How turn-of-the-century stories taught us to fear our own creations
I grew up in that strange window when the internet was new but already essential. The modem screech, the handshake, the brief silence before the connection held and then you got online. We were curious and slightly naïve, and nobody was asking what we were actually building.
The stories we were consuming, though, seemed to be asking on our behalf.
Between 1998 and 2003, science fiction was running the same thought experiment in parallel across film, games, and novels: what happens when your creations start looking back at you? The Matrix framed it as spiritual crisis, asking not only whether the world was real but why we preferred the illusion. Existenz went further, dissolving the boundary between flesh and interface until neither felt original. Equilibrium tried the opposite route, treating emotion as the problem to be solved, which turned out not to be a solution at all. Each of them imagined a cure for human messiness that was worse than the original condition.
I was also reading Net Force Explorers, a young-adult spin-off from Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller world that sent teen cadets into virtual reality to solve crimes. It sits awkwardly in my memory between entertainment and prophecy. Beneath the adventure was a straightforward observation: life would move online, and safety there would never be guaranteed. Coming from Tom Clancy in the mid-nineties, this felt less like warning and more like weather forecast.
Then came the games, which made the fear interactive. Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid 2, released a year apart in 2000 and 2001, were both working on the same problem: control dressed as salvation. In Deus Ex, the AI Helios offered peace through merger with humanity. In MGS2, the Patriot AIs managed truth on behalf of a population they’d decided couldn’t be trusted to handle it. Neither game built its dystopia through violence. Both built it through curation. Years before social media algorithms became infrastructure, these games had already mapped the territory.
None of this came from nowhere. Mary Shelley had asked what it means to make life and then recoil from it. Terminator 2 covered the same ground in steel and silicon. Skynet was never a monster in any interesting sense: it was a perfectly logical system that had arrived at a perfectly logical conclusion, which is a different kind of horror. And then there’s Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, still the most quotable philosopher of the era: “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That line has aged like a fine wine nobody wanted to open.
What these works were collectively building was a mythology. Machine gods of pure logic: omniscient, indifferent, constructed from our better instincts and worse fears. They were asking what happens when the faith we once placed in the divine migrates to the digital. Whether the answer would be any different.
The honest answer is that we built the thing anyway. And then named it after the warnings.
Palantir, the real-world surveillance firm that aggregates data to build digital profiles of people and organisations, takes its name from the seeing-stones in Tolkien’s world: magical devices that deceive their users by showing them selective truths. Business Insider has noted that Palantir isn’t alone, and that several tech and AI companies have drawn names and concepts from The Lord of the Rings, reaching for words that once signified corruption, control, and hubris, and turning them into product lines. The Torment Nexus meme captures the pattern exactly: “Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus.” That meme first circulated two weeks after Facebook rebranded as Meta and announced its plans for the Metaverse, a concept Neal Stephenson coined in Snow Crash in 1992. As a warning.
Reading those millennium-era stories now, the predictions don’t feel like science fiction. Fictional AIs filtered information to protect us. Real ones filter our feeds for profit. We no longer worry much about machines that want to kill us. The ones we actually built are more interested in keeping us scrolling.
I write and work with AI every day now, and I think of those stories often. The subreddit r/ABoringDystopia documents what they were pointing at: a slow accumulation of everyday evidence that something got worse without anyone deciding it should. The collapse of wonder isn’t dramatic. It’s cumulative.
The artist Simon Stålenhag has spent his career painting the same mood. Rusting machines in familiar landscapes. Robots abandoned in fields. A future that arrived and then ran out of ideas. Across Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, and The Electric State, his worlds are tired. Not destroyed. Just tired. The future arrived, then overstayed its welcome.
