Molested by the Internet
A review of Cairo Smith's "Scenebux"
“I like to joke I was molested by the internet,” our hapless narrator states in Scenebux (New Ritual Press, 2025). He’s kind of kidding at this point in the story, but not really. Much later, after experiencing a lifetime’s worth of trauma, his love interest says that their parents, who let their generation wade through an unfiltered internet, have to be “absolved” for their ignorance. In just a few hundred pages, Scenebux goes from a mildly risqué joke to realizing that the internet is something akin to heavy sin.
Smith, the owner and editor of Futurist Letters, considers himself one of the big names of “New Wave” literature. New Wave (which is one of many different appellations for the same inchoate scene) is the catch-all term for a loose coalition of young (Millennial to Zoomer) writers working independently of the (thankfully dying) major publishing world based in New York. Some of these writers, such as Dan Baltic, are clearly aligned with right-wing politics. Others, like Smith and ARX-Han, are either liberals or leftists. New Wave elides easy definitions all except for one—every piece of New Wave fiction at some point confronts the problems associated with being too online.
Scenebux is no different. Mr. Smith’s latest novel is a jaunty, action-packed examination of one aimless smut peddler’s descent into a Landian world of hyper-racist eugenicists and their post-ironic sentinels. Think scenes of far-right theater goths speaking in AAVE while snorting coke in Oakland; think scenes of lush Laotian jungles torn apart by bullets meant to take out a very reclusive and very gay tech billionaire. Scenebux is the kind of gonzo book that can have such scenes and still make sense.
The novel’s protagonist is one Ben Etxina. Ben is an Idaho transplant of Basque extraction who, at the beginning of the novel, is in a disastrous relationship with a San Francisco girlboss. One night, while his girlfriend busies herself on the dancefloor with her favorite paramour, Ben talks about inevitable nuclear destruction with a gorgeous Vietnamese American named Lin Jiao. Lin plays nice with Ben’s ‘tistic rant, and before long, they exchange information.
Later, and we don’t know exactly how much later because time moves like a machine gun in Scenebux, with months passing between periods in the same paragraph, Ben attempts to return to his Fogtown apartment but is blocked by several middled aged bikers with classic BMW hogs. When Ben plays at being a tough guy, one of the bikers clocks him and humiliates Ben in front of the world. The wounded writer of bodice-ripping romances, who should be more concerned about his upcoming deadline, decides to get revenge on the bikers. When he later finds their BMWs parked outside of a known scene hangout in the city, Ben, with Lin’s help, pours sugar into the gas tank. This one action kicks-off a labyrinthine hell that will see Ben witness multiple deaths, endure multiple drug freakouts, get laid a few times, and then ultimately bear witness to an old evil reborn.
In short, via Lin, Ben gets invited into an exclusive art scene in Oakland and New York that is funded by a shadowy cabal of right-wing tech oligarchs. The scene, which is nothing more than a parody of Dimes Square, includes Neo-Nazi bikers, neo-reactionary philosophers who listen to Kendrick Lamar, drug-addled e-girls, and various oddball personalities, some of whom appeal to Ben. The truth is that Ben just wants to get laid in order to get even with the Leviathan (his philandering gf), and he particularly wants to sleep with Lin. But this goes awry when one of the bikers finds Ben and nearly lynches him in a Waymo. To protect himself and soothe things out in the scene, Lin suggests that Ben fly to a private island near Guam where a former member of T4 (the mysterious group supposedly funding the scene) can be contacted to carry out a mediation.
