Scenebux

by Cairo Smith

Part noir, part counterculture fever dream, all Cairo Smith. Neo-Luddite Ben Etxina travels the globe in a drug-addled delirium, tracing the threads at the heart of a growing vibe shift.

In this rapid-fire tech-weird picaresque, Cairo Smith paints a searing and wry portrait of the mid-2020s, an era careening at high speed toward an uncertain future.

Ben Etxina is a software engineer who can't bear to look at a screen. When he crosses a shady German motorcycle club in downtown San Francisco, he ends up thrown into a mess of underground parties and venture funds rumored to connect to a certain neoreactionary billionaire. A mysterious Pacific island, Vietnamese Catholic femme fatale, and anti-AI terrorist sect all spell deeper trouble for the jet-setting sensitive young man.

Undeniably at the head of the New Wave, Smith has penned his punchiest and most incisive novel yet.

"The writing is certainly accomplished, brilliant even, in its casual utilization of funny idioms without breaking the pace or feel of the prose." —Toxic Brodude

"A breezy, twisty turny /lit/ novel." —Phil Rot

"Great dialogue, voice, cleverness and inventiveness abound. He’s honing his already-formidable skills at storytelling." —Alexander Sorondo

"All literate people (especially porn-brained, irony-addled internet autists) should applaud that something so timely and absurd is available for consumption." —Arbogast

"Scenebux, like Neuromancer, is an exciting neo-noir thriller from start to finish. I read it on a Sunday bombed out on cancer meds, and I had a blast." —Paul Beauhart

192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 6, 2025

About the author

Cairo Smith is a screenwriter, director, and author living in Los Angeles. He writes stories of adventure and esoteric worlds, and dreams of a dynamic, vital future. You can follow his work via his online publication, Futurist Letters, and find him on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd.

Reviews

[meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

fun read but it had a very negligible effect on my life… nice artefact of online space

[H K · Rating 1 out of 5]

I slogged my way through "Scenebux." Man, what a labor of hate that was. I don't think I've read anything as soulless and shallow since my last venture onto Reddit. The entire book is a series of disjointed non sequiturs about online culture with no greater plot than irony for irony's sake. It's certainly a product of its time, written by an imagination captured by the lifeless apparatus that produced it.

[Paul Beauheart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first found out about New Ritual Press by way of Dan Baltic. I’ve followed him on Twitter during the more edgy political days and most recently for his hilarious hornypoasting about zoomettes on Substack. Searching out younger writers in our current literary malaise, I was pleasantly surprised to see an entire writeup from Rolling Stone on New Ritual Press in July 2025, which I encourage you to peruse. Categorized by the magazine as “anti-woke,” I think that does a disservice to New Ritual Press, simply placing them into a sort of political ghetto. It would be more accurate to describe them as post- whatever way you want to define the last five years. There’s some much-needed new talent emerging after years of a dead literary fiction scene categorized by academic blowhards and racial grievances.
What comes next now that everyone hates following the ridiculous outrage cycle? Cairo Smith’s Scenebux makes an excellent attempt at satirizing the current mood of being a young person used and abused by the malevolent forces of mainstream and online culture. He is not afraid to mock the current crop of elites, whether they be obnoxious girl bosses, cantankerous liberals whining about 2020 issues, or weirdo neo-reactionary tech magnates with Hitler memorabilia.
The book is not some silly, navel-gazing autofic tripe written from the bowels of “Dimes Square.” Praise God, even an uncool old like myself can relate to this. It’s a real novel with an exciting cast of characters. The book is even edited! The main character, Ben Etxina, is a techbro with a smut writer side hustle who is forced into a cataclysmic chain of events since he wants to impress a good-looking woman of Vietnamese descent. It’s nice to see that the younger generation hasn’t become total eunuchs yet. What follows is a whirlwind tour through the secretive elite gatherings of Silicon Valley, an island in the South Pacific, a meetup with group of dorky hackers in Berlin, gangsters in Laos, and back to the good old USA.
Other reviews of Scenebux have criticized Cairo Smith’s work for being too “terminally online.” I would respectfully disagree and say that the numerous online references made in the novel (e.g. the chad vs. virgin meme, hyper-Nietzschean larpers, a federal agent literally named “Glowee,” and of course the ever-persistent “gamer word”), are all part of the mainstream now that people raised by the internet have come of age. As Cairo Smith states early on in the novel, his generation was molested by the internet. There are no “normies” anymore like in 2009. Cairo Smith seeks a way out of this endless morass in our post-political landscape where the future is unclear. He tears down the false idols that our tech elite have created. The prophecy of Isaiah in the Old Testament comes to mind: Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.
Cairo Smith has mentioned on his podcast that he is a fan of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, and there are a number of parallels for the protagonist in Scenebux: the crippled techie, awkward encounters with the opposite sex, and constantly being in situations that are impossible to deal with. But most importantly Scenebux, like Neuromancer, is an exciting neo-noir thriller from start to finish. I read it on a Sunday bombed out on cancer meds, and I had a blast. 5 stars!

[Corporate Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scenebux is well done, fun and very cool. An intelligent page-turner. I was genuinely looking forward to each reading session. I'm dealing with a newborn at the moment and found myself grabbing a few extra pages at very odd hours in the night.

It is sort of a cyberpunk adventure, that is not based in the future. It reminds of Ryu Murakami's Coin Locker Babies, in that sense. It feels futuristic because it sits on the edge of the present. The book flows from one dramatic scene to another and there is a lot of action. But the set pieces never feel forced. Each scene arises organically, driven by the characters or the plot points.

The plot itself is strikingly original. A conspiratorial, tech-thriller that the main character stumbles into. Thematically it loiters at the crossroads of cutting edge tech, nu-right politics and zoomer masculinity. These things are central to the events and characters, but the book is never preachy. It explores many edgy questions and leaves you thinking deeply, while none the wiser as to Smith's own political/cultural views.

The characters are larger that life but complex and within the envelope of believability, as a thriller cast should be. Nobody is totally good or bad. Everyone is anti-villain or anti-hero.

Smith states in the afterword that the book is very much within the Zeitgeist and may be unintelligible to later readers. I don't think this is totally true. Obviously part of the fun is figuring out who the real life equivalents of the cast are. But I think the book would fundamentally make sense to someone not on X or in the future, it's just some of the jokes will be invisible (I'm sure I didn't spot them all myself).

Overall, pretty much a perfect thriller and it just shows how ridiculous the quality of indie fiction is.

[Andrew Ballard · Rating 5 out of 5]

This pulp-meets-gozo novel is equal parts hysterically funny and deeply thrilling. This should be required reading for every “Lehman-traumatized Millennial dork and algo-fried pornbrain zoomer illiterate.”

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cairo Smith isn’t dissecting the internet age; he’s living it.