When They Insist Upon the Torment Nexus

“If they invent self-driving cars, they’ll just drive people to jail. You know that, right?” My friend told me.

I didn’t have a response for him, because he was right. There was never any chance that a carceral society like the USA was going to develop self-driving cars as anything other than an extension of social control and punitive justice.

So I wrote a story about it, sold it to Vice, and tried not to think about it too much since.

Ten years later, that story came true.

I've become an avid reader of socialist and queer sci-fi, and Margaret Killjoy is one of my favorite modern authors. I haven't read "One Star", but I've read enough of her work to be wholely unsurprised that one of her stories has become another example of our oppressors building the Torment Nexus.

I feel like there's something to be said for sci-fi/fantasy authors writing about what's happening already as a counterpoint to the tech oligarchs necessarily taking inspiration from the most evil concepts in fiction. As she points out in this post, it doesn't take prophetic vision to see that a new technology created under fascism will serve the interests of those in power over the interests of the people. The historical context goes back at least as far as the industrial revolution and the original Luddites. I see no reason to let any of that get in the way of a good meme, though.