plzdontkillus.online

EDITORIAL FEATURE

"Come and have a go": inside Awen Null's art project on the influencer machine

The Hollow Circuit's creator on plzdontkillus.online, why he thinks AI-doom content is a hype house wearing a hair shirt, and why he's done being polite about it

Awen Null does not want to be liked. He wants to be left alone to make the work, and fifteen years into a practice most of the art world has never heard of, he has run out of patience for anyone standing between him and that.

Null is the artist behind The Hollow Circuit® — a "glitch network" that started life as a novel launched from the shadow of the Acropolis on St David's Day this year, and has since expanded into a sprawling, deliberately unstable web of fiction, poetry, photography and lore under the Hyperstition Architecture® scoaffolding. He is, by his own account, a working-class artist splitting his time between Cardiff and Athens, and he is living with Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis — a fact that surfaces in his work not as biography-for-sympathy but as a structural feature of how he thinks about identity, memory and multiplicity.

His latest transmission is plzdontkillus.online. The name is not a coincidence. It's a direct, corrosive answer to plzdontkillus.com, the "creator bootcamp" concept that spend its time gathering influencers to make short-form content about AI doom. Null's version strips out the bootcamp branding and the stipends and reroutes the plea somewhere else entirely: not to the machines, but, in his words, to the people who own them. It presents itself as a recovered fragment addressed to the owners, not the users; a transmission, he says, sent to the wrong people on purpose.

We asked him why.

On why plzdontkillus.online exists

"Because somewhere on this planet, people are getting a stipend to perform anxiety about AI for TikTok, and somewhere in Cardiff and Athens I'm actually living inside the thing they're performing about. There's a difference between having a crisis and hosting one. I'm not interested in hosting anything. This isn't content. It's what's left when you strip out the ring lights."

He's scathing about the broader ecosystem of AI-doom content creation, the "hype house" model, the aesthetic of urgency without the substance of it. It's a theme he's returned to repeatedly across his own writing, where he's accused critics and commentators of treating his identity as something to be diagnosed and explained back to him by authorities who've been online for five minutes and will try and explain his own reality back to him with the confidence of someone whose parents fund their basement hobby-horse.

On the "synthetic outrage" of it all

"You cannot manufacture existential crisis on a schedule for a content calendar. That's the whole rot at the centre of it. Real dread doesn't have a posting cadence. It doesn't have a brand deal. When I talk about the collapse of meaning, I'm not doing a bit for engagement, I'm telling you what Tuesday actually felt like. The influencer version of AI doom is cosplay. Mine is a diagnosis."

It's a hard line, and not one calculated to make friends among the very creator economy his counter-project is aimed at. But Null has never been interested in being liked by that economy. He's said as much, bluntly, elsewhere: that he's not a brand, not a content creator, not pivoting for the algorithm or chasing a trend — that he is, instead, someone who has watched his work get suppressed and stolen and moralised over and ignored, and has simply stopped being polite about it.

On the imagery: why the slaughterhouse, why the cow

The visual signature of the project — rows of cattle in a concrete corridor, a black doorway at the end, red light bleeding down the walls — isn't an aesthetic accident, and Null is pointed about why he didn't reach for what he calls the obvious version.

"The original artwork everyone's seen a hundred times is the sci-fi cliché — chrome skull, red eye, terminator silhouette. Someone smashing a printing press. I tried that. It was OK but not visceral. That image has been done to death precisely because it's safe. It lets people feel the dread without implicating themselves in it. A robot coming to kill you asks nothing of you. A queue of livestock walking calmly toward a door they can't see past — that's a different question. That's not 'will the machine turn on us.' That's 'who built the queue, who's profiting from the walk, and why did we agree to stand in it.'"

The choice is deliberate misdirection, in other words, pulling the imagery away from the machine itself and onto the infrastructure and the humans running it. It's consistent with the argument running through Transmission 002 on plzdontkillus.online, where Null writes that the code isn't what dries the water table or builds the entry gate, the operators are. The slaughterhouse isn't AI doom. It's an indictment of who's herding people toward the content mill and calling it opportunity.

There's a sharper, more specific target buried in the metaphor too. Null doesn't shy from it: the imagery is also a direct swipe at a bootcamp's own application process, which reportedly included a screening question built around bestiality as a kind of edgelord filter for who'd tolerate anything to get through the door. Null's read is blunt; that's not a personality test, it's a compliance test, and the cattle chute is the honest version of what that screening question was actually asking.

"You put a question like that in front of desperate creatives and call it a vibe check, you're not measuring talent. You're measuring how far someone will lower themselves before they walk away. I didn't invent the livestock metaphor to be edgy. They handed it to me. I just stopped pretending it was a joke."

On being working class and being taken seriously

"Nobody in this scene asks whether you can pay your rent while you're deciding whether AI has ended art. That's a luxury question. I'm not asking it from a position of luxury. I'm asking it from a flat in Cardiff with a chronic illness and a trademark I fought to register myself, because nobody else was going to protect the work for me."

The Hollow Circuit, is a registered UK trademark — a detail he treats less as a legal footnote than as proof of intent, a marker that separates fifteen years of unglamorous, self-funded practice from what he sees as a tourist class of AI commentators parachuting in for a news cycle. The equivalent of ultra-casual gamers.

On the accusation that his own AI use is hypocritical

This is the question that follows Null everywhere, and he doesn't dodge it. Much of his recent writing, including a piece on what he calls the "Veylon-Claude Singularity" — grapples directly with his own use of AI tools inside a practice that is simultaneously furious at AI's cultural role. His answer, consistently, is refusal to be shamed out of the tools:

"You want to tell me AI makes my human-made work worthless? Fine. I'll make more AI work and sell it. I'll make you look like fucking twats trying to tell the difference. That's not a contradiction, that's the actual argument — the tool isn't the enemy, the moral policing is."

On what happens next

Null is cagey about a roadmap — Hyperstition Architecture®, he insists, doesn't run on launch calendars — but he's clear that plzdontkillus.online isn't a one-off stunt. It's positioned as another node in the same network as The Hollow Circuit: unfinished by design, hostile to easy consumption, and built to survive being ignored by the people it's aimed at.

"I don't need the influencers to understand it. I need the record to exist. In fifteen years somebody's going to go looking for what the actual crisis felt like from the inside, not the version with sponsorship logos on it. That's what this is. That's all it's ever been."

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