While browsing through a cluttered bookstore in Calcutta, I overheard a conversation between two college students. They were holding a novel — the winner of a major literary award — and debating whether to buy it. “It’s not trending on Instagram anymore,” said one, half-apologetically. The other nodded. They moved on.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the author was a figure of sovereignty. Not juridical but discursive, powerful in a deeper, Foucauldian sense, a function that lent coherence to the chaotic multiplicities of a text. The author framed meaning. Anchored interpretation. Wrote not just books but futures.
It was P.B. Shelley who once framed this faith with prophetic clarity: “Poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Literature, to him, was a subversive parliament of feeling — moving hearts, unsettling moral certainties, giving form to what was yet to be imagined.
Today, that vision lies blurred. The poet, or novelist, or essayist is no longer a legislator but a content provider. What was once conjuration is now circulation. Writing has become an act of optimisation: for engagement, virality, screen rights. Writers no longer build worlds; they build visibility. In the age of reels and reaction videos, authors are no longer the axis around which meaning coheres. The authority that once emanated from the act of inscription is now dispersed, commodified, subject to the algorithm, the hashtag, the scroll thumb of a distracted public.
Consider a recent, telling episode. A bestselling novelist, more familiar with longlists than flame wars, found herself publicly panned on BookTok. A teenager dismissed her work as “aesthetic but annoying”. The novelist, in an uncharacteristic gesture, issued a defence; a blend of apology and explanation. But the damage, as they say, had been done. Not by a critic; not by a reader; but by an algorithmically visible influencer.
Such incidents are not anomalies. They are symptoms. We are witnessing, quietly but undeniably, the dethroning of the author as the centre of literary authority by a digitally atomised republic where interpretation is filtered through likes, where aesthetic judgment is conducted via emojis, where critique wears the costume of comment. In this emerging ecology, it is the reading public in its digitised avatar that occupies the seat of power. Roland Barthes may have proclaimed the “death of the author” but what we are seeing is not the withdrawal of authorial intent but its replacement by reader-performers, most of whom, while enthusiastic, are less invested in literature than in visibility per se.
This inversion has reshaped the writer too. The author is no longer just a creator; he/she is a brand, a curated digital presence. To resist this culture is to risk irrelevance. Writers who retreat from performance are labelled aloof or outdated. Those who comply find themselves adjusting plot points for OTT adaptations, diversifying characters not out of narrative necessity but out of market expectation. The novel, once slow and subversive, must now be screen-friendly and globally ‘representative’.
This is not without irony in India where writing has always intersected with region, caste, class and language. Digital platforms have undeniably enabled the emergence of voices — Dalit, queer, regional — that mainstream publishing ignored and marginalised. That is the democratic promise. But this promise, too, is refracted through the grammar of trend. A Tamil short story about land reform may remain unread, while a diasporic rom-com with dosa and divorce might go viral.
To mourn the fading authority of the author is not to yearn for gatekeeping. It is to ask: what do we lose when difficulty disappears, when the literary becomes indistinguishable from lifestyle content? In this ever-scrolling agora, where everyone speaks and few seem to listen, we risk losing not just the author but the conditions that once allowed an author to emerge: solitude, slowness, silence.
Srijita Talukdar is an undergraduate student of English Literature