"I found it interesting and rewarding"

September 8, 2023 9:30 AM

Jim Ray riffs on the satirical 2021 tweet about "Don't Create The Torment Nexus" with a short fiction story told as a thread on Mastodon starting: "Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about the launch of The Torment Nexus, the opening of the Xthonic Gateway, and release of the arch-demon Tzaunh MAY HIS REIGN BE DARK AND ETERNAL, who has begun his foretold 10,000 years of suffering and torment. I figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company." The skewerings in the 17 following posts call to my mind The Bug by Ellen Ullman or the Knives Out films. Ray noted, "The Call of PMthulu writes itself".

Ray published his thread July 28th, 2023.

If you liked this you might also like "Rät" and "Divine Comedy of the Tech Sisterhood".

posted by brainwane (26 comments total)

I realized that another piece of fiction that strikes a similar vein, for me, is Peter Watts's bonus material for his scifi novel Blindsight: the in-universe presentation "Vampire Domestication: Taming Yesterday's Nightmares for a Better Tomorrow" (previously on MetaFilter).
posted by brainwane at 9:39 AM on September 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

The comments on the mastodon thread are also good.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:48 AM on September 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Paging Mr Stross… I format and content were perfectly matched. Though I would have preferred to see it published on LinkedIn
posted by q*ben at 10:11 AM on September 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

Also, just in case y'all missed what else this is referencing, here's the tweet. The verbatim paragraphs (e.g.: "I'd be remiss [...]") are *chef's kiss*.
posted by mhum at 10:26 AM on September 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

It's pretty easy for satire to "write itself" when another post provided you the phrasing and the format ready made, and all you had to do to make it "satirical" was to take someone else's classic joke and play some Mad Libs to extend it to tiresome length. This is sub-Borowitz level stuff, nowhere near the Peter Watts sketch about domesticating Draculas.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 11:23 AM on September 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Q: this is very internet
A: I aim to internet
posted by infinitewindow at 11:54 AM on September 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Aw, bummer. I thought this was pitch perfect, absolutely nailing the mimicry it was attempting. Came here to gush about how wonderful it was! But finding out it's just a close rewrite of some post takes all the air out of that balloon. Rather like finding out that this guy who's doing such a great Al Pacino impression is actually Al Pacino wearing a fake beard for disguise.
posted by MiraK at 12:38 PM on September 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Thanks for giving this one a bit of a second life, brainwave.

Back to my sub-Borowitz cave of unoriginality. Just when I thought I was out!
posted by jimray at 1:05 PM on September 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

It's terrific, jimray! Please don't let folk get you down.
posted by JHarris at 1:33 PM on September 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

(I think it works better knowing its origins!)
posted by JHarris at 1:34 PM on September 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

I posted this not knowing the specific post it was so closely satirizing and appreciate the heads-up, mhum!
posted by brainwane at 1:49 PM on September 8, 2023

We’ve all had fun learning about the Torment Nexus, but there’s nothing “fun” about “the sub-Borowitz cave of unoriginality”…
posted by Artw at 2:33 PM on September 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also, just in case y'all missed what else this is referencing, here's the tweet. The verbatim paragraphs (e.g.: "I'd be remiss [...]") are *chef's kiss*.

There really is something eldritch and wrong looking about extra-length tweets.
posted by Artw at 2:37 PM on September 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

The comments on the mastodon thread are also good.

@jimray So glad you’re finally speaking out! I remember a lot of unenlightened people mocked you for having a sleeping bag in your office, while I was perceptive enough to recognize it as a cocoon to shed your weak, useless human husk and be born anew bathed in the punishing light of the Dark One. IYKYK!

Works nicely when paired with the original.
posted by clawsoon at 3:52 PM on September 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

This arch-demon Tzaunh MAY HIS REIGN BE DARK AND ETERNAL character reminds me of Vectron. PRAISE VECTRON.
posted by knoxg at 4:58 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

There really is something eldritch and wrong looking about extra-length tweets.

blrrrrgh, fr fr.

Tznh scks. 140 ltrs shldv bn plnty fr vryn.

