The era of expressive Fordism and spectral plagiarism turns us into transmitters of an empty language dictated by AI. Reclaiming authorship requires the courage to reintroduce the body into the text.
"It's not luck, it's persistence." "How do you build something genuine in a format that demands quantity?" "Not every echo resonates: some barely repeat and fade away." "Every attempt at originality triggers an invisible process: to seem new while still fitting in."
Clichéd phrases, already read, worn out. Abstractions drained of real meaning that desperately insist on performing originality. Today, plagiarism on social media isn't limited to literal theft; it's no longer about maliciously copying someone else's work, but rather repeating a pattern without origin. It's the automation of one's own voice. This capitulation doesn't always depend on the obvious shortcut of asking an artificial intelligence to write for us. The mechanism runs deeper: we write with what we read, therefore; we write with what we consume. And this formats the language.
Today, plagiarism on social media isn't limited to literal theft; it's no longer about maliciously copying someone else's work, but rather repeating a pattern without origin. It's the automation of one's own voice.
After subjecting our gaze to hours of content (texts, images and videos that package the complexity of life into thirty seconds), thought enters an unconscious bias loop. What is stated as new was already written in the vast web of the internet, optimized for circulation, ready to be regurgitated under another name. We find ourselves reading, time and again, the same empty and abstract structure that disguises the lack of content behind the screen.
Urgent questions then arise in front of the keyboard: Why do we write today? Are we trying to glimpse a clouded reality or simply executing a performance of originality to gain validation? What implicit contract sustains authorship today?
The figure of the author dissolves and gives way to spectral plagiarism. We no longer steal a text, we rent a cadence. In our eagerness to be "cool" or innovative, we resort to hegemonic structures that writing, by definition, should question. We believe we are stating a personal truth, but in reality, we operate as ventriloquists of a system that rewards the predictable and punishes critical reflective thought.
Ideas lose their political weight, context, and density, becoming linguistic commodities, interchangeable phrases that serve more as identity accessories than as tools for thought. The architecture of networks doesn't benefit from intellectual density; it thrives on the superficiality that retains the user. By yielding to the comfort of clichés (whether due to algorithmic bias or the laziness delegated to AI), we also surrender a symbolic power: the right to name the world we inhabit.
Just look at the fate of contemporary critical thought to see this emptiness. Complex concepts born from sociology, psychoanalysis, or political activism (such as emotional responsibility, deconstruction, or anti-capitalist critique) are stripped of their prior theoretical thickness to be packaged into pastel-colored infographics or Twitter threads designed for quick astonishment. An aestheticization of thought occurs: the radicality of an idea is flattened until it becomes harmless, a mere accessory to adorn the profile of whoever shares it. In this process, we not only plagiarize syntax but also plagiarize moral outrage and political commitment, turning them into a sterile performance. The architecture of networks doesn't benefit from intellectual density that discomforts; it thrives on the progressive or reactionary superficiality that retains the user, polarizing without ever inviting deep reflection.
Dante Sabatto
Today we read fragments stripped of authorship, subjecting our attention to infinite scrolling, and thus the history of ideas erodes. The format of the web demands an immediacy that is a natural enemy of genealogy. The algorithm is not a transparent mirror; it preaches and manipulates our desires. If our way of consuming is preconfigured by a pattern that rewards reproductions, our way of producing will hardly escape that inertia.
If the architecture of networks was already pushing us towards this spectral plagiarism, the massification of generative artificial intelligence accelerates the process towards its industrial phase. Why write if we can ask an interface to resolve the enunciation for us?
What drives this massive delegation is not just a lack of time, but an urgent need for validation. We want to be read, we seek to project a cool and innovative version of ourselves, but we want a shortcut to achieve it.
The result is a tragic paradox: in the desperate search for originality, we inaugurate the era of expressive Fordism. We operate in a true semantic assembly line. We ask AI to draft our stances or our emotions, and we assemble the standardized pieces it returns.
By yielding to the comfort of cliché (whether due to algorithmic bias or the laziness delegated to AI), we also surrender a symbolic power: the right to name the world we inhabit.
However, there remains a convenient excuse among the defenders of this automation: the belief that writing the prompt is the new refuge of authorship. We cling to the illusion that by setting the parameters of the text, we still maintain control. But in expressive Fordism, drafting a command is not a creative act; it’s a managerial task. The subject ceases to be an author and becomes a supervisor of an algorithmic assembly line. Worse still, in a perverse twist, it is the interface itself that ends up training us on how we should ask for things. We adapt our language to the machine's requirements to achieve an "optimal" result. In the search for shortcuts, we delegate the discomfort of doubt, that friction where style resides. Writing ceases to be a battleground of meaning and turns into a production line and personal branding. We are workers fulfilling our daily content quota.
