Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh says AI has made us dumbed down machines

Irvine Welsh points to the second floor of a gray stone building in Edinburgh’s port area Leith.

As the 1993 cult novel is preparing to publish the continuation of Trainspotting, the author shows me the window of the room, and then wrote the first book that became a hit film played by Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller.

A Leith Docker, who had a course in electrical engineering, spent time in a Punk group and the son of a waiter, and Welsh, who was a young man as a young man, returned from London to Leith and “just began writing”. He tells me that he decided that he decided to “this is my last chance to do something creative” before writing Trainspotting.

Trainspotting follows the life of a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh. The book, which is violent, often shocking and dark funny, is an picture of social decay, which emerges by decreasing the industrial heart of England. It was Welsh’s first novel and sold more than a million copies only in England.

But when he was sitting, he had no idea that he would be good in the early 90s. “I just wanted to do this,” he explains. It definitely worked.

The book and the film have touched the cultural Zeitgeist so successfully for more than 30 years, and you can still book an official Trainspotting tour in Leith. But on a blush Scottish summer day, I get one of the author himself, I visit some important stops that inspire him.

We are going to Banana Flats, a curved building called Cables Wynd House, where the character (played by Miller) grew up in the Leith Skyline.

We visit Leith Dockers’ Club, in which Renton went with his mother and father (played by McGregor) and remembered that Welsh was “stuck as a child and sits there with lemonade and chips” and “really feel offended”.

Welsh’s characters are called Men In Love. He wrote a prequel about the follow -up books and the Trainspotting gang (he cannot clearly get enough), but this new novel was set immediately after the first end of Renton and his friends escaped with a big drug agreement.

This time, Wales are investigating what happened when young men begin to fall in love and have relationships. It was partially motivated to write, because “we live in a world full of hate and poison … I think the time we focus more on love as a kind of antidote for everything”.

But don’t expect Sakarin Romanticism stories – after all this galli. Some of the characters of the cheating, liar, manipulative – and sometimes horrifying – the behavior of still evidence is still in evidence.

At the end of the book, there is even a waiver that because the novel was determined in the 1980s, most of the characters say “they are now disturbing and discriminatory.”

Welsh says publishers insist. “They felt that we lived in such sensitive times.

“We live in a much more censored environment,” he continues. Although the female enemy, including “Fat Lassie” in the book, is painful and “there is a good reason for us not to say them, the state” you can’t talk about it, you can’t talk about it, I think we’re on a dangerous road. “

The men in the Love Story go back to the early 90s. Britain is broadcasted at a time when the 90s fell into a slightly nostalgia, Oasis Tour and Pulp’s surprises in Glastonbury are receiving Rave investigations.

Welsh tells me that he “never left” that period, but he tells the younger generations that he felt a nostalgia for that, because “People had lives at that time.”

It makes a part of the accusation of cultural change on the Internet and social media into a “control rather than a power that enables”.

As someone who understands addiction, Wales hopes that we will be “more logical” in the future use of social media. He points out that people have “adhere to their faces” while moving.

He said: “If we survive in the next 50 years, the 80s will have strange in the film as he has smoking people who smoke.”

He also thinks that the internet makes us more stupid. “When you make the machines think for you, your brain is only atrophy.” “On the one hand, we are afraid that we go to a democratic, post -art and culture after culture, and on the other side we have some kind of natural stupidity, we become only these great machines that receive instructions”.

Trainspotting’s success came partly at a time when people were more challenging, less formula will be willing to read books. And as the money rolled, it gave him the freedom to write.

He is also released an album with a DJ and Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra. Disco pieces are about the characters, story of the novel and “emotional landscape”.

When writing “Basic” and at the same time “in music writing, he always looking for four four rhythms.”

It creates a playlist for each character and theme.

Renton Iggy Pop is entering Lou Reed, Velvet Underground. The patient also says that Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, New Order, he says.

He loves aggressive and violent Begbie “Rod Stewart and Power Ballads”.

The singer recently told Times that the public should give a chance to reform British leader Nigel Farage. I wondered if Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting characters would support this party if they are growing.

“They tell me that Scottish working classes still have a radical spirit.

Then he adds, “People are so desperate that they will go with everyone who has this discourse of change.”

Wales have always been political and tells us how Margaret Thatcher ends the construction of ships in Leith for centuries as he wandered in the region where he grew up. He says five thousand Docker never happened.

Trainspotting was also echoed, because “he heralded the adjustment made to people living in the world without a paid job. And now we’re all in this position”.

His argument is that England’s class system changes because of “concentration of great wealth against the rich”.

The working classes do not have any money, and now the middle classes are increasingly debt and they can transfer their existence less, which makes life insecure.

“Basically, we are all members of the precary.

In my time at Welsh’s company, we didn’t visit Leith, I gave an idea to his brain, from our dystopic future to why the best music was made in the analog period, and even if a knight is offered (a no, since).

When our time is over, Dockers enters the bar in the Dockers to see a friend he met in primary school 60 years ago. His old friend jokes me for being a plumber, Welsh writes a millionaire. You can see the love between them.

Trainspotting may have completely changed Welsh’s life. But he still got stuck in the community that shapes him, and Leith, where he turned into such a magnificent fiction.

Men in love published on July 24, 2025