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.

And they were right. A Torment Nexus did get built, it just got named after the one in their book because of the obvious precedent.

Had they not written the book, the Torment Nexus would still exist, it just would have been called the TechCo.io TortureHub instead.

@foone
Except if the author said that the service would be provided by the actual Mafia. Then the name is already taken so they must invent some new name like "Uber torments" or something.