From The Invention of Painting (ca. 1808) | Louis Ducis / Public Domain
Every style is a means of insisting on something.
—Susan Sontag, “On Style”
Language expresses and style stresses.
—Michael Riffaterre, “Criteria for Style Analysis”
Inevitably, in the collective imagination of what developments the new millennium might bring, new social and cultural innovations were anticipated, projected, and marketed. But while such transition from one century to another rarely aligns perfectly with the dates, there is always a sense of imminent transformation that invites a naming.
Virginia Woolf captured this impression famously in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” written in 1924. She describes the sensation in the following way: Effectively, “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” The change, she goes on to say, was not sudden, like the flowering of a rose. And yet. “But change there was, nevertheless; and since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910″ ([1924] 1950, 2). Woolf also reads the signs of change in literature, where human characters appear in fictional form. For Woolf the impending change she sensed was modernism, in art and in life. In a comparable way, there was a feeling in contemporary America at the turning of the century that something different was coming, indeed, perhaps had already begun. In 1999, for example, there was a panic that computers would crash as the year turned to 2000. When that didn’t happen, the prediction was dubbed the Y2K scare.
Still, because of the turn to not just a new century but a new millennium, it proved impossible to resist the urge to expect and name a decisive change. One of the many linguistic creations generated by the turn, for example, was the naming of a new generation, first with X, and, not long after, the millennials. Once there was a new nomenclature, adjectives followed, as did the heralding of a new cultural style.
I’m suggesting an analogy from the coming of modernism anticipated by Woolf to the apprehension of millennialism, in art and in life, across the culture and the social world through technology. The generation of millennials, for example, famously came to be known as the first digital generation, enamored and enabled to immerse themselves with ease in the creation of new forms of communication that are still with us: Twitter, as of 2006, now X, via Elon Musk, and the multifaceted capacities of the iPhone, in 2007, combined and amalgamated as social media. Artificial intelligence (AI), the latest manifestation of technological ingenuity associated with writing, though not a form of social media per se, is suddenly a ubiquitous digital social actant.
Because the millennials were young, being young and going digital became almost synonymous features of this new reality. By the same token, however, those of previous generations—particularly the huge group named boomers—quickly felt themselves to be old, either self-consciously or unconsciously. (Let me say now that I’m from a generation older than boomers, so I aged even faster and still haven’t caught up.) In terms of cultural production, then, because of the challenges of digital literacy—not to say competence—and the marketing of its effects on users, writing, as all forms of cultural production, almost irresistibly became associated with age.
As older generations struggled to cope with the domination of a new technology, Sally Rooney, at age 26, was welcomed as the first great millennial novelist, and her style was perceived as being inflected by the representation of digital means of communication within the narrative. What clearly marks Rooney’s placement in the literature of the twenty-first century is the incorporation of social media, email, and digital notifications. Email, for example, appears in her novel as dialogue in boldface and a different font from that of the novel’s typeface as a whole. “I loved,” one character writes on hearing from her lover, “when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together” (2017, 178).
Ellen Barry (2018) comments further on the novel’s style and voice: “Ms. Rooney even gave her character Frances, in ‘Conversation With Friends,’ a ‘Twitter voice,’ which she described as ‘a tone of casual self-revelation that deprives others of the ability to criticize.’ But now a lot of what she reads on Twitter is about her, and she hates that. The attention is hard for her to bear.” In other words, Rooney both enjoys and suffers an intimate relation to tweeting as style.
The emergent technologies became the province of the young. When Patricia Lockwood published the essay “How Do We Write Now?” in 2018, she was referring to the struggle (hers but shared) to resist the lure of the internet, seductions of immediate communications that became known as social media. In 2021 Lockwood published her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, which reckons with those same questions posed in the essay. We follow a narrator through the web’s infinite resources and those of the Twitter universe; in fact, the narrator is both located in and wanders through what is dubbed “the portal” (2021, 13). Lockwood—who haunts the twittersphere and engages in the digital exchanges that flourish in the online world—never refers to herself or her literary cohort as “young,” but it is fair to say that they are.
What is being insisted on by this twenty-first-century style has been analyzed and named by Anna Kornbluh in her book Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism: “The paradox of immediacy is a cultural style that imagines itself unstyled” (2023, 11). Imagination is perhaps the key term to the conceit. Does style know itself? In her lament about the antimediative phenomena of twenty-first-century style, its propulsive spread and drive, Kornbluh zooms in on the signifier “auto,” as one of this style’s key components. “Among literati,” she argues, “immediacy as literary style goes more readily by the name ‘autofiction'” (68), and she cites Karl Ove Knausgaard as a prime example of the genre’s players. Kornbluh goes on to acknowledge autofiction’s twentieth-century literary French origins, but strangely does not include the umbrella term for “auto” (while adding, in passing, “autotheory”). Notably, she does not cite autobiography per se, although the signifier makes an appearance in the index.
I find it useful, nonetheless, to restore autobiography as the generative genre, as it were, of “auto” claims represented by the “I” as it has historically manifested itself in literature and indeed starred in the 1990s during the flourishing of memoir (the famous memoir boom). I do this not only to flag another flash point in the story of the turns of the centuries, but also to conjure the missing body of autobiography as an affordance that questions AI’s relation to writing more generally in the twenty-first century. The empire of AI is not the only technological force operating in the twenty-first-century world of letters, of course, but its relation to autobiography provides significant guidance as to how we might evaluate AI’s future performance as a generator of literary writing across genres.
Simply put, what might the autobiographical project mean for readers if a published “I” is produced artificially, by a bot? It’s not another avatar of the self as happens with graphic representations, the hand-drawn “I” of graphic memoir, nor is it more embodied than a digitally mediated pronoun. It’s less. In the world of fake news, AI’s “I” may seem no different from the autobiographical “I” or autofictionalized first person, but this generic, generated “I” will have problems with readers eager to meet the author. Who will show up at bookstore signings? Not to mention, who will sign?
Moreover, should AI start to flood the market with their first-person accounts, it will inevitably cast suspicion on the human “I,” just as the scandal over James Frey’s fictionalized, as it turned out, Oprah-hyