HOLO is an editorial and curatorial platform, exploring disciplinary interstices and entangled knowledge as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, research, and activism. Read more
“You have to clock in for school, clock in for work, and now you have to clock in just to prove you aren’t dead. Chinese people—spending a lifetime ‘clocking in.’”
– Weibo commenter, on the viral success of Sileme (translation: ‘are you dead?’), a check-in app for solo dwellers that alerts an emergency contact if users don’t confirm they’re alive every 48 hours. The iOS app became China’s most downloaded paid app this month, its name a dark pun on popular food delivery service Ele.me (‘are you hungry?’). By 2030, China could have 200 million one-person households.
“The goal is to keep users engaged, meet message quotas, and never reveal who you really are. It’s work that demands constant emotional performance: pretending to be someone you’re not, feeling what you don’t feel, and expressing affection you don’t mean.”
– Kenyan researcher, labour advocate, and Data Labelers Association (DLA) Secretary General Michael Geoffrey Asia, on the quiet emotional labour behind AI intimacy. In his testimony, the former chat moderator sheds light on a workforce that remains invisible yet essential, the people whose emotions fuel algorithms that pretend to feel.
“A society that uses automation to ‘build shareholder value’ while impoverishing everyone else will not be successful.”
– Tech publisher and pundit Tim O’Reilly, on the deeply problematic direction of the AI economy. Venture capitalists are largely to blame, he argues, observing they are “consciously whipping up a media bubble rather than fostering real growth.”
“Trump’s ICE Director wants to run mass deportation ‘like Prime, but with human beings.’”
– Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, highlighting the company’s role as a major cloud services provider to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Palantir. The open letter—signed by over 1,000 workers—demands clean energy data centres, worker input on AI deployment, and an end to collaborations with surveillance and deportation infrastructure.
“It is a chatbot which will enable users to pose political, historical, social questions, problems of organization and tactical initiative, and receive a response which draws on the vast archive of Marxist thought.”
– American Marxist and World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) chair David North, on the forthcoming launch of Socialism AI. Trained on lefty literature and WSWS’s deep archive, it reflects and expresses the interests of the working class. “We understand the power of AI, both its reactionary but also its revolutionary potential,” North said at a public meeting in Berlin. “We are acting on the latter.”
“Many people will say that citations are the ultimate feminist technology—a social network of how ideas come together through community, not because of some individual genius. Adding a financial component felt like an extension of that.”
– Artist and technologist Mindy Seu, on the experimental redistribution model of her new book, A Sexual History of the Internet (2025). “Every single person who is cited in the book splits 30 per cent of all profits,” Seu tells writer Laura Pitcher. [main quote edited]
“Just because you have new miracle machines does not mean most people will benefit,” writes journalist Andrew Singer, looking to the Industrial Revolution for lessons on AI’s potential disruption of labour. Tracing how power looms devastated early 19th-century English cottage weavers—wages fell by half in five years—Singer argues that history’s pattern of concentrated gains needn’t repeat. His conclusion: handled right, AI might restore the middle-skill jobs that computerization hollowed out rather than deepen the wealth divide.
The fifth Industrial Art Biennial activates sites across Croatia’s northwestern Istria region, kicking off at the Pijacal complex in Labin. Curated by Bani Brusadin and Giulia Colletti, “The Vast Automaton” populates the former coal mine with works examining automation and extractivism. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Lawrence Lek, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, and others address the provocation: “What is industry, when industrialization runs through data streams and convoluted decision-making processes?”
“Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract—laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity.”
– Researcher Sophie Bandarkar, on the larger anti-worker agenda behind recent tech layoffs. “These firings are not driven by financial strain or genuine automation-related pressure,” Bandarkar argues, ”but by a strategic choice to restructure contracts and weaken the position of labour.” In short: “AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.”
“They’re not investing $500 billion in data centres in order to sell you $20 a month subscriptions. They’re doing it to sell employers $2,000 a month subscriptions.”
