When They Insist Upon the Torment Nexus

or: your car should not drive you to jail

A few weeks ago, a self-driving Waymo-brand taxi in San Mateo, California delivered two children into the hands of the police. The machine determined that its two 15-year-old passengers were drinking and shooting toy guns, so it contacted the police, drove itself to a parking lot, and turned itself off. The children were then apprehended by the armed men (and possibly women), who graciously decided that instead of caging the teenagers, they could be returned to their parents. This time.

Nearly every article I’ve read on the matter really wants to emphasize the fact that the children were not locked into the car, that they were free to leave. That the two fifteen years olds were free to leave from a random parking lot, god knows how far from home. As if that makes it alright.

And I read a lot of articles about the incident, because at least a dozen people tagged me in the stories or messaged me about it. Because in 2015, Vice published a short story of mine called One Star, about a nonbinary graffiti artist trapped in a self-driving taxi that decides to drive them to jail. It’s a short read, scarcely longer than my average newsletter.

I felt really clever at the time, when I wrote it. I got the idea for it when I was traveling with some friends across the country in the van that I used to live in, which I’d named Leviathan. Because it was gigantic and represented civilization.

Self-driving cars were barely in the proof-of-concept stage at that point, but I declared that I would love it if Leviathan could drive itself, if I could just sleep in my own bed in the back while my van took me where I wanted to go.

“If they invent self-driving cars, they’ll just drive people to jail. You know that, right?” My friend told me.

I didn’t have a response for him, because he was right. There was never any chance that a carceral society like the USA was going to develop self-driving cars as anything other than an extension of social control and punitive justice.

So I wrote a story about it, sold it to Vice, and tried not to think about it too much since.

Ten years later, that story came true.

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In 2021, The Onion author Alex Blechman tweeted:

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.

Ever since, “Torment Nexus” has become shorthand for the horrendous things that people (especially people who run tech companies) do that seems to be inspired by all of the worst dystopian imaginings of science fiction writers.

Alex Blechman was specifically talking about how Facebook changed its name to Meta and sought to develop the Metaverse, inspired by the Metaverse from the corporate cyberpunk dystopian novel Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. I think the most Torment-Nexusy example of this phenomenon of all is Palantir, the transparently evil surveillance company named after the devices used by the transparently evil villains of The Lord of the Rings.

If we’re being pedantic, I don’t think the Waymo prison taxi is a true Torment Nexus moment, because I don’t have the hubris to believe that self-driving taxis, or their ability to deliver delinquent youth into the hands of the police, were inspired by my writing.

Instead, I just fell prescient, and not in a way that feels good.

I don’t want the Torment Nexus.

What if instead we all built Hron, from Margaret Killjoy’s hit secondary world utopian novel, Please Build the Country of Hron? (Well, actually, it’s called A Country of Ghosts.)

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We’re sliding faster and faster into a nightmare that no one, except the people in power, want. We don’t want Flock cameras that track our every move. We don’t want to hand over our brains to a trumped-up autocomplete that is destroying the world’s books.

We want to fight climate change. We see the cities on fire or underwater and sometime those are our own cities. A third of a million people have been displaced in France and Spain this past week by the fires there, and either you or someone you know has already seen your power grid struggle under the weight of heat waves and heat domes this summer.

The movement against data centers is probably the movement most capable of unifying us across cultural divides in this country. While legacy media outlets are bragging about the meteoric rise of data centers and AI as infrastructure, we’d all rather that effort went into retrofitting housing for efficiency, cooling, and smoke filtration. Because “wouldn’t it be neat if a website could sing you a little song” feels a lot less essential right now than “I would like to not watch my loved ones choking on wildfire smoke.”

The only power-hungry infrastructure we need to be considering right now is air-conditioning.

I don’t have a lot to say about this that isn’t just a series of curse words.

And our cars should not drive us to jail. I wish we could have self-driving cars, but the carceral state and capitalism are why we can’t have nice things.

I’m not anti-technology, not in the abstract sense. But technology isn’t neutral; it’s built and implemented within societies. The original luddites didn’t hate the idea of machines, they hated the idea that their livelihoods were being destroyed by machines. Textile workers had worked in cottages—a literal cottage industry—but suddenly became replaceable, industrial cogs in the cities instead. It’s not that the workers all lost their jobs, it’s that their jobs went from the dignity of craft to the misery of industrial production.

And this morning The New York Times quoted an AI asshole as saying AI is going to bring “10x of the Industrial Revolution at 10x the speed.”

Now, fortunately, I’m a bit of an AI optimist. Which is to say, I think it’s going to crash and collapse instead of accomplishing these massive, world-changing things that none of us want. Likely, it will fall under its own weight. But if it doesn’t, well, there’s a revolt happening, now, already, and that revolt is going to grow.

And when they insist on the Torment Nexus, we can refuse to build it.

And if they build it anyway, we can destroy it.