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Comment by kmeisthax

3 years ago

Aah yes, we've finally invented the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi classic Don't Invent the Torment Nexus

11 comments

kmeisthax

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XorNot  3 years ago

I hate that tweet. It was coined in the context of whatever Meta was doing with "the Metaverse" which for some reason everyone decided to lose their minds about as some sort of imminent threat rather then just a ge nobody wanted to play.

The thing is, The Metaverse wasn't a problem in Snow Crash. It just was - it was a thing, and it was generally regarded as one of the last places not totally under the dystopian corporate lawlessness that the rest of the world was.

So the motivating example is built on misunderstanding the original text, in the same way that Meta doing it was built on misunderstanding everything about the concept.

  • kmeisthax  3 years ago

    Ok. I get that The Metaverse from Snow Crash is not quite a Torment Nexus.

    However, the concept still holds weight. If you want a less obnoxious motivating example, there's actually a very, very old Torment Nexus that we've been trying to build for over a hundred years: humanoid robots. The play that literally coined the term robot - R.U.R.[0] - very much made them the central problem of the story. Building humanoid robots IRL is a very bad idea, and yet people still do it, resulting in all sorts of creepy robots with awful problems that could have been built as far more useful machines had they not been forcibly anthropomorphized.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

    Yes, I am aware that the robots in this story were more grown-in-a-vat than built-from-parts, but still.

djur  3 years ago

This goes way back. Over a century ago a guy named his beef extract after the Victorian equivalent of the Force from Star Wars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovril

  • sehansen  3 years ago

    This life force "Vril" is from a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, best known in hacker circles as the author of the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night" and the namesake of the Bulwer-Lytton (bad) Fiction Contest. Winning entries are a fortune staple. Or "were", since the newest entry on my Arch Linux box is from 1990.