According to New Scientist, science journalist and author Annalee Newitz argues that our collective obsession with the futuristic tech in sci-fi stories, while ignoring their actual messages, is a critical error. They point to the “Torment Nexus Problem,” named for a 2021 satirical post by Alex Blechman, where tech leaders like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg literally build dystopian tools—Palantir and the Meta metaverse—inspired by fictional worlds where those same tools cause evil, madness, and brain crashes. The second error is the “Blueprint Problem,” the mistaken belief that sci-fi provides an exact model for the future, which skewed early space programs toward human pilots over robots and fuels unrealistic hype around AI. Newitz, who co-edited the 2024 anthology We Will Rise Again, contends that treating sci-fi as prescription, rather than as a worldview for questioning reality, jeopardizes how we shape what comes next.
The Torment Nexus Problem
This one is just painfully funny. And painfully common. You can see the original satirical tweet from Alex Blechman that named it, but the examples are everywhere. Peter Thiel names his data-mining and surveillance company after the cursed seeing-stones that corrupt their users in Tolkien’s lore. And then that company goes on to build systems for the U.S. government to track migrants and for militaries to select targets. It’s not subtle!
Then Zuckerberg names his VR pivot after a virtual world in *Snow Crash* that literally fries people’s brains with a virus. I mean, come on. Here’s the thing: these aren’t oversights. They’re a specific kind of reading failure. The tech bros see the cool gadget and completely miss the 50-foot-tall neon sign that says “THIS IS A BAD IDEA.” They treat the cautionary tale as an instruction manual. It’s like watching *Jurassic Park* and thinking, “We need more raptors in urban centers.”
The Blueprint Problem
If the Torment Nexus is about missing the point, the Blueprint Problem is about being too literal. It’s the belief that sci-fi is a prediction, a roadmap we just have to follow to reach the shiny future on the cover. This is why, for decades, the public and many engineers thought human space colonization was the obvious next step, because Flash Gordon did it. Never mind that robots are objectively better at pure exploration right now.
We still do this! A space probe like Voyager hits a major milestone at the edge of the solar system, and it gets a fraction of the media buzz that a billionaire’s joyride does. The science is incredible, but it doesn’t match the blueprint we were sold. Same with AI. We were promised C-3PO and Data, so every chatbot gets measured against that impossible standard, and every real, messy, problematic application feels like a letdown or a threat. The blueprint sets us up for disappointment and bad priorities.
What Sci-Fi Really Is
So if it’s not a gadget catalog or a future map, what is it? Newitz argues it’s a worldview. A way of asking, “Why is the world like this, and does it have to be?” That’s a powerful, subversive mode of thinking. It’s not about building the Dyson sphere; it’s about asking why we accept energy scarcity in the first place. It’s not about uploading your brain; it’s about questioning what “you” even are.
That’s the spirit behind anthologies like *We Will Rise Again*. The goal is to dislodge assumptions. To look at a machine folding tissues or an invisible border and see them as strange, arbitrary choices, not inevitabilities. That’s the real gateway. Sci-fi at its best makes the present look weird, and that weirdness is the first step to imagining something truly new—not just a copy of someone else’s nightmare or daydream.
Imagine It Yourself
The final takeaway is simple but tough. You can’t outsource your vision of the future. Replication is a dead end, whether you’re copying a dystopia or a utopia. The tech industry, frankly, is awful at this. It’s filled with people who are great at executing but seem to have no original imagination beyond “like that thing in that movie.”
And look, this applies way beyond software. If you’re in a field like industrial automation or hardware, the pressure to just iterate on what already exists is huge. But the companies that break through are the ones that ask the sci-fi questions: Why do we interface with machines *this* way? What if the data wasn’t trapped in that silo? What if the factory could see? It’s about applying that “what if” mindset to real-world constraints. You have to do the hard work of imagination yourself. Otherwise, you’re just building someone else’s Torment Nexus, and frankly, we’ve got enough of those already.
