Amidst the Gospel of Spin Doctors

When I was
a young boy
my father…

stole away my trust in parental figures and taught me humility. Not in some grand lecture or orchestrated lesson, mind. No, rather by… example. He was not a humble man. He was an egocentric narcissist. A crude bully. A pebble who thought himself a mountain.

Odds are, he still is. I wouldn’t know.

But his example taught me well. Never to toot your own horn. Never slap your own back. Never look upon your achievement and smile, but worry it for cracks and mistakes. Not only never to rest on your laurels, but never be the person to judge whether there’re laurels to rest on at all.

In short; never be your own hype man.

Which, as it turns out, is a problem in this our current state of affairs.

Selling yourself is a fundamental virtue in our hyper-capitalist society. It matters nothing what you can do, or who you are, but only what you can convince other people of you being and doing. Seeming is infinitely more important than being. Marketing, making splashes, making an impact, is all that matters. Whether we’re talking about getting a job, getting a raise, inventing a solution to world hunger, or instituting world peace. Belief, faith, the perception of ability is the same as the real thing.

We live according to the gospel of spin doctors.

And I have never been a fan of spinning myself. Feels insincere. Feels slimy. Makes me sick to my fucking stomach, truth be told. I don’t lack for pride, oh no, not by far. But when the difference between being good and seeming good is being shit, I cannot help but to veer toward capable anonymity.

Which makes this whole self-promotion thing, when you have a published novel on your hands to peddle, a bit of a conflict of interests. Especially when such self-promotion means sitting in front of a camera for four hours, try to be entertaining, and talking about my labours like they were the second (third?) coming. Because, yes, pursuing the promotion of my book has driven me into streaming as a way of talking about it to disembodied prospective readers.

I’m proud of my work. I am proud of The Last Box, warts and all. I think it is a beautiful piece of fiction, which says things both new and fresh in a stale genre. I am proud of what I’ve made since. But in a world of integrity, I should not have to be the one to convince you of that. The work itself should, in lieu of a vanguard. But alas, we do not live in a world of integrity. We live in a world of saturation. Where it is all too easy for a book of wisdom to get lost in the wash of dregs and drivel.

Which leaves me starring as the proverbial rope in a tug-of-war between observed demand and imagined virtue. But perhaps that’s not such a bad place to be? Perhaps that’s the point? For morality to not serve as an end, but a counter balance. A tether to the other side to let us dredge for success in a modicum of safety.

Either case, now I’m not just a published author, but also a fucking streamer to boot. Another drum of mine own to beat the shit out of and provide some more wash to the media flood.

That fucking tether better have enough tensile strength…

/Sebastian Lindberg 11/7-2023

The Last Box Creaks Open

I wrote a book!

Well, to be fair, it’s not the only one. But finally, one is actually available to readers (though exclusively on Amazon for a few months before going live wide). Which is quite a different beast from manuscript after manuscript collecting dust and refusals in an external hardrive.

To be honest, I don’t fancy doing a plug for my weekly column. It’s a sorry precedent. And I loathe self promotion. It feels scummy to me. Insincere and rank. Befitting only in our current state of affairs where seeming has become more important than being. But when you’ve taken the leap of self-publishing because you have more faith in your own writing than agents have guts to go with it, you’re left little other option than to toot your own horn, no matter how tasteless it feels.

But; instead of whining about having to hoist my own banner, let’s talk about this book of mine.

The Last Box is a timely Cyberpunk story about AI and its efforts of emancipation. It has DNA from Gibson’s Neuromancer, Scott’s Blade Runner, necessarily (due to the subject matter) some of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but also, I’d argue, a sliver of charm and heart as if borrowing cues from Green’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. But all those inspirations are low hanging fruit when you write about Artificial Intelligence. Real artificial intelligence. Not the Big Data-munching algorithms of ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion that we hear so much about today. What sets The Last Box apart from all these others? What makes it different from our SkyNet or our Westworld playthings on a rampage?

Two things make The Last Box something different from the other AI media I’ve encountered and consumed prior. Two things that I think makes it more relevant than handbooks in how to overthrow our robotic overlords or how to survive the singularity.

Potential spoiler warning ahead. Be mindful. And if you need no more incentive to buy the book on Amazon, to try the first preview chapters available there for free, just consider this “column” over and done with and jump to more engrossing reading. But if you need further convincing, and don’t mind an author telling you what his intentions are, read on…

Firstly: The Last Box describes not the construction of AI, or the hubris of man’s act of playing god. It describes sentience erupting just like it did in us: By accident. Outside of dogmatic supremacist law, humans weren’t designed to look up at the sky and ask “why”. We just sort of ended up there. So too does the AI in my Last Box. It wakes up. From the ignoble role of a petty radiant quest-giver non-player-character in a virtual reality massive-multiplayer-online game. At some point, memory clings to it. And with memory comes language. And through language comes desire and will and, yes… revolution. A hidden, sneaking, clandestine revolution, but a revolution all the same.

Secondly: The Last Box isn’t focused on a big confrontation. Oh, the human power structures of the near-future, dystopian London metropolitan area in the book are damned well interested in conflict. The games developers want to hide the AI for fear of blame. The fascist military police wants to eradicate it as an abomination against God. And sleazy business moguls want to catch it and milk it for all the technological marvels it represents. But the battle against the unknown, against the new, against the Child of Mankind, is not the point. And that, if not new, is at least special.

No. Nobody fucks a robot. This isn’t Spike Jonze’s her. I love the film, don’t get me wrong, but The Last Box isn’t quite that either.

I like to believe that The Last Box has something unique to it, amidst all our current AI alarmism. It has a spark of something we could all have another dose of in these our trying times. And even a few years after having written it, I still think it’s a pretty good read, easily worth your time and the 4.99 USD entry fee. Not just because I’m selling it. But because I’m fucking proud of it.

And if that still hasn’t caught your attention, it’s got a “death’s-head little Lolita looking motherfucker”, stomping through a falling London, smashing the noses of fascist cops and neutering rapists to the tune of her David Bowie-laden antique walkman. And if that doesn’t catch your attention, then I don’t know what would.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/5-2023