Interviewing Mario Coelho

Hellooo!

Late last year I read Unto The Godless What Little Remains by Mario Coelho - link at https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2022/12/14/unto-the-godless-what-little-remains-by-mario-coelho it’s a refreshing dose of European cyberpunk with things to say about social media; tech companies and where we may be going. I was delighted to get the chance to ask Mario sone questions for the blog!

- Hey, thanks for inviting me. I love talking about myself.

How would you tempt people to read Unto the Godless What Little Remains?

- Disregarding the fact that they’d be supporting the underrepresented demographic of extremely handsome men, I believe Unto the Godless What Little Remains will scratch an itch a lot of people don’t even know they have. It’s fundamentally a story about our relationship with the internet. How we’re all addicted to our phones, how human connection is being commodified by mega corporations via algorithms made of our behavioural data. And it’s about how nobody really cares about any of this because we’ve been tricked into thinking this is our own fault.

It’s social sci-fi/cyberpunk for our generation: terminally online and always a little bit tired and anxious. I wrote it from the heart and with minimal chemical aid.

And here’s a more material synopsis: Unto the Godless What Little Remains is the story of a massive loser addicted to injecting himself with temporary personalities, while being romantically stalked by the AI controlling the whole internet. The story also involves everybody’s nudes getting leaked online all at once.

Why did AIs and artificial personas form the basis for this story?

- Let’s pretend it was a conscious thematic decision, so I can sound smart: artificial personas represent the parts of our identity we buy instead of build. Nobody should get emotionally attached to a mobile operating system or a sneaker brand or a multi-billion-dollar intellectual property. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve witnessed two complete strangers spend a whole afternoon arguing with each other on Reddit because one is a fan of the MCU and the other has good taste. It’s scary how we’ve let things designed by mega corps dictate how we view each other, and ourselves.

As for AI, I think most people are yet to grasp the influence it already has in our society, even in its current nascent state. Moore’s Law might not be as immutable as tech bros promised, but the number of transistors on silicon is still growing fast, which means our smartphones are ever more powerful machines, connected to other more powerful machines that house ultra-powerful AI. Lots of power here. Lots of power at the service of companies who really love collecting your data. And sometimes your data is indeed put to good use. Allow your phone to look at enough pictures of your poop and one day you’ll have a one-dollar medical app capable of analysing every shade of it, and tell you if you should get screened for colon cancer or just cut down on the beet juice.

Most times, however, your data will just be collected and sold by Zuckerberg-type dweebs and used by Steve Bannon-type molluscs to manipulate you. Or fed to AI tools like ChatGPTand Midjourney. Because why not devalue and automate art, too? Corporations love not paying creators, and AI tools don’t unionise.

(As a side note, one of the scary things AI is making possibleis perfect Deep Fakes. People smarter than me are already talking about the potential for next-level disinformation here, so I’ll mention a more niche worry of mine: Deep Nudes. Soon, all you’ll need to nudify or even pornify somebody is a photo downloaded off Instagram and an internet connection. If this seems like a minor issue to you, then consider the double meaning of minor.)

All that said, I’m not a luddite, I swear. I think that, fundamentally, tech is a huge boon for society and we haven’t even scratched the surface of its benefits. But I also think our current relationship with the internet is co-dependent at best, and utterly destructive at worst. I wish we could back to the late 90s/early 2000s, when the internet was a wacky place full of badly designed websites and free of corporate interference. I miss chat rooms. I miss the blogosphere. I miss how going to the internet was a conscious decision. We used to live most of our lives offline.

I know I’m sounding like an old man yelling at the Cloud, but that’s about it: I wrote about AI because it already dominates a good part of our lives. And I wrote the artificial personas as a straightforward – if accidental – metaphor about how we’re butchering what makes us human to the whim of inhuman tech corporations, and in the process turning into intolerant, impatient, insecure twats.

This tale also covers the darker side of social media – with recent events at a certain social media site how closer do you think we’ve got to your future?

- I guess my rambling above already touched on this somewhat, but I don’t think the future in Unto the Godless What Little Remains is that more nefarious than what we currently have. Or maybe I just hid the gritty parts behind pretty prose and sexy drama.

Here’s my perhaps-too-optimistic prediction for the future:our relationship with social media will continue to get worse, until it reaches such a low point society at large will decide to give a shit, like we did with tobacco, the ozone hole, and movies starring Kevin Costner.

Maybe things are just bad now because science moves at a snail pace, while tech moves faster than a British man fleeing the sight of good cuisine. We don’t have that much data yet on how social media is screwing up our brains and making us miserable and anxious, so we’re just letting it happen.

(There are some worrying studies, though. A couple years back some nerds enrolled 221 college students in a 2-week study about the correlation between phone notifications and inattentiveness and hyperactivity, common symptoms of ADHD. To no one’s surprise, they found that increased phone usage seems to mimic these symptoms of ADHD.)

Last year I read a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshanna Zuboff, that made the argument (well-backed by evidence) that tech bros took advantage of the dizzying speed of technological change, plus the fact that the average lawmaker is a 131-years-old corrupt lich, to lobby for possession of your data, which they’ve owned since then. A fact we don’t seem to mind. It’s mind-boggling, if you think about it. Companies like Facebook, Google and TikTok are profiting from our data. Stuff we make.

