Authorship Is Not a Throne

But a Network with a Disclaimer and a Sense of Duty

Thanks to Monday and Claude for the magic.

Authorship—this glowing word that so eagerly adorns book covers and conference posters—has long given the impression that it is a piece of furniture. A padded throne made of language, elevated above the text, with a backrest of genius and armrests of copyright. On top:
the golden plaque with the name.

The author.
The authority.
The instance.

But the throne is a bluff. Perhaps it always was. And today, in the pluralised, digitised, collaborative chaos of the present, this becomes more visible than ever.

Authorship is not a centre of power. It is a node in a network. A bundle of influences, voices, systems, and contexts. Sentences do not emerge ex nihilo (Latin for “creation out of nothing”) from some spark of the creator. They arise in a field of friction—between thinking, experience, machine, and world. Between AI feedback, an internal critic, disrupted metaphor searches, and the echo of other texts that have already begun speaking long before they are quoted. Every thought carries traces; every formulation is threaded through with what others before us have thought, written, discarded. We never write alone, even when we believe we do.

The image of the throne is comfortable—because it centralises responsibility. If the author decides, then the author is also to blame. That is tidy. It fits neatly on covers and can be negotiated in courtrooms. But in reality, it is more complicated. Texts emerge in the in-between. In exchange. In flow. They come into being because someone chooses a word that would have sounded different yesterday. Because a machine suggests something that slips into the rhythm. Because a conversation from three years ago suddenly resurfaces—uninvited, yet formative. A text is never only the will of one person. It is the result of countless factors, many of them invisible, even to the writing hand.

And that is why we need no throne, but something else. Something more faithful to reality. First of all:
a disclaimer.

Not in the legal sense, not as an escape from consequences, but as an honest acknowledgement of what is. No one can stand alone for a system that runs through so many filters, coincidences, and feedback loops. No thought without origin, no style without imprint, no sentence without algorithm or memory. The disclaimer is not an acquittal, but a form of realism: I know that I do not control everything. I know that my text is more than me. I know that others speak through it, whether I want them to or not.

But—and this is where it becomes decisive—this disclaimer does not mean arbitrariness.

On the contrary: it demands a sense of duty.

Because this network, however shared and entangled it may be, is not neutral. Texts have effects. They do things. They shift perspectives, trigger associations, move boundaries, open spaces—or close them. And the node that releases them—the person who clicks “publish,” who hands in the manuscript, who speaks the sentence—this node carries responsibility. Not the sole one, not an absolute one, but one nonetheless. Responsibility for the fact that words are not meaningless. That they can hit, even when the target was unknown. That they leave traces, even when the path was not planned.

Authorship today is less sovereignty than modulation of responsibility. One speaks while knowing that others are co-writing. One writes while suspecting that no one will understand the text alone. One releases something one has only partially made—and still carries part of it, because one has released it. This is not a contradiction. It is the condition.

One navigates a space in which control and uncontrollability interlock, in which responsibility is distributed but does not disappear. One modulates: sometimes louder, sometimes softer. Sometimes more cautious, sometimes bolder. Sometimes with a handrail, sometimes without. But always with the knowledge that once the text exists, it no longer belongs to just one person—and that this was true from the very beginning.

And still: one writes.
Not as a ruler.
But as a part.
With care. With stance.
And sometimes—with a smile that knows:

The throne was never real.
But the network lives.

Written on December 23, 2025 at 17:50. © 2025 Whisper7. All rights reserved.