Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works — an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.”
The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.1
Scenebux is a short, snappy novella about a young underemployed writer named Ben Extina who embarks on a modern Pynchonesque tour of “the scene,” or the contemporary online ecosystem of niche intellectual figures. This landscape is primarily focused on a lively anatomical slice of a particular right-coded intellectual subculture backed by A Certain Silicon Valley Oligarch, but isn’t fixated on a single persona or figure — the novella’s center is its rapid momentum and flurry of events, scene changes, and characters.
In this respect, Scenebux isn’t quite situated as an internet novel since the online intellectuals that Smith is referencing are corporeal characters that the protagonist meets in real life. Here the novel encompasses a broader effort to recapture the dynamic, gonzo-style hijinks of 20th-century protagonists who experienced the world through acts of human agency rather than the graphical user interface of a screen or the surprisingly passive creative-class jobs that seem to dominate book jacket summaries these days.
Smith is at his best when he seizes onto a certain manic Zoomer energy in the first chapter of the book: a tightly-packed, high-energy introduction to our narrator through rapid-fire observational comedy in a decidedly contemporary voice I haven’t encountered among other writers of his generation. Here the book starts off promisingly, and this opening sequence calls to mind Jay McInerney’s breezy Bright Lights, Big City, which captured a certain movement and sense of motion that sustained it throughout. At its best, Smith’s voice-driven prose draws you into a very particular stream-of-Zoomer-consciousness:
I’m a cusper, twenty-five years old in 2025, stuck between Lehman-traumatized Millennial dorks and algo-fried pornbrain Zoomer illiterates. In a way, I got the worst of both, an early childhood on a lawless web rawer and sicker than anything we’ve got today. I like to joke I was molested by the internet. I really think I was. That’s why I quit.
Scenebux is an interesting book and Smith is categorically different from most young indie male writers who typically produce literary fiction with varying levels of quality. He writes quickly and prodigiously, with a rapidly-growing oeuvre that spans literary works, genre books, and even films and screenplays.
What most prominently separates Smith from other writers in this grouping is a lack of dourness. The failure mode of the outsider male novelist lies in the over-reliance on nihilistic repetition: many young male writers without the backing of the professional-MFA-publishing complex over-anchor on a very particular form of grimdark-sex-writing — a circular regurgitation of the sex-addicted male with accompanying existential angst, which has long become tiresome.
The problem with these writers, in contrast to Smith, is an excessive heaviness to their work, insufficiently leavened by humor and left unbalanced as a result. Smith’s repertoire has a wider breadth and is decidedly lighter and, in the case of Scenebux, driven by a persistent wit.
The plot of Scenebux follows the sort of classical madcap adventures of the typical protagonist in a Pynchonesque literary comedy — there is, nominally, a sequence of events here that is initiated by Ben’s altercation with some bikers, but the book rapidly loses momentum after the first chapter. Unlike the persistent narrative thrust of McInerney’s NYC-based novel — the spiritual sister of this book, in my view — Scenebux feels like a chronology of events sequenced together to create a carousel-like effect of rotating the reader through a litany of online/IRL subcultures and their associated characters.
Here the humor lands somewhat inconsistently — the jokes are sometimes impactful, and other times not — but Ben’s internal state remains largely even throughout. Detached irony is perhaps the appropriate tonal voice for the protagonist in a lighthearted literary comedy, but I was left wanting something more from the character of Ben Extina.
It’s not that the execution here is at any point bad, it’s just that a novel reliant on a steady stream of humor-driven narrative beats is exceedingly difficult to execute. There are indeed quite a few gems here, but they’re not tightly packed enough to sustain deep interest in the story, even one of its relatively short length.
But when Smith is clever, he’s clever — and his short, intellectual brand of humor reminds me of Tony Tulathimutte: “On the tenth picture I see the biker who decked me holding a PBR. He looks like a fat Ryan Gosling with eyes a little too close together, like he’s got some kind of chromosome abundance.”
The meat of Scenebux follows a fairly clear structure: there are some hijinks, an interesting character (or two) representative of a particular online/IRL subculture gets introduced, Ben injects these events with a steady stream of internal commentary, and another event rotates the carousel into the next subculture.
Captured are a variety of contemporary intellectual spheres, including various forms of technofeudalism, national-security suits, BAPtist or BAP-adjacent American Dynamism entrepreneurs, EA-Butlerian-Jihad terrorists, and peptide addicts.
The difficulty with each of these sections is a progressive loss of narrative momentum tied to the lack of stakes for Ben as the primary character — his ironic detachment makes it hard to sustain interest in the plot and feels like an excuse to keep rotating the carousel.
That said, there are moments of brilliance throughout these middle sections where Smith’s talent shines through and he captures pearls of interesting ideas into self-contained micro-capsules: a character describing his cuneiform-trained LLM, or the morbid curiosity of an Asian woman explaining why she’s joined a cult of genocidal white supremacists.
Indeed, Smith’s strengths as a writer sometimes feel anchored to the capsular — to short, clever exchanges of dialogue that invert or upend conventional framings or assumption-sets:
“I don’t read a lot of Nazis,” I gripe.
“There were no Nazis in 1922,” she hits back. “You would probably call a Platonist a Nazi. You would probably call your grandparents Nazis. If you take the positions of a failed Central European political party and define yourself entirely in the inverse you are still letting them build your frame of morality, which ironically validates their beliefs as an infallible oracle of goodness, through anti-goodness. You end up opposing things like animal rights.”
Scenebux — if I may partially spoil it for you — ends with an abrupt shift into the more somber and serious, departing from the madcap tone of the first 90 percent of the novel. The critique of the millennial writer is that they have often turned to irony-poisoned detachment as a redoubt from sincerity and a retreat into moral relativism. By contrast, Scenebux concludes with a clear moral thesis, ultimately repudiating the ethnosupremacism of the new American right and the self-ratcheting genocidal logic of racialism taken to its extreme.
Given his rate of output and ability to intermittently reach some literary high notes, it’s tempting to speculate that Smith merely needed to take longer to write this novella — to redraft it a couple more times and to let it cook.
But given the transient nature of the world he wanted to capture — which is already dissolving only six months later — I can’t quite blame him for taking the literary equivalent of a photograph, and for giving us a map to help future readers situate it.
ARX-HAN is the author of the novel Incel and writes the Substack newsletter DECENTRALIZED FICTION.
I myself noticed perhaps 10 to 20 percent — but sadly couldn’t locate the reference to me, specifically!
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Fun to see ARX-HAN write a book review!
This book sounds interesting. I wouldnt grapple with contemporary language, but i see now how important it is.