About 12 years ago I was travelling through Luton Airport in the UK. Then, as now, the security checkpoint served as a temple to human stupidity. Yet in an effort to change the leopard’s spots, airport management had installed something new: life-size holograms reciting instructions about taking laptops out of cases, removing liquids, not doing terrorism, etc. For a moment, I was elated: Finally, the science-fiction stories of my youth have come to pass! We are living in the technofuture I was promised! But the elation didn’t last long. Oh shit, that means the dystopia has started, and it only gets worse from here.
Admittedly I wasn’t in the best state of mind. Rather stupidly, I had taken a shedload of MDMA a couple of nights before. (I was trying to impress a girl, what can I say?) Now I was dealing with the crippling comedown. The last thing I needed was Bladerunner becoming lived reality. So I stared out of a window to Paris, drinking too much black coffee, and trying not to panic about our collective impending doom.
After a few days my serotonin levels returned to normal. And in the end, the talking holograms didn’t last long. (Let’s be honest they weren’t even real holograms, just daft-shaped screens.) But as you may have noticed, technology didn’t stay put, let alone retreat. It kept coming. More and more, year after year.
A decade ago, the idea that people would have AI girlfriends, and develop forms of psychosis accordingly, was the stuff of literal Hollywood sci-fi Now it’s just…a thing. Until recently, people only worried that the ubiquity of online pornography would mess up real world sexual relations. Which it did. But what it also did was mess up the minds of millions of young men, who now identify as sexually orientated towards porn itself, with actual flesh humans largely removed from the equation. Once, the idea that Donald Trump could be American president was just an absurdist Simpsons punch line. Now he has been elected (twice), in large part due to his ability to harness the fleeting attention of apes addicted to little black rectangles that they cannot bear to be without. Little black rectangles that make a handful of billionaires richer every day…who then use their billions to trample Western democracy into the dirt. Did someone say dystopia?
It is true that my drug-addled mind was overreacting that day in Luton Airport. But I wasn’t completely, wrong was I? We aren’t in Kansas anymore. We haven’t been for some time. And unlike Dorothy, for us there is no going back.
Which raises a question: what, if anything, can anybody possibly say about this? This fast-moving, ever-evolving, constantly in-your-face upending of everything, everywhere, all the time. Or rather, what can anybody say about it beyond the boring (because so utterly ubiquitous) moral screeching of those who, as evinced by their screeching, don’t actually have anything to say?
Traditionally, the place one went to look for good answers to This Kind of Question was literature. And in the past, it has served us remarkably well. (Just ask Yossarian.) But here we seem to have a problem. Literature, at least according to the internet, is dead. If you spend too much time on Substack (and I do), you will have repeatedly been told that 1) major publishers don’t publish books by men anymore, in part because 2) men don’t buy novels anymore, which is the reason why 3) the major publishers only publish smut stories about sexy monsters as bought by women. That this is where the money is; do the math.
Is this a true account of the publishing world? Honestly, I have no idea. But what I do know is that Cairo Smith is a man, he writes novels, and he has written one about the internet. Or rather, what the internet has done to his generation. It is called Scenebux. And my God, it is good. Reports of the death of literature have been greatly exaggerated (although it is perhaps no accident that one has to go to New Ritual Press, a minor American outfit, outside the near monopoly of the “Big Five”, to find out why.)
So, what are scenebux? Pronounced: scene-bucks. That’s what narrator-protagonist Ben Etxina (Idaho Basque; great gametes) sets out to discover. Not because he particularly wants to, but because he has to. Sure, it’s partly his fault that he has to. But he is under a lot of stress, ok? Stress that is practically baked-in for his generation. And not just because of the drugs. But because he’s a “cusper”. Born in 2000, and thus “stuck between Lehman-traumatized Millennial dorks and algo-fried pornbrain Zoomer illiterates.”
He's also “network sober”, having determined that the internet was rotting him from the inside out and the only solution was total detox. (If you are fortunate enough to still think that a gooner is simply somebody who supports Arsenal Football Club, then either be grateful in your ignorance, or careful what you Google.) Hence no phone, no laptop, no nothing. Or at least, he tries. But how does a man get paid going analogue in a digital economy? By writing smut, of course, for that shrinking demographic of women who still buy books. Melrose Milan is the nom de plume, telling tales “about Mary Sues of middle-aged Southern and Midwestern white women getting fucked by trainers and billionaires and werewolves and minotaurs and shit”.
