The platform/profile economy entrenches the idea that each individual author must be a brand. Success in this environment entails building a brand that is part content part personality, around which a fan base or community can form.

Achieving this, however, brings not the freedom to say whatever one likes, but new forms of constraint. One feels beholden not only to the expectations of others, but to one’s own past self and the success that past self has enjoyed.

Repetition is then rewarded over innovation and exploration.

“Cancel culture” addresses only the fear of reaction. But what holds many writers and thinkers back is the fear of being seen to have changed. The fear of betraying a past successful self.

A new, healthy creative and intellectual culture or avant garde would emphasise change over consistency, unpredictability over reliability, unknowability and ambiguity over clarity of position. Chaos, frankly, over neatly ordered development and entrenched stances.

This can only be achieved by a kind of self-sacrifice: abandoning the very idea of the writer as personality, as brand, as figure.

The future is a chaos of texts, with no-one to claim them.