4

Book of the Night

( August 2025- October 2025, January 2026)

For the children of the future.

Artist Statement

The Book of the Night is the final chapter of a four-part series examining techno-fascist governance and the algorithmic suppression of speech. Shaped by experiences of shadow-banning, account compromise, and the targeted harassment of political activists and dissenting voices within contemporary digital platforms, this work considers how fascist tendencies no longer operate solely through spectacle or overt violence, but through what might be described as techno-fascist silence: algorithmic suppression, automated moderation, and corporate surveillance presented as safety, neutrality, or the correction of misinformation.

The work situates surveillance not as an external imposition, but as an ambient condition—embedded in platforms, credentials, and interfaces that govern visibility, legitimacy, and participation. Speech is not prohibited outright; it is deprioritized, throttled, or rendered invisible. Control is exercised less through censorship than through modulation.

The Book of the Night examines how identity has become continuous, data-driven, and difficult to escape. Access to social, economic, and cultural life is increasingly mediated through phone numbers, email addresses, biometric verification, and persistent digital id. To step outside these systems is not an act of freedom, but a form of exile. Without credentials, one is pushed to the margins of society—present, yet unrecognized.

The work revisits Aldous Huxley’s notion of the Noble Savage as a provocation rather than a fantasy. In a world of near-total digital adoption, the possibility of living “off the grid” collapses under the weight of infrastructural dependency. Refusal is no longer romantic; it is impractical, even punitive. What appears as voluntary participation is enforced through necessity.

Ultimately, The Book of the Night asks whether freedom can exist beneath a digital net that is always watching, sorting, and remembering. When surveillance is continuous, speech is governed by opaque systems without appeal, and dissent is managed rather than silenced, civil liberties do not disappear—they erode quietly. The work dwells in this erosion, interrogating who is allowed to speak, who is rendered invisible, and how power operates most effectively when it cannot be seen.

-Macaulay Woods, January 2026.