wanderingmagus

The concept of the “Torment Nexus” is a placeholder for any technology specifically described as dystopian or otherwise contributing to suffering in fiction, such as mass surveillance, mind control technology, and so on. The meme refers to modern-day corporations missing the point of the fiction, and creating said “Torment Nexus” as something they view as “cool” and “futuristic”. In some cases, the companies are self-aware enough to not pretend that their creation is anything other than dystopian, but in many cases they try to sell the new technology to the public as a good thing despite that very tech being described as dystopian already.

So tell me, what part of their creation was “solving real-world problems” beyond playing to the desires of autocrats and control freaks? What part of their creation was a net positive to society? Or are you happy to live in a world of autonomous drone strikes on weddings and kindergartens, mass surveillance, a thermonuclear sword of damocles hanging over all of humanity, and so on?

How about the following examples:

• Autonomous weaponized drones with automatic targeting (Terminator)
• Mass surveillance and voice recording (1984)
• Nuclear weapons (HG Wells, The World Set Free)
• Corporate controlled hypercommercialized microtransaction-filled metaverse (Snow Crash)
• Netflix to create real-life Squid Game (Squid Game (speedrun!))
• “MoviePass to track people’s eyes through their phone’s cameras to make sure they don’t look away from ads” (Black Mirror)
• Soulless AI facsimile of dead relatives (Black Mirror)

So Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein aren’t qualified to give understandings of the technologies they wrote about?

What are examples of advanced search strings they’re restricting? I haven’t heard of this. Do other search engines restrict them?