It is at this point where Scenebux goes completely haywire. Up to this point, Ben has been portrayed as a perennial fuck up—a cuck in his personal life and a failed writer in his professional one. Yet, as soon as he runs afoul of some no-name biker gang, Ben becomes a jetsetter who takes endless flights. For the remainder of the novel, Ben will find himself flying to or staying in the following countries: Guam, The Netherlands, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Armenia, Thailand, Laos, and several more. All of this travel is done to get ahead of unseen enemies, for, after Max Pacifica (the former T4 guy who Ben sought for mediation) winds up dying in a swimming accident, Ben has to go on the run. His first companion is a weird Manhattan Jewess named Jacaranda Rosenbaum-Josselewicz, alias “Robot.” Robot takes Ben to Amsterdam, where they have a threesome with a German prostitute, and then she briefly has him join an anti-AI terror group right before they carry out an attack in Berlin. After finally having sex with Robot back in New York, Ben decides to meet with the head of T4 at his residence in Dubai. Gabe Findhom, who resembles Erik Prince, does Ben dirty by planting drugs on him. This in turn forces Ben to escape to Israel, then Laos, where he shelters with Mac Amoolish, the former second-in-command at T4. This brief moment of bucolic safety ends when Vietnamese gunmen shoot up the place, and Ben and a U.S. intelligence operative have to run back to San Francisco.
All of this sordid insanity leads up to one final reveal outside of the city. Lin invites Ben to one more party, and after being kidnapped by Odinists, Ben is taken to the inner sanctum of Carl Froht—the true kingpin and supplier of scenebux. With a proud NSDAP banner displayed behind him, Froht spells out to Ben that the whole point of funding right-wing artists is to cultivate power, influence, and DNA for a eugenics program designed to sterilize unwanted haplogroups. Froht and Lin ask Ben a very simple question: is he a friend to their ideals, or an enemy? Ben decides to save his skin by playing along, but he never signs on with the new Aktion T4 program. Lin knows this, and after sleeping with him only to acquire his seed, she tells Ben to scram so that she can go to Mass and atone for her multiple sins.
Scenebux is many things, but it is primarily a comedic send-up of the online right. However, unlike Baltic’s NUTCRANKR, Smith is clearly uneasy with right-wing thought and does not like the fact that the cordon sanitaire in the U.S. has been broken by a million spergy fascists fresh from 4chan. Scenebux is similarly a center-left takedown of Peter Thiel (ever heard of “Thielbux”?) and the whole cavalcade of tech-bro influencers who have facilitated the hard-right turn in American politics and culture.
Yet, as several passages make clear, Smith is not didactic, and Ben is far from a hero. Ben says no-no words; he mocks libs and frankly has no ability to discern a good situation from a bad one. He is a stumblebum idiot like the rest of us who only gets an attack of conscience after getting all the sex and sleaze he’s been lusting after since the Leviathan first slept with one of her lawyer friends. Indeed, one of the best scenes in the novel is when Lin, who outs herself as the right-wing daughter of dispossessed South Vietnamese immigrants, reveals to Ben that he has no actual philosophy and merely parrots “Nazis = bad” because his mind has yet to be detached from the hive.
“…I’ve done enough work on my soul to hold my own moral frame in the face of opposition, which you would as well if you didn’t just soak up the unthinking mania of the masses of your time like a sponge.”
An unthinking sponge is kind of what Ben is until the very end, and even in his moment of clarity, his designs are aborted. Scenebux plays the comedy all the way until the end, and then it becomes a tragedy. Yes, it’s a highly political book. Yes, it clearly displays a distaste for all things right-wing (although the only faction of the right shown is the extreme side). But, above all of these themes, is the resounding fact that Scenebux is about the degenerating influence of the internet. At one point in this novel, Ben comes to realize that there is no world outside of the internet (“there is no more grass left to touch,” as I once wrote). All of us, regardless of our politics, have in some way been molested by the hideous Golem called the internet. There’s no escaping this hyperreality, and Scenebux plays with this uncomfortable fact brilliantly.
Maybe New Ritual Press have published Scenebux to skirt any allegations of Thiel funding. Then again, maybe they published it just because it’s a damn entertaining book. Either way, all literate people (especially porn-brained, irony-addled internet autists) should applaud that something so timely and absurd is available for consumption.