– If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025) co-author Eliezer Yudkowsky, on AI development’s true business model: agents that undercut human labour costs. In dialogue with Ezra Klein, the AI safety researcher details his case for existential risk and why alignment remains unsolved.
“The economic return on this investment in Ireland’s artists and creative arts workers is having an immediate positive impact on the sector and the economy overall.”
– Minister of Culture Patrick O’Donovan, celebrating the success of Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot. The trial saw 2,000 artists receive 1,500 EUR monthly since 2022, generating positive returns while increasing recipients’ arts income by over 500 EUR per month and reducing reliance on social welfare. The program will become permanent in 2026.
“Chess robots have been beating human world champions for 30 years now. ‘Get good’ is a petulant opinion.”
– Holding Absence singer Lucas Woodland, responding to “make better music” takes after he lamented the rise of AI copycats. “An AI ‘band’ who cite us as an influence (i.e. it’s modelled off our music) has just overtaken us on Spotify, in only TWO months,” Woodland wrote on X. “It’s shocking, it’s disheartening, it’s insulting—most importantly—it’s a wake-up call.” What can be done? “Lobby for transparency” and “violently support real music.”
“Switching from an LLC or 501(c)(3) to an A-Corp model is a bit like a gambler switching from roulette or slot machines to blackjack: no matter the game, the odds are still stacked against you.”
– Critic Louis Bury, on the limitations of Yancey Strickler’s proposed pro-artist legal structure. “A-Corps are a capitalistic answer to the economic and social ills artists experience under capitalism,” Bury argues. It and Strickler’s Metalabel are innovative, but they won’t solve the root financial problem for most artists: a market that is not large enough to make a living.
“AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society, and our descendants will be digging it out for generations.”
– Canadian-British journalist and internet activist Cory Doctorow, on the long recovery from rampant automation after the AI bubble bursts. “The money-hemorrhaging ‘foundation models’ will be shut off and we’ll lose the AI that can’t do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or ‘discouraged’ and out of the labour market, and no one will do your job.”
“The ultimate goal is never to be as good as the art—the goal is to be good enough to get on the page, get the consumer to use it, and get rid of the worker.”
– Artist Molly Crabapple, putting AI image generators on a longer timeline of capital systematically displacing human labour across sectors. Drawing on her experience having her own work scraped, the American artist advocates for workplace AI restrictions and public shaming of companies using synthetic content.
“We call this NIMI—Not In My Industry—which means that I don’t give a shit if I take an Uber, I don’t care if I buy books on Amazon or listen to music on Spotify. However, when something hits my industry, such as AI in comics, I will be very against it.”
– Greek-Belgian researcher and conceptual comics artist Ilan Manouach, on the hypocrisy of artists who lament AI’s threat to creative labour after years of uncritically embracing extractive, manipulative technologies and platforms that served their interests. “The real problem is capitalism,” Manouach emphasizes.
“If you’ve never spun up an AWS orchestration diagram how can you possibly critique the state of software today? I don’t understand how academia can critique technocapitalism without having actually done any of that work.”
– Exocapitalism (2025) co-author Marek Poliks, challenging academics to engage the technical realities they critique (like Amazon Web Services). Interviewed with co-author Roberto Alonso Trillo, the duo discuss the scale and mechanics of post-Silicon Valley capitalism. [quote edited]
Art blogger Régine Debatty returns from the fourth Re:humanism biennial at Rome’s Fondazione Pastificio Cerere with her signature list of recommendations. IOCOSE’s whimsical video installation AI-Ludd (2025), for example—a top pick—follows a pro-labour chatbot encouraging workers “to deceive bossware, disrupt automation, resist capitalist constraints, and enjoy life,” Debatty writes. “It takes a machine to tell us how much machines have enslaved us!”
Theorists Marek Poliks and Robert Alonso Trillo map capital’s migration into algorithmic territories—from AI to memecoins—developing conceptual tools for navigating life in an era of automated finance and distributed computation.
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