Fucking tech bros; those billionaires who read a bit of sci-fi and think they’re building the future, when really, they’re just building bigger cages. It’s enough to make me fucking spit, for sure.
Fucking megalomaniacs, the lot.
You have your Musks and your Bezoses, don’t you? Raving about Iain M. Banks’ Culture series and how they’re going to build space colonies and send us all off into the stars. And then young Zuckerberg, with his ‘metaverse’ pish, prattling on about Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. But these lads have missed the bloody point entirely, haven’t they? They’ve read the covers but skipped the actual words inside.
Scottish writer Banks, bless his anarcho-socialist heart, wrote about a post-scarcity society where everyone is free, where technology serves humanity, not the other way around. Where profit is a forgotten concept because everyone has what they need, and art and exploration are the driving forces. And these lads, with their fuck off shit piles of gold and their armies of exploited workers, think they’re building that?
They’re building a spaceship to Mars so they can escape the very Earth they’re ruining, all while dreaming of some neural implant that’ll turn us all into better consumers for their bloody products. It’s a grand delusion, fit for a king, if that king was a madman with a spreadsheet for a soul.
The Real Goal: of course, its Profit and Control.
When Bezos talks about space colonies, he’s not talking about the democratic, egalitarian utopia of The Culture. He’s talking about a place where his company, Amazon, can expand its reach, exploit new resources, and probably charge you for the oxygen you breathe. It’s not about liberation; it’s about expansion of the market. And Musk, with his Neuralink and his grand pronouncements about enhancing humanity? It’s not about making everyone better; it’s about creating a two-tiered society where the rich can afford to augment themselves into god-like beings, leaving the rest of us behind, scrabbling for crumbs. He’s talking about a future where you can upload your consciousness, but only if you can afford the subscription fee, the prick.
They see the shiny gadgets and the grand scale of these sci-fi worlds, but they completely ignore the fundamental social and economic structures that make them work. The Culture isn’t about rich individuals conquering space; it’s about a collective, about mutual aid, about a society where the means of production are controlled by everyone, for everyone. There’s no Jeff Bezos in The Culture, because there’s no need for one! It’s like these lads are looking at Star Trek and seeing the Starfleet ships, but completely missing the fact that there’s no money, no hunger, and no poverty in the Federation. They just want the warp drive to get to the next profitable asteroid.
The Satire Missed: Snow Crash and the Metaverse
And Zuckerberg and his obsession with Snow Crash… that’s the richest, stupidest irony of the lot. Stephenson’s novel is a blistering satire of corporate power, rampant privatization, and a future where the virtual world is a drug used to pacify the masses while the real world falls apart. The metaverse in Snow Crash is a reflection of a deeply broken society, not something to aspire to! It’s a warning, not a blueprint. Yet, Zuckerberg sees it and thinks, “Aye, that’s a grand idea for a business model!” 
He wants to build the *Torment Nexus,* doesn’t he? To create a virtual reality where he can control every interaction, every thought, and every penny spent, all under the guise of “connection.” He’s building the prison he thinks will set us free.
The Torment Nexus and AI
This brings us to the Torment Nexus itself, a lovely bit of a phrase coined by Alex Blechman. It’s when someone creates something truly awful, something that causes suffering or oppression, all while claiming it’s a revolutionary step forward, often inspired by a misreading of sci-fi. These billionaires are constantly building their Torment Nexuses: AI systems that automate away jobs and deepen inequality, surveillance technologies that erode privacy, and space ventures that promise salvation but deliver only more corporate power.
They talk about AI saving humanity, but their AI is designed to maximize profit, to analyze our every move, to create algorithms that serve their bottom line, not our well-being. They’re not building HAL 9000 to navigate space for humanity’s good; they’re building algorithms to target us with more ads and predict our next purchase.
Sci-Fi’s REAL Warnings
Science fiction, the good stuff, is often a warning. It shows us not just what could be, but what we must avoid. It asks: who profits, and who is harmed? Who benefits from this new technology, and whose lives are made harder, or worse, taken away? These lads, with their eyes on the stars and their hands on our wallets, are ignoring those warnings. They’re trying to build a future for themselves and their mates, a future where they’re still at the top, god-like figures with their neural implants and their private Martian colonies, while the rest of us are left on an Earth they’ve picked clean, dreaming of a metaverse that’s nothing but a >digital cage.< It’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s a betrayal of the very spirit of imagination that great sci-fi and its utopias, dystopias and satire offers.