Fckn Tznh. Rnd th bst thng fr my hstl snc tlgrphy.
posted by Vowelzebub at 6:07 PM on September 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is a kind of Poe's Law-type pattern that happened today, in that I fully thought a bunch of the lines in the parody version were elegant skewerings of the kind of things Silicon Valley folks (including me) might be prone to say, and then I learned that they WERE IN THE ORIGINAL. Like

My take on what’s happened since then is full of lived nuance.

When people ask why I stayed it’s easy to answer: optimism, curiosity, personal growth and money.

when I’m on a team I uphold the philosophy of “praise in public and criticize in private”.

I think of life as a game....

It was like reading "Infidelity Will Be The Death of My Marriage" before reading the essay it was satirizing.
posted by brainwane at 6:32 PM on September 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

The original is so un-self-aware that it begs for parody. I loved this, jimray! Very internet.
posted by signal at 7:30 PM on September 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

> brainwane: "There is a kind of Poe's Law-type pattern that happened today, in that I fully thought a bunch of the lines in the parody version were elegant skewerings of the kind of things Silicon Valley folks (including me) might be prone to say, and then I learned that they WERE IN THE ORIGINAL"

That was exactly my feeling as well. Even though I was very familiar with the original and probably should have spotted it by "yeeted for years into the void", I didn't pick up on it until relatively late in the game. I'm reading along thinking, "oh yeah, this is a lot of familiar jargon, buzzwords, catchphrases, etc..." and then getting to the first mentions of Elonthradiel and thinking "oh we've got some Elon-specific material". But it wasn't until I got to "praise in public and criticize in private" that I finally caught on that this was a beat-for-beat remake of Crawford's letter.
posted by mhum at 8:34 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, parodically un-self-aware perfectly describes Esther Crawford's original tweet. That the parody copies the original so closely is part of why it's funny. Like, you want to yell, "You see you're describing an unstable man-baby with enough money to destabilize a continent, don't you? That's what your words are saying!" at the original tweeter until your throat gives out.
posted by fnerg at 8:46 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

It was like reading "Infidelity Will Be The Death of My Marriage" before reading the essay it was satirizing."

Went on a deep dive (hadn't read it or the parody before), and ended up here. He's still trying to turn it into a business.
posted by signal at 8:52 PM on September 8, 2023

I do recommend "Rät" and "Divine Comedy of the Tech Sisterhood" and Ellen Ullman's novel The Bug as explorations of the distorted psychological dynamics that emerge as one participates in the tech industry.
posted by brainwane at 4:30 AM on September 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's been a long time, but I remember enjoying Ullman's memoir Close to the Machine as well.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:31 AM on September 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sunday Forecast
Partly cloudy in the morning then becoming sunny. Highs in the 60s to lower 70s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Air Quality Index: Good.
Torment Nexus Level: sub-Borowitz.
posted by ApplAuD at 3:47 AM on September 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

The synthesis of the sources - the beat-by-beat interleaving.

BRILLIANT

A chronicler of our present. A true scholar of the voices speaking.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 5:09 AM on September 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Another Torment Nexus riff: In a different thread, Artw mentioned Chris Gioran's jest from July 21st of this year: "Here's the detailed technical plans for a working Torment Nexus." [after opposition to the core idea] "Why won't people focus on the technical merits of the proposal." Yeahhhhhh.

Gioran used the phrase "techbros" to castigate the speaker in this scenario, which I don't want to co-sign. The tweet Jim Ray was satirizing was by Esther Crawford on July 26th -- I know Gioran wasn't and couldn't have been responding to it, and this is a more general thought. I think most of us by default read the word "techbro" or the plural "techbros" as referring to men, and this often leads us to forget that people of all genders are capable of getting narrow-mindedly focused on our own personal ambitions or blithely ignoring the consequences of our work -- as Ray writes,

Besides, as everyone in both Silicon Valley *and* the Valley of the Damned knows, just shipping is so much more important than what you ship.

posted by brainwane at 11:40 AM on September 10, 2023