Oh yes, because this book is funny. Like, really funny. Or at least it will be if (like me) you have spent too much time online in the past 20 years, and hence get enough of the references. That constantly come at you, 20 per page, every page, without warning, without a break, without explanation. (Memes as literature? In more ways than one.) Here’s a representative sample:
“The Basilisk, for its part, is a theoretical evil superintelligence bent on subjugating humanity. I won’t belabor the details, but the general goal of the syndicate is to stop it from being created. It’s not exactly Luddism. It’s more like John Connorism if there was no terminator and John was just a homeless crackhead. Maybe it’s all true. Who am I to say? If you want to go deeper down this rabbit hole, look up the Zizians. These people are all in league.”
Like I say, you probably have to be a bit too online to really understand all that – although I imagine it’s no problem for the ACX readership. (We are both audience and target, although by no means the only ones). Indeed, there is a real danger that the book becomes practically illegible in 10 years, precisely because of the phenomenon it is grappling with. That in the age of the internet everything just moves too fast, is constantly replaced and constantly at risk of being forgotten, such that one has to be present in 2026, right up at the coalface, to even understand the references required to satirise the coalface. But assuming that historians still exist in the future, diligently trying to work out what the hell even happened back then, Scenebux will prove an invaluable source.
But for those of us stuck reading now, it offers up the best kind of satire: the kind with intelligent bite. At one level it’s a dark comedy caper following a tried and tested formula: ordinary man gets caught up in wider drama, that he has no desire to be part of, but which he must keep going with, as the stakes are constantly raised, just to stay alive. Ben travels around the globe – Guam, Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, Dubai, Laos – before ending up right back where he started, in San Francisco. (Of course in San Francisco.) But what makes this tried and tested formula anything but trite, anything but done-before, is that never previously has it been seen through the eyes of Gen Z.
The generation that grew up as internet natives – and hence had to learn the hard way that “the internet is alive and evil”. Can you blame them if they seem weird, messed up? “As kids, we were sneaking through the digital trapdoor to get our mental assholes widened nightly by chanposting pedos. Even worse, we spent our horniest years under lockdown, denied any glimmer of the ‘college life’ they sold us in their movies.” Hell, you can’t even blame the parents. As Ben’s love-interest (absolutely not the right words) Lin Jiao (Vietnamese-American; perfect NorCal accent; particular interest in gametes) tells him: “They didn’t know what they were doing…We have to let them be absolved.”
So is that, like, the politics of Scenebux? Because as you know, in the 21st century nothing can just be art. Ambiguity is not permitted. Everything has to take an explicit political stand. And if it’s going to be allowed into the cultural mainstream, that political stand sure as hell better be progressive.
Here’s the thing though. A left-right political binary developed in an age of economic class identity, Cold War antagonisms, and gate-kept media, does not compute when all those things, and more, no longer apply. If Scenebux has a political message, it’s that the current political message-senders are broken and need to fuck off. Hence Ben gleefully flips the bird to the “fat goth with a nose ring and bangs” putting him on “ocular probation” in a bookstore “dedicated to centering black bodies and nonbinary joy”. But he also has no time for self-described Gigafascists, who are really “gay theater kids obsessed with fake pagan revanchism” who would otherwise “just be statists”.
How is it that Ben can see through the bullshit on both sides? Well, because for a generation raised on the Internet, “extremist ideas…now seem almost banal in their ubiquity. You may not run into Nazbols, fourth-trimester abortionists, Punic nationalists, or furrymaxxing luxury communists at family dinner, but you will definitely see them on the tubes, riding the Al Gore rhythms. At a certain point you just get used to it.” After all, “as the internet was widening the underage assholes of our minds, it was also widening the Overton window”. Nothing really shocks anymore, because performance bullshit is inherently weak. And there is just so much performance, so much bullshit.
Which is not to say that the appropriate response is an apathetic relativism, let alone some glib nihilism. The internet offers up plenty of that, but Ben knows a true baddie when he sees one. Not the kind on point, on OnlyFans. The kind who is not LARPing, is fully California-enabled, and really is out to get you. I will say no more, because I refuse to ruin a great story. Read it for yourself. All I will say is that Scenebux is about as far from moralising as it is possible to be – but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to tell us. Quite the opposite.
One last thing. It is common to hear that AI will make the creative arts redundant. Apparently people prefer AI poems to those written by humans. Spotify is awash with robot-shat audio slop. One of the most prolific freelance journalists of the last two years has been revealed as…ChatGPT. Is the novel thus doomed to go the way of the dodo? I think not. Cairo Smith has shown not only that the novel lives, but that an LLM cannot, ever, do this. Only a human can. So keep an eye on this one. He is going to do big things. Unless the literal Nazis get him first.