An Ironic Homage to Walter Benjamin, and a Cheerful Eulogy for the Human Pen

The New Aura of the Algorithm    

For most of human history, writing has been the most intimate of acts. Fingers stained with ink. Cigarette ash on the edge of the typewriter. Long nights. Longer silences, followed by sudden bursts of illumination, unlike anything else in life. A pursuit of unattainable dreams. A fiasco in life – and a universal hosanna after death. A rise and a fall, not one after the other, but intertwined in a deadly embrace. Magic.

Such has writing been – at times a ritual of pain, beauty and solitude, at other times an endless pregnancy, refusing to bear any fruit. A mission, a calling and a curse. All at once.

But only until recently. Only until the arrival of the thinking machines.

Today, with a single keystroke, one can whip up a haiku, military memoirs or a novel about climate apocalypse – depending on mood, time zone, or reading habits. The effort is minimal. Sometimes even non-existent. The language: impeccable (so they say). The originality: roughly zero.

And yet the text is there. Black letters on a white background. Outwardly indistinguishable from any other written word. Smoothed out, confidently displayed before the eyes of its proud creator. Polished.

Well then, where is all this heading?

In 1935, Walter Benjamin – the unwitting prophet of the new world of mechanical production – wrote one of the most perceptive elegies about the death of art as it had “always” been: essentially, a kind of “shamanic” practice. According to him, the main consequence of technical reproducibility is the death of the aura – that halo of magical transcendence which had long been considered a defining trait of true art. In its place comes a flood of mass-produced artifacts: paintings resembling postcards, performances reduced to film. Art becomes massified, accessible, proudly displayed in the living room under the slogan “I have taste too.” The only thing that remains unchanged is the eternal debate over who “gets it” and who doesn’t.

But that, of course, is a completely different topic.

What Benjamin likely never imagined was that a day would come when the same fate would befall the last remaining bastion of humanity – the realm of words, of language, of preserved knowledge.

Today we live in a time when machine-generated composition is not only possible, but quietly preferred. The aura of the literary work, once tied to the trembling pulse of solitude, now glows coolly from one of millions of cloud servers – copyable, formatted, translated into 137 languages, including Klingon, Pig Latin, or “Shaikespearean English.”

So we are left with only one question:

What happens to literature when it can be produced so easily, cheaply, and impersonally?

The scenarios I will offer are just a few among hundreds – if not more.

Scenario 1: The Golden Flood (or: when everyone writes everything)

Let us imagine a world in which machine-generated literature is the dominant mode of writing. In this brave new future, the reader will not search for a book – they will order it, in their own image and likeness. And the system will deliver it instantly: a novel in the style of Gabriel García Márquez, but with elements of Elon Musk; a Stoic treatise in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius, adapted for readers who’ve mistaken bar fights for character-building; a science fiction trilogy with eco-Marxist subplots, written by a simulated George R.R. Martin.

Writing will no longer be discovery. It will become configuration.

Books will be something like playlists: personalised, unmemorable, instantly generated.

Reading will turn into a mirror act – the consumer of the text will absorb a version of themselves, shaped into words.

In this world, human authors will become anachronistic craftsmen. Something like blacksmiths in the age of 3D printing. Or monks in the era of WiFi. They still exist – they’re interviewed for documentaries. And they write “authentic” things – with typos and existential pain. Some of them are even good. But they are no longer necessary.

The market will tolerate them the way it tolerates handmade soap: they’ll be something charming, expensive, and essentially unnecessary.

Or, to sum up: while in Benjamin’s era the aura of the artwork was fading, in the era of algorithmic reproduction it is the writer’s unrest that fades.

And, honestly, how many will bother to mourn it?

Scenario 2: The Literary Zoo (or: human writing as cultural relic)

In this scenario, the writer does not disappear – they become an object of care.

