Social media was supposed to connect us. We turned it into a content machine.

The original promise was small and quite good. You would be able to tell the people who cared about you what you were doing. That was it. A photograph from a trip, a line about a bad week, a book you had just finished and could not stop thinking about. It was correspondence, made public and made easy.

Nobody decided to end that. It ended the way most things end, one reasonable decision at a time.

Sharing became performing

The first thing that changed was that the audience stopped being knowable. When you write to a friend you know exactly who is reading. When you post, you are writing to a room whose composition is decided by a system, and the system is not telling you who is in it.

Writers are unusually sensitive to this, because addressing a specific reader is most of the craft. Ask a novelist who her book is for and she can answer. Ask her who her Instagram post is for and something goes slightly out of focus. The uncertainty is not a failure of nerve; it is a real absence of information, and it is the thing that makes the caption take forty minutes.

So people did the sensible thing under uncertainty: they aimed at everyone. And writing aimed at everyone is the only kind of writing a writer is trained to recognise as bad.

The easy explanation is a little too easy

The usual account of what went wrong is dopamine. Everyone got addicted to the little numbers, the argument goes, and now we are all performing for hits.

It is not wrong exactly, but it explains too much. It would predict that everybody behaves identically on every platform, and they do not. The same person is thoughtful in one place, combative in another, and silent in a third. What changes is not their brain chemistry between apps. It is what each place makes easy, what it counts, and what it shows other people.

A system does not only carry what people want to say. It changes what gets said.

Make a number public and it becomes a target. Rank by engagement and you have quietly told everybody that the strongest feeling wins. Reward volume and the person with something careful to say is outrun by the person with something loud to say. None of that requires anyone to be corrupted. It only requires them to be rational.

Where it went wrong for people with something to sell

Once the platforms became a place where attention could be won, an industry grew up to win it, and that industry needed something to sell. What it settled on was volume.

Hence the calendar. Thirty slots, filled in advance, because a calendar is the only thing you can promise a client before the month has happened. Hence “content” — a word that means, precisely, material whose job is to occupy a slot. The tell is in the language. Nobody has ever described a letter to a friend as content.

And the moment the calendar is the product, the answer to what goes out during a quiet week is fixed in advance: something goes out anyway, because the calendar has to be fed. Which means most of what you are looking at, on most accounts, is material about nothing, made to a schedule, by somebody who was not there.

Then AI arrived and everybody blamed the new arrival

When the feeds filled with generated text, the reaction was to blame the generator. It is a comfortable story and it is mostly backwards.

The demand for material about nothing predates the machine by a decade. The calendar invented that demand; the machine simply met it at a price that made refusing absurd. If you had already committed to thirty posts a month regardless of whether thirty things happened, of course you were going to generate them. The alternative was to admit the commitment was wrong, and nobody was going to do that.

So the flood is not really an AI problem. It is a calendar problem, running at a new speed.

What a machine should be allowed to do

Which leaves a real question, and writers are entitled to be more suspicious about it than anybody else. If a machine can write, what should it be permitted to write on your behalf?

A useful line to draw: a machine can carry the part that is not you. It can resize an image for a platform whose requirements you should never have to learn. It can hold a queue. It can notice a comment sitting unanswered for two days and put a draft reply in front of you. It can transcribe your own recorded voice so that somebody watching without sound can still read what you said. None of that touches the voice. All of it is administration, and administration is exactly the sort of thing that ought to be automated.

What it should not be allowed to do is invent the thing that happened, or rewrite the sentence you wrote.

If you write the line, it publishes word for word. That is not a feature. It is the boundary the rest of it is built against.

There is a softer case in the middle, and it is worth being honest about it: the blank day. Sometimes you look up and there is nothing you can see. Being offered a line to start from is not the same as being written for, as long as two things hold — you asked for it, and you are free to throw it out. A first sentence somebody hands you is something to argue with. Every writer knows what to do with one of those.

And it does not get the last word

The other half of the boundary is that nothing reaches anybody until a person has read it. Not as a policy, not as a setting somebody could switch off in a hurry — as an actual absence of any path to publication that does not pass through the writer.

This is the part of the current landscape that should alarm people more than it does. A tool that drafts and queues a fortnight of material is publishing on somebody’s account, under their name, without them having read it. The convenience is real. So is the fact that their readers are now receiving letters that the sender has never seen.

Maybe it does not need reinventing

The interesting thing about the original promise is that nothing about it has been disproved. People still want to know what the people they care about are doing. A reader who loved your book still wants to know whether there is another one coming, and would be delighted to watch it arrive.

That was never the part that broke. What broke was everything built on top of it to make it scale: the calendar, the slots, the material about nothing, and the slow conversion of correspondence into performance.

You can simply not do that. Take one photograph of something that actually happened. Say one true thing about it. Send it, and go back to work. That is the whole of the original idea, and it still functions perfectly.

A calendar is how you look active. A record is how people find out what you are actually like.