Torment Nexus

The Torment Nexus is a term used in critical commentary of the influence of science fiction on technological development.

Overview

The term was coined in a 2021 Tweet by American writer Alex Blechman, shortly following Facebook's announcement that it would be rebranding to Meta Platforms as part of a shift in the company's focus towards developing a metaverse. In the Tweet, Blechman wrote:

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.

Dais Johnston of Inverse has defined the Torment Nexus as "shorthand for something that backfired in fiction being unironically replicated in reality." Reviewing the 2023 CES trade show, Katie Wickens of PC Gamer defined the Torment Nexus as "a concept that encompasses our growing concern that science fiction will continue to become science fact across the consumer market, with the phobias wrought by technological speculation turning palpable in the hands of money-hungry corporations." In September 2025, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction editor Gabriel Burrow wrote that the term had become "a common joke within science fiction circles... The joke, of course, is that tech executives fail to engage with the critical aspect of science fiction—even when it’s staring them in the face."

Debates

The term has been used in debates and commentary surrounding the role of science fiction in society. Sri Lankan SFF author Vajra Chandrasekera has stated that "as a scene, science fiction has to be able to fight those battles" concerning how the genre inspires technological development, saying that "you know the Torment Nexus meme? I love it, I enjoy it, but it also elides culpability in a way. It’s like, “oh, we were just warning you against it, we didn’t mean to make it sound cool.” You kind of did, a little bit, mean to make it sound cool." In the 2024 Routledge Handbook of AI and Literature, Jo Lindsay Walton of the University of Sussex cited the term while discussing "critical design fiction," arguing that "perhaps science fiction can stimulate innovation, but cannot suppress it: like when you are told not to think of a pink elephant, and so you think of a pink elephant."

Writing for Writer's Digest in August 2025, author Tim Chawaga wrote that there was "a (partially self-imposed) expectation put upon the near-future science fiction writer, whose purview includes the climate conditions of this planet, they should really find some way to be useful. That they should conjure up some theoretical but realistic invention that will, on a planetary scale and in less than 300 pages, solve the Problem, i.e., the damage caused by climate change," but that many science fiction writers were "skeptical that technology alone can save us, or more specifically that their brilliant technology ideas will be used for the purpose of saving us. Today’s grandest environmental tech proposals, like atmospheric aerosol sprays, carbon capture devices and credits, feel more like the downstream of a Ponzi scheme than a meaningfully scalable solution. And anything that science fiction has dreamt up that has been deemed worthy of churning out has often begun as a Torment Nexus."

Lucas Ropek of Gizmodo has named American science fiction writer Ernest Cline's 2024 announcement that he would launch a metaverse platform as an example of the Torment Nexus, saying that "the guy who wrote a book that arguably warned us about the dangers of getting lost in the metaverse is now busy creating one." Jack King of GQ has named British reality TV show Squid Game: The Challenge, based on the South Korean dystopian TV series Squid Game, as an example of the Torment Nexus, linking it to "the tendency of film studios and tech conglomerates to ignore the moral lesson of a given artwork if there's a buck to be made."

The term has also been used in debates and commentary surrounding Silicon Valley and technological development. British author Charles Stross has written for Scientific American that the meme is "a worryingly accurate summary of the situation in Silicon Valley right now: the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat." In his 2024 book Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History, British scholar Martin Paul Eve cited the term while describing how "simultaneously, we have a philosophy that is prevalent in Silicon Valley that apparently knows of the danger of AI overreach even while Silicon Valley’s corporations pursue the apocalyptic endgame that they say they wish to avoid," saying that it was a form of "epistemological expansionism" where "there is something about the supposed irrepressible march of knowledge that drives such logic. Under such a rationale, inventions such as the nuclear bomb were always inevitable because it is always wrong not to seek to know more."

In an October 2025 interview with writer Eliot Peper about the term, American journalist Ellen Huet wrote that "In Silicon Valley, it’s incredibly common to find tech leaders who have drawn inspiration from the science fiction they read when they were younger... Peper says one of the reasons tech leaders are drawn to sci-fi so strongly in the first place is because it matches their desire to see the world as malleable."

See also

• List of existing technologies predicted in science fiction
• Science fiction studies