Literature is divided into two kinds:

1.   Functional prose – produced by machines for market needs.

2.   Texts with aura – generated by humans, crafted in analogue fashion, irrationally revered.

Readers attend live writing events, where real people compose texts in real time, sometimes with visible sweat. New independent magazines appear: Unsupported Text, No Algorithm, or The Handwritten Monthly, trading in certified human-made texts. Each issue contains works “verified through neural audit and with no AI involvement whatsoever.”

Prices go up.

Libraries install “Human Writing” sections, separated from the “normal” ones by velvet ropes. University courses teach “Organic Prose from the 19th to the 21st Century.”

In this timeline, writing becomes artisanal, almost religious, vaguely performative. Its value is inversely proportional to its efficiency. The human writer becomes the tradition itself. It is preserved not out of necessity, but reverence. Literature becomes a kind of spiritual echo in a practical world.

Of course, there’s a market for all this – there will always be some nostalgic elite demanding their literature pure and slow. Like people who buy sourdough bread made by monks, or custom fountain pens from Prague. But make no mistake – this is museum culture.

The human author is no longer a producer. They are the performer of an imposing, high-risk role.

Scenario 3: Assimilation (or: Prompting as the new authorial practice)

Now let us consider the most likely scenario: symbiosis between human and machine.

In this world, authors don’t disappear. They evolve. They become curators of voice, editors of intent, engineers of rhythm. The writing process becomes a game of calls and responses between human intuition and machine fluency.

The writer begins with a kind of impulse – a fragment, a tone, a memory. The machine returns a dozen stylistic iterations. The writer selects one, deletes five, rewrites three, and reprograms the rest. Over time, a hybrid emerges: a text that is neither purely human nor purely synthetic, but consciously layered.

In this mode, originality becomes a navigational skill, not an inherent right.

Authorship loses its romantic mystique, but gains new possibilities:

– The haiku writer becomes the author of multilingual microfiction.

– The philosopher writes real-time dialectics, with multiple references and footnotes, displaying scholarship never actually acquired.

– The poet merges their subconscious with a style-transfer machine trained on Sylvia Plath and hip-hop lyrics.

In this world, the author is not a creator of texts, but a composer of attention.

Benjamin would likely be horrified. He imagined mechanical production as a threat to the spiritual uniqueness of the work. But perhaps something else is true: that the aura does not die – it migrates.

From the physical object – to the creative intent.

From the sentence – to the system behind it.

From the author – to the composer of meaning.

Death of the author? No. This is simply their digitalisation.

What we lose and what we keep

In all three scenarios, something is lost. But what exactly?

Literature does not disappear. On the contrary: it floods us like an unstoppable torrent.

Beauty doesn’t disappear either. Machines are already capable of producing far more palpable beauty than the average writer on a newsletter platform.

But what we lose is the resistance – the inner friction that once made writing meaningful. The long silence. The hesitation. The doubt. The failure to express something. Once upon a time, all these things gave moral weight to the written word. Style wasn’t just technique – it was a sign of inspiration. When every sentence is smooth and instantaneous, where does the gravity of writing go?

But let’s not rush to despair. This isn’t the first time humanity stands horrified before another testament to its boundless inventiveness. Perhaps we’ll develop new forms of resistance. Perhaps future writers won’t struggle with language, but with meaning, with context, with truth. Perhaps the aura of literature will not be found in its origin, but in the impulse it sparks:

Why this word, right now, strikes me with such force? Regardless of who – or what – wrote it.

If he were alive in the era of TikTok and ChatGPT novelists, Benjamin might have said:

Every era dreams the art it deserves.

We’ve always dreamed of abundance. Now we must learn to endure it.

The Hand-Forged Paragraph

At the start of the 20th century, most nails were already made by machine. But there were still people – a few – who forged them by hand. Not because they were stronger. But because they were theirs.

So it will be with writing. In a world where texts can be generated endlessly, some of us will go on writing slowly, clumsily, and painfully. With no guarantee of success. With no need for approval. We will write because we want to express something no one has asked for. Because no machine – no matter how eloquent – will ever feel the fear before the blank page. Because the aura – that faint, flickering shadow Benjamin mourned – perhaps survives in one single, peculiar place: not in the text, but in the decision to write it yourself.