Authorship honesty dies not because the machine processes text, but because the subject, like the worker in a factory, becomes completely disconnected from what they produce; they publish words in which they no longer recognize themselves and alienate from their own discourse.
So why do we accept becoming workers of our identity?
It’s not just simple laziness, but fear of invisibility. In digital culture, being seen is existing, and to be seen, one must be read. The paradox, therefore, is frustrating. We want to break away from the typical, to have a voice that disrupts and questions the status quo, but we resort to prefabricated molds to ensure we don’t fall outside the conversation. We capitulate out of pure FOMO.
Writing on social media is thus a tool of symbolic survival. If a text doesn’t meet the standards of the algorithm (the exact cadence, pasteurized outrage, textbook irony), it faces the severity of indifference, accompanied by the immediate symptom of anxiety. Because in this infrastructure, identity has become a purely digital value. Attention is what legitimizes our existence. That’s why obeying this tyranny is a logical instinct; we adapt to the mold to ensure we remain in circulation and avoid social bankruptcy. We replicate emotional templates because they offer a guarantee of exchange on social media. Plagiarism operates, at its core, as a survival instinct. Faced with the vastness of the digital space, we prefer to empty ourselves of meaning and sound identical to others rather than not being heard by anyone.
Plagiarism operates, at its core, as a survival instinct. Faced with the vastness of the digital space, we prefer to empty ourselves of meaning and sound identical to others rather than not being heard by anyone.
In this attention market, authenticity is penalized. If our language has nuances, doubts, or complexity, the machine doesn’t know how to label us for distribution. That’s why we flatten the discourse. We adopt irony not out of conviction, but because it works as an algorithmic password. Silence on social media is social death. To avoid it, we accept that our writing be predictable, scannable, and digestible. We self-censor not out of fear of a repressive power, but out of terror of not fitting into the metrics.
In the face of a digital infrastructure that pushes us toward mediocre averages, what, then, is the purpose of insisting on writing?
Writing was never about passively describing the river, but about pushing the reader into the water, making them feel the cold and the force of the current. However, the abuse of formatted language has created an illusion. Standardized language does not illuminate any reality; it clouds it. And this is an act of intellectual cowardice.
Formatted writing for social media, enhanced by AI, demands that we be born already edited, spotless, and algorithmically perfect. We are terrified of the vulnerability of hesitation.
This cowardice has killed one of the noblest tools of writing: the draft. The essay, in its very etymology (essayer), means to attempt, to test, to throw oneself into the risk of error. Writing required temporarily inhabiting the mistake. However, formatted writing for social media, enhanced by AI, demands that we be born already edited, spotless, and algorithmically perfect. We are terrified of the vulnerability of hesitation. By eliminating the draft stage (that private space where the author grapples with their own shortcomings), we eliminate the process that allows for discovery.
There are no epiphanies in a prefabricated template.
Here is where the true inadequacy of our time is revealed. The problem was never whether artificial intelligence is good or bad, nor is it exhausted in the addictive architecture of social media. The problem is ontological and deeply ours: writing used to be the attempt to capture a chaotic reality, using an instrument like language. It is a craft that requires lucidity, sleeplessness, and risk. By anesthetizing that tension to fit into the times, we cease to exist as complex subjects. If we were truly ourselves, the massification of voices would be impossible.
Javier Pallero
But peeking outside the algorithmic cave means risking social irrelevance.
Perhaps the only way to dismantle the paradox of spectral plagiarism is to embrace that loss. In other words, daring to be illegible to the machine, accepting that an honest voice will always be a glitch in the system.
The ethical problem culminates when we relinquish authorial responsibility. When we throw a vague instruction at an interface, we receive a block of sterile syntax and launch it into the world without those words passing through our bodies, without questioning whether they truly represent our vision of things. What remains is mere mass production, expressive Fordism to keep the engine of the feed running.
Recovering authorship demands putting our bodies back into the text. It requires getting our hands dirty with words and inhabiting the contradictions that binary code rejects. When we set out to write the social (our crises, our times, our affections), we cannot settle for the plasticity of a language assembled by statistics. True transgression today is not about shouting louder in the feed, but about reclaiming the slow time of writing that matures and makes mistakes. Dismantling this expressive Fordism is an act of resistance; it’s the choice to leave a human, immeasurable, and inefficient mark on the leaks of the machinery.
The tools may evolve, but the urge to name the world remains a fundamentally human trait. The urgent question that the reflection of the screen throws back at us is not what the machine can write, but what we are willing to sacrifice in order to finally reclaim our own voice.
