’s terrifying 1967 story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” features military supercomputers that become sentient, merging into a single system that annihilates nearly all humanity, preserving five people just to fuck with them. And yes, James Cameron’s The Terminator gave us Skynet, now shorthand for self-aware intelligence recognizing humanity as a threat and attempting to exterminate us. Hardly ambiguous.

For all the Gene Roddenberry visions that gave us communicators, tablet-type computers, voice interfaces and machine translation, we seem to have a million Black Mirror scenarios. We’ve done well with the gadgets, but the Federation is way behind schedule.

Of course, this stuff goes back much further than science fiction. Human beings have been telling stories about the destruction of worlds for millennia. Hebrew and Christian traditions have floods, plagues, beasts, wars and cosmic catastrophe. Norse mythology has Ragnarök. Hindu cosmology describes enormous cycles of creation, preservation and dissolution. Buddhist cosmology likewise has worlds arising and disappearing across vast kalpas, along with descriptions of dharmic decline and “degenerate times.”

Tibetan Buddhist terma (hidden-treasure) traditions include prophecies attributed to Padmasambhava, aka Guru Rinpoche, concerning the approaching Iron Dog year of 2030. Some teachers interpret these as warnings of nuclear war. Significantly, these teachings prescribe practices intended to avert or mitigate catastrophe. Here, prophecy functions as cautionary rather than immutable: if conditions persist, this is where shit could end up.

All of which is to say, the Torment Nexus is much older than Silicon Valley.

So is this precognition or some type of death wish endemic to our species? Both things can be true. It could be that imaginative or visionary minds occasionally apprehend something about futures that haven’t happened. Or maybe, like the Mentats in Dune, writers are simply good at pattern recognition, noticing arrangements of power, technology, ecology and human behavior.

Imagining catastrophe may also be adaptive. If we can picture and model something, perhaps we can avoid it. Apocalyptic storytelling could serve a prophylactic function, with civilizations running simulations of potential futures without consciously knowing it.

There’s also cultural recursion. Fiction becomes part of our everyday mindset and influences the people who subsequently construct the future. Prediction and inspiration become difficult to disentangle.

I can’t answer any of these questions. However, in my own understanding, I would attribute all of this to mind, which engenders everything, samsaric or nirvanic. Because of our habitual mental conditioning, we end up building the Torment Nexus anyway. Oops!