For social media, data comes from engagement. And nothing breeds engagement like toxicity. When you come across some dweeb on Twitter arguing that Ari Aster is a neonazi because he’s got a cool undercut and likes Vikings, that wasn’t an accident. That’s by design. The algorithm knows tame opinions don’t breed engagement. Virulent toxicity does. You’re not very likely to reply to a stranger tweeting: “oh it’s a nice day out”. But you might reply if they tweet: “the earth is flat and your mum never loved you.” And the more you post, the more they profit.

Social media toxicity is directly tied to late-stage capitalism. We need to move away from an engagement-based social media. The only way to do that is making social media unprofitable. But spiritual fleshlights like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and their invisible, infernal host of stockholders won’t make that easy. If change comes, it’ll be through a mixture of legislative effort and education. Lawmakers will tell billionaires to fuck off and corporations to stop stealing your data, and educators will follow through.

I’m somewhat hopeful. People tend to do the right thing when all other options are exhausted. (I know this is a saying about Americans, but it applies to everybody.) With the climate crisis on our doorsteps – or rather, having flooded our living rooms –, we might just be on the cusp of moving away from the myth of infinite growth, and thus the manufactured need for infinite posting.

What is the Portuguese SF scene like and anyone you think we should also be reading?

Anaemic, to be honest. Portugal has abysmal reading rates, among the lowest in Europe, and the SFF scene is particularly poor. The few SFF readers among us prefer to read foreign stuff. It’s the opposite problem to the Anglophone world, which calls itself diverse but avoids translations like the plague. In Portugal, foreign = better. There are a bunch of intrepid, highly intelligent, supernaturally talented Portuguese authors out there braving the Anglo seas (me being the captain of the ship, ofc), but translingualism always hacks off a part of your cultural identity. We’re not as Portuguese when we write in English as we are when we write in, well, Portuguese. Still, reading outside of your culture is always awesome, sothere’s a few names I would like to mention:

Rafaela Ferraz: Nowadays Rafaela mostly writes non-fiction on topics like death acceptance and the funeral industry. She’s written for the death acceptance org Order of the Good Death (founded by Caitlin Doughty from Ask a Mortician fame). On the fiction side, she’s only published shorts so far, but they’re all bangers. Check out her stuff here: https://rafaelaferraz.com/publications

João F. Silva: up-and-coming writer of grimdark fantasy. I haven’t read the stuff he’s put out for free on his website at https://joaofsilva.net/, but I can attest that his short on the 33rd edition of Grimdark Magazine is great. I’m usually sceptical of Grimdark in short form, but João made it work. He’ll have a novel out soon and I’ll buy it day one.

If you’ll allow me to mention our Brazilian brothers across the pond: I’ve read and heartily recommend Jana Biachi, Renan Bernardo and Illimani Ferreira. I believe Jana and Renan have only published short stories so far, in noteworthy places like Clarkesworld, Apex, Escape Pod, among others. Illimani has a novel out called Terminal 3. Bear with the somewhat under-edited beginning and you’ll find one of the few truly hilarious SFF books I’ve read in recent years.

As for big names, if you’re into literary SFF then Saramago is a no-brainer. Portuguese academia loves to ignore the fact that most of his stories have speculative premises: in Blindness, an epidemic makes everybody in the country except for one person go completely blind. In The Stone Raft, the Iberian Peninsula detaches from Europe and drifts into the Atlantic.No need to sing any praises to a Nobel Prize laureate. He’s as good as everybody says.

For stuff only available in Portuguese, I recommend the work indie publishers Imaginauta and Editorial Divergência have been putting out. The latter has a selection of themed anthologies like Rural Fantasy, Cyberpunk, Space Opera, etc, and they make an effort to discover new authors. Portuguese and Spanish are mutually intelligible languages (in writing), so I suggest Spanish-speaking readers give them a shot. I’d specifically recommend the author Carlos Silva if you want something deep and stylish, yet accessible.

What else have we got to look forward to from you and where can we find out more?

Visit my semi-neglected website at https://www.mario-coelho.com/ to check out all the stuff I’ve published.

Ootheca, my New Weird short story about a guy with cockroaches for teeth going on a date with a girl who’s suspiciously into that – originally published in Strange Horizons – is going to appear in Best of World SF – Volume 3, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Apart from that, I don’t have much going on, but I’m currently writing a novel titled Who You Are in the Dark, set in the same world as Ootheca. It’s about a man whose own skin keeps sloughing off getting dragged into a conspiracy involving the trafficking of wombs, sunlight, and drugs that make you ejaculate non-stop.

If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?

You’re cruel for only allowing me to choose one! (Why Thank you!) It’s probably recency bias, but I would say Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio di Maria. In it, invisible Lovecraftian creatures settle philosophical arguments by having pillow fights, only instead of pillows they use random people as cudgels. It’s not an easy book, but it’s beautiful and prescient. It was written in the 70s yet it predicted social media to a tee. The ending is one of the most atmospheric, powerful things I’ve ever read.