The Torment Nexus

Building the Panopticon: The doorbell camera version

If you watched the Super Bowl last weekend and are either located in the United States or have access to the American commercials, you might have seen a…

Feb 12 • Mathew Ingram

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What a social network for bots can tell us about AI

As usual, the past week or so has been filled with the usual insanity on the part of Homeland Security, who keep finding new ways to surveill and harass…

Feb 5 • Mathew Ingram

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January 2026

Social media and teen mental health: There is no smoking gun

As I wrote in a previous edition of Torment Nexus, the Australian law banning kids under 16 from using social media is the first of its kind, but it was…

Jan 29 • Mathew Ingram

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Why blogging is better than social media

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus called “The social web is dying.

Jan 22 • Mathew Ingram

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Surveillance: It was already bad and it's getting worse

Last March — which feels like a hundred years ago now — I wrote a post titled “Be careful what you post on social media: They are listening,” in which I…

Jan 15 • Mathew Ingram

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What I would say to the Oxford Union about social media

I got an unusual email the other day from someone representing the Oxford Union, a fairly prestigious student-run debating society based (not…

Jan 8 • Mathew Ingram

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December 2025

We should help teens with social media not ban them from it

Australia recently became the first country in the world to ban kids under 16 from using social media — the result of a law that was passed last year…

Dec 18, 2025 • Mathew Ingram

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The social web is dying. Is that a good thing?

If you spend much time wandering around what we used to call the social web — and by that I mean primarily the large social apps and platforms like…

Dec 11, 2025 • Mathew Ingram

Self-driving cars are an unambiguous social good

Before we get started, let’s agree that Elon Musk’s promises about full self-driving on the Tesla have been figments of his ketamine-addled imagination…

Dec 4, 2025 • Mathew Ingram

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November 2025

What did Mark Zuckerberg know and when did he know it?

My last Torment Nexus piece was about how weak the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta was, weak enough that it was thrown out by a federal court judge…

Nov 27, 2025 • Mathew Ingram

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The Meta antitrust case started out weak and got worse

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Meta was dismissed in its entirety on February 18th by Judge James Boasberg of the District Court…

Nov 20, 2025 • Mathew Ingram

The Internet Archive should be protected not attacked

In a recent edition of The Torment Nexus, I wrote about Wikipedia, which I argued was one of the best things the internet ever created (or that we all…

Nov 13, 2025 • Mathew Ingram

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