APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis

Abstract

The APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis is a short story that imagines the future of machine-readable data encodings. In this story, I speculate about the next stage in the development of data encoding patterns: after barcodes and QR codes, the invention of “holocodes” will make it possible to store unprecedented amounts of data in a minuscule physical surface. As a collage of nested fictional materials (including ethnographic fieldnotes, interview transcripts, OCR scans, and intelligence reports) this story builds on the historical role of barcodes in supporting consumer logistics and the ongoing deployment of QR codes as anchors for the platform economy, concluding that the geopolitical future of optical governance is tied to unassuming technical standards such as those formalizing machine-readable representations of data.