Welcome to The Torment Nexus

Hi everyone! Just wanted you to know that I’ve launched a newsletter about technology and society called “The Torment Nexus,” where I will be writing analysis and commentary about technology and culture. I was recently laid off from my job as the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I have been writing since 2017 about the intersection of technology, media, and culture, so I decided to run this up the old flagpole and see if anyone salutes 😄

I’m publishing The Torment Nexus via Ghost, an open-source publishing system, as I do my other newsletter, a collection of interesting, odd, and/or unusual links called When The Going Gets Weird. If you’re more comfortable with Substack, I’m also publishing it through that software as well, and if you prefer to read it the old-fashioned way, I will also be posting some or all of the posts here on my website, as I do with almost everything I write. Feel free to share this and other posts with anyone you think might have an interest in these kinds of topics!

In case the name Torment Nexus doesn’t ring a bell, it comes from a hilarious meme that Alex Blechman—a writer for The Onion—came up with awhile back, and I think it sums up so much about where we are right now in terms of our relationship with technology. Here Alex’s original tweet:

Another popular meme along similar lines shows Jeffrey Goldblum’s character in the movie “Jurassic Park” telling someone: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

This doesn’t mean I’m anti-technology, by any means! I’ve been using digital technology of various kinds and (for the most part) enjoying it since I got my first PC — an Atari 1040ST, with a graphic interface and MIDI support — in the mid-1980s. As for the web, it is easily one of the most fascinating and life-changing technologies I’ve ever come across, and I’ve been more or less addicted to it since Marc Andreessen invented the first web browser. Things like Google Earth continue to amaze me. I’ve also been an enthusiastic user of every social-media app from Twitter and Tumblr to Facebook and Google+ (RIP.)

For those who don’t know me, I’ve also been writing about technology since Apple was $5 a share and headed for bankruptcy (or so everyone said), and Research In Motion’s Blackberry was the height of mobile tech. I wrote about Google’s IPO, and the downfall of Nortel Networks. I was one of the first social-media editors at a major newspaper in North America (as far as I know), where I helped launch and moderate reader comments, used Facebook and live-blogging to help cover the election of Barack Obama, and started a wiki aimed at crowdsourcing readers’ thoughts about politics (RIP.) I also co-founded a conference called Mesh, where we talked with experts about things like blogs and YouTube, and why Craigslist looked so terrible but was worth billions.

In 2010, I left the newspaper to join a San Francisco-based blog network called Gigaom, founded by my friend Om Malik. I worked there for five years, writing about brand new things like Twitter and Instagram and analyzing important questions like whether bloggers are journalists (I also wrote about how Jack Dorsey might be the new Steve Jobs, and I apologize for that.) When Gigaom ran out of money, a bunch of the writers joined Fortune magazine, where I wrote about Twitter and important questions like whether we should refer to Donald Trump as a liar, a discussion that seems so quaint now it might as well have been about whether cars should replace the horse-drawn carriage. After a few years at Fortune I joined the Columbia Journalism Review.

Despite my long history as a fan and enthusiastic user of technology — or possibly because of it — I would be the first to admit that some technology has flaws, which is not surprising, since it is created by human beings. There are aspects of technology that are fundamentally hostile both to users and (arguably) to society itself, from printers that stop working if you try to use discount ink to social networks that empower a genocide, as Facebook arguably did in Myanmar. A lot of technology—with AI being just the latest example—seems to be driven by an attitude of “why don’t we try this and see what happens,” (or “move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously put it.) This is great, unless what you wind up breaking is democracy, or our ability to understand the world.

What I’m hoping to do with this newsletter is to bring a critical eye and some historical context to discussions of how technology impacts both individual users and society as a whole. If the tech is being used in ways that are helpful, I will say so. If I think it—or its creators—are being misunderstood, then I will say that. And if the technology is being created or used in negative ways, or there are aspects people should be wary of, I will point that out too. It’s even possible that in some cases, all three of the above things will be true. If you disagree or think that my perspective is wrong, I hope you will let me know!

I’m hoping to write an essay-length piece (800-1000 words or so) at least every week, and hopefully at some point twice a week, but since this is a new venture I am going to try to remain flexible, and I hope that you will too. And of course, I will include some hilarious tweets and/or memes, as I do in When The Going Gets Weird.