I think a lot of time when the Torment Nexus thing is brought up, people are getting the arrow of causality the wrong way around. It's not that necessarily that Bobby Techbro read "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" and was inspired to make one, even if that's what the marketing tries to sell it as.

No I think that's not giving scifi authors the proper respect as futurists. They looked at how things were going and thought "man, this might lead to a Torment Nexus" and then wrote a story about that.

@foone Gibson looked at the 80s and went "this is fucked and bad" and then got invited to talk to orgs telling him "We're trying to build the future of your books"

(I'm not disagreeing with you, but that sticks with me when I hear the Torment Nexus thing)

@silverwizard @foone Part of the force of the joke is that we've had decades of mass media that split the superficial imagery of science fiction from the social criticism at the core of it.