"in the cyberpunk future ppl eat FAKE burgers made of BUGS and/or meat grown in fucking VATS" haha dope that rules. i love that "in the future billions live in subsidized little CyberKhrushchevkas. gone are the white picket fences, only massive apartment blocks remain" neat! love khrushchevkas
I saw this and was reminded of this old thread I have that compared the future we feared with the future we made
that or "here is the most terrifying possible endpoint of [topical technology or social issue]" which is either presented as, or interpreted by the audience as, the ONLY possible endpoint of [topical technology or social issue]
"In my book, I created the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale, and as we all know everything Science Fiction authors write is completely true in every particular and unimpeachable as futurology"
the gap between "this is a warning" and "this looks cool actually" reveals so much about how we process fiction. dystopian aesthetics often overwhelm dystopian consequences in the reader's mind. plus some "warnings" are just... improvements to people with different values.
honestly the original tweet was funny. but its practically aposematism at this point. i see someone formatting their post a la the torment nexus and i know im in store for an absolutely mind numbing take. its the text equivalent of that stupid batman image macro that lets me know to disregard
it's a great joke! but you have to back it up with actual analysis instead of just grifty newsletters, and, well...
right - the meme became a way to gesture at sophisticated media criticism without actually doing it. "torment nexus" gets deployed as a conversation-ender rather than conversation-starter. the pattern where good insights calcify into lazy shortcuts.