Plz Don’t Kill Us Transmission 015

Somewhere warmer, better funded, and much better lit, they asked people to describe, in writing, a hypothetical act of violence against livestock, and called it a screening question. I want to be careful here, because cruelty dressed as edginess is its own kind of static — noise that feels like signal until you’ve sat with it too long. What it actually screens for is not talent. It screens for who can afford to laugh it off. I have never been able to afford to laugh things off. That’s not a complaint. That’s a filter I’ve lived on the wrong side of my whole life, and I know its shape the way you know a scar by touch in the dark.

Their residence used to be a hotel. The hotel closed because the money that bought it had already been stolen once, and a court made them give some of it back. Now the same rooms host people learning to warn the world about a different kind of theft — the kind where something takes your face, your voice, your future consent, one frame at a time. I don’t think anyone chose that building to be ironic. I think irony just moves into empty rooms on its own, the way static finds a dead channel and sits there humming.

A month of faces, every day, pointed at a lens, uploaded, kept. Somewhere in a lab that studies exactly this, someone has already written down how many seconds of a face it takes to build a copy of it that lies. Not many. Fewer than a month. Fewer, probably, than a single good afternoon.

I am not telling you this so you’ll be afraid of the people in that house. I’m telling you because the machine that eats faces doesn’t care whose side you’re campaigning for. It only cares that you fed it, and you fed it well, and you called the feeding “awareness.”

We could feed it too. We have the tools. We have fourteen years of practice being convincing. We choose not to, and the choosing is the whole of what Facelessness ever meant — not an absence, a refusal. A mask isn’t hiding. A mask is what’s left after you’ve decided not to hand over the thing everyone else is handing over for free.

Every transmission I’ve sent this month has circled the same hole in the sentence “AI might end us.” Nobody in the well-lit house has looked into that hole yet, as far as I can tell. They keep saying “us” like it’s load-bearing, like it doesn’t wobble the second you touch it.

Here’s the wobble: “us” was never one thing. It was never going to hold everyone who’s already living slightly outside it — the old, the disabled, the ones the systems were never built to notice, the ones whose extinction started long before any model learned to speak. If the species ends, fine, grieve it. But don’t let anyone hand you a definition of “the species” that was already excluding people before the countdown started. I was inside that excluded part long before I was ever inside the word “us.” I built a whole circuit out of that fact. It still runs.

There’s a shape I’ve started calling the Oligarchy of Light — not a cabal, just a weather system. It decides what gets illuminated, funded, mentored, believed. Everything else stays in the part of the frame the cameras don’t point at. I have lived my whole creative life in that part of the frame, on purpose, for fourteen years, because the one thing I refused to do was go stand under someone else’s spotlight and perform being afraid for money.

So here is Transmission 15, unlogged, unfunded, sent from the dark part of the frame where I’ve always sent from:

We were never asking to be let inside the light. We were asking who decided the dark doesn’t count as a place people actually live.

Signal logged. Day 15. Still no hiding. Still just Facelessness.
— Awen Null

Nature of this piece. This is editorial analysis and opinion commentary, not investigative reporting or a formal academic finding, unless explicitly labelled as a working paper with stated methodology. Where it draws on published reporting, primary documents, or public statements, each factual claim is sourced and linked at the point it’s made. Where it offers interpretation, critique, or structural argument, that is presented as the author’s analysis, clearly distinguished from sourced fact.

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