Imagine a world where every digital trace you leave can be used against you. Where your writing marks you for surveillance, your family for intimidation, your sources for imprisonment, and your work for erasure or exploitation.
For many writers today, this is not a hypothetical risk — it is an everyday reality.
Across the world, writers, journalists, translators, researchers, and artists are navigating increasingly sophisticated systems of censorship, surveillance, intimidation, and digital control. At the same time, new technologies are transforming how creative work is copied, extracted, monitored, and reused — often without consent, protection, or accountability.
AES-451 exists as a response to that shift.
The project documents the lived experiences of writers and cultural workers who have faced digital repression, censorship, surveillance, intimidation, platform dependency, and the theft or exploitation of creative work.
Importantly, these testimonies are not collected simply as records of abuse. They form the foundation of a broader publishing and research effort exploring how writing, creativity, and freedom of expression are being reshaped in the digital age.
The stories gathered through AES-451 will contribute to a future book examining digital repression and censorship through the experiences of the people living it directly.
Our first task is therefore to listen.
AES-451 collects testimonies from writers and cultural workers who have lived, or are living, under environments shaped by surveillance, censorship, political repression, digital insecurity, and technological dependency. These experiences will support future research, education, publishing, and the gradual development of practical strategies and tools designed to help writers work more safely and independently.
The goal is not abstraction, but practical protection grounded in real experience.
This includes exploring ways to:
The threats are no longer only political. Contemporary digital infrastructure increasingly encourages dependence on systems that track, extract, replicate, and centralise creative work. Writers risk losing not only safety, but autonomy, ownership, and control over how their work is used.
AES-451 approaches these challenges carefully and incrementally. The work is ongoing.
At its core, the project is concerned with protecting the right to write — and the right to be read — on the writer’s own terms.