The Zombification of the Author

He may have been spinning in his grave these last few years, but for the hell of it, let's dig up Barthes and reanimate him as a forensic psychologist.

I was eating a few Oreos and doomscrolling TikTok the other night as I am given to do, flipping between footage of the U.S. bombing Iran and AI-generated “reactions” that were clearly engineered by bad actors — or worse, branding interns. And right in the middle of the carnage, the algorithm delivered to me a cozy little video meant for aspiring writers.

Tee-fucking-hee.

Annoyingly, this was well-targeted.

I’ve got a novel I’m trying to finish before I turn 40, I’m a former MFA, and most of my friends are writers too. (So, yes — very astute, Algorithm. Bravo.)

I watched it, half-engaged, as a palate cleanser from all the geopolitical dread. But as soon as it veered into “writing advice,” something old and involuntary kicked in — was it disgust? Cynicism? PTSD from literary Twitter?

Whatever it was, I immediately remembered a punk-ass 19-year-old kid from my hometown who self-published an 81-page novel, “Compass of the Nymphs,” and asked the local paper (i.e., me) to cover it. He gave me a signed copy. He also gave me life advice.

“The moment you start acting like a writer,” he said, “you’re done.”

The sentiment has always stuck with me — a half-brilliant, half-bullshit koan of sorts. And it clashes violently with what “being a writer” seems to require today.

Because now? You have to act like a writer. On camera. On cue.

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Proof of Life

In a recent WIRED piece, bestselling author Victoria Aveyard slams a 1,000-page draft onto a table. Another author posts a time-lapse of herself writing, with a caption that reads:

“Watch this scene get written for a murder mystery TV show — no gen-AI used.”

Now hold the fuck up.

Say what you want, but the art critic in me immediately screams “This is authorship as performance.” Is it no longer enough to write a book? We’ve gotta livestream its birth to verify that it came from a womb of our soft and squishy brains and not a prompt, too?

And all of a sudden, pouring a glass of milk at 1 a.m. (to go with the Oreos), I realize: The author isn’t dead.

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The Zombified Author

Once upon a time in the Year of Our Lord 1967, Roland Barthes declared the death of the author. It was a landmark moment in literary theory — a stake through the heart of the Romantic notion that an author’s intent was the most vital thing to understanding any given text.

Instead, we were told to focus on the words on the page. The text had meaning in itself. The author was irrelevant, a ghost. Boo!

(Obviously, readers have resisted this and sought more biographics from their artist of choice, from the relative celebrity of Hemingway to Colleen Hoover).

But then came the lightning bolt of generative AI — vomiting infinite plausible imitations of creativity into the world in a great Thorgasm of electrons. From blogs to novels, from symphonies to shitty Canva-all-hands rap jingles — all conjured up without bodies, trauma, or shame-eating Oreos in the dark.

And now? We’re desperate for proof that something was made by a human — a real, bleeding, half-broken human. (👋)

The corpse of the author lifts a twitchy arm. We see the glint of a quill.

It’s alive, sort of.

But no, it’s not the same.

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The Author as Evidence

This new reborn Author isn’t a genius to be lauded, or even a self-serious academic to watch at their next TedX Talk. They’re a zombie — a strange half-being that must continually perform its own humanity in order to be believed. Not famous, but necessary. A character in their own meta-narrative. A validation device.

You don’t follow their work. You follow their what? Their fucking… evidence trail.

But still, the market demands authenticity.

Consider:

• Market Signals Favor Human-Made Work. On Etsy, backlash to AI content forced an update last year requiring labels like “Designed by AI” and banning pure prompt-based listings.

• Emotional and Ethical Trust Gaps Are Growing. A Pew study recently found that while 76% of AI researchers believe AI will personally benefit them, 43% of regular people think it will harm them. And even when AI-written content scores high in blind tests, people prefer what they know was human. MIT dubbed this “human favoritism.”

• Writers Are Striking Back. As we all my remember, the 2023 WGA strike centered on the demand to regulate AI in scriptwriting. Public support overwhelmingly backed those overeducated, out-of-touch Hollywood-based humans — 55% sided with writers, just 3% with studios. In fact, half of Americans said AI should be banned from replacing them entirely.

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Where Were You On the Night of….

So now, when a writer posts a TikTok of themselves slamming a manuscript onto a table, they’re not just sharing a moment — they’re offering an alibi. “I made this. Me. I’m a person. See?”

This now changes the nature of art in three import ways:

1. The Commodification of Labor

The artist must preemptively defend themselves. The TikTok becomes proof that they didn’t cheat. The work becomes secondary to the validation. And for that, the work itself becomes in conversation with validation. The audience is not consuming the art, they’re evaluating the evidence of effort.

2. The Tyranny of Performed Authenticity

Messy buns. Crying at the camera. Bowls of wet grapes. All the signifiers of “realness” become theater. We demand proof of struggle, but that proof is just another performance — algorithm-friendly, engagement-maximized, staged within an inch of its life.

3. The Altered State of the Art Itself

The story is veritably haunted by its making-of montage. Meaning is pre-chewed. Emotional experience is outsourced. The author — once dead — now leans over your shoulder whispering, “Remember how hard this part was to write? Feel it.”

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Braiinnsssss, BRAIINSSSSSS!

Both Barthes and Foucault were right to challenge the cult of personality and institutional authorship. But today’s threat isn’t the authority of the author. It’s the absence of one.

We live in a crisis of origin.

We are not asking, “What does this mean?” anymore. We are asking, “Who made this shit?” And even more: “Did they mean this shit? Do they even exist?”

So we comb through TikToks. We trace digital fingerprints. We want to believe that somewhere behind the content is a pulse.

The zombified author performs their resurrection again and again. Not to be understood, not to connect, not to draw borders on some unmapped part of this ugly thing called human existence — but merely to be believed.