Ah... I just realized for the first time that this must be the same Robert Browning whose poem served as an inspiration for Stephen Kings "the dark tower"
I hate that tweet. It was coined in the context of whatever Meta was doing with "the Metaverse" which for some reason everyone decided to lose their minds about as some sort of imminent threat rather then just a ge nobody wanted to play.
The thing is, The Metaverse wasn't a problem in Snow Crash. It just was - it was a thing, and it was generally regarded as one of the last places not totally under the dystopian corporate lawlessness that the rest of the world was.
So the motivating example is built on misunderstanding the original text, in the same way that Meta doing it was built on misunderstanding everything about the concept.
Ok. I get that The Metaverse from Snow Crash is not quite a Torment Nexus.
However, the concept still holds weight. If you want a less obnoxious motivating example, there's actually a very, very old Torment Nexus that we've been trying to build for over a hundred years: humanoid robots. The play that literally coined the term robot - R.U.R.[0] - very much made them the central problem of the story. Building humanoid robots IRL is a very bad idea, and yet people still do it, resulting in all sorts of creepy robots with awful problems that could have been built as far more useful machines had they not been forcibly anthropomorphized.
"Language evolves" means language evolves. To insist that the only valid use of the torment nexus meme is in the context of a reference to the Metaverse from Star Crash vis a vis Facebook's meta is language prescriptivism at its most absurd. It works as a general metaphor in numerous contexts relative to the tech industry and the dystopic effects of its own utopian nerd hubris, in trying to make science fiction real while failing to heed the warnings of that same science fiction.
In fact, there was a whole HN thread about an article on just that phenomenon recently[0,1].
The meme is used so often because there are many, many torment nexuses. Just as the definition of "enshittification" ceased to be bound to a description of platform decay almost as soon as it went viral here, and "literally" has been its own contronym for literal centuries, "torment nexus" has evolved to communicate a broader concept than was originally intended. And that's OK. It doesn't take anything away from the original usage.
Yes, one can be angry that human language doesn't follow the strictly defined, rigid rules of a programming language, and that the meaning of words can change quickly, and that language is fluid, sometimes vague and even self-contradictory. But to be mad that other people are using a meme in a way you don't approve of is petty and silly, because that's how the internet works. Such people need to touch grass and get a life.
The comment you replied to wasn't complaining that the meme was being misused, but that the original tweet itself misconstrued the book it was referring to. This isn't a prescriptivism vs. descriptivism situation, it's a matter of literary interpretation. (Anyway, linguistic descriptivism doesn't forbid people from having opinions about usage.)
I think that pointing out of the misunderstanding about what exactly the metaverse was in the book and how it relates to silliness around Metas "metaverse" could actually become a meme in it own right. It speaks to how often the "torment nexus" meme is really just misinformed pessimism because "technology is scary" and many people just totally completely misunderstood the message in cyberpunk fiction.
I think there’s a difference here in the sense that the “torment nexus” meme was originally “off” (in the sense that it was apparently misunderstanding the Metaverse from fiction—I don’t know, didn’t read the book). I still don’t 100% understand why they dislike the meme, but I think it just might be that people are misunderstanding a book they like. I don’t really get why anyone who isn’t a fan of that particular book should care about this, it is just trivia about the book, the meme stands alone.
A change in the meaning of enshittification would be worse, IMO, because it is a nice description of a widespread phenomenon. It didn’t really have a great name before (“platform decay” sounds too passive, enshittification is good because it emphasizes the fact that it is incentivized to proactively make the platform bad).
So, I think we should go along with the former but not the latter.
This life force "Vril" is from a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, best known in hacker circles as the author of the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night" and the namesake of the Bulwer-Lytton (bad) Fiction Contest. Winning entries are a fortune staple. Or "were", since the newest entry on my Arch Linux box is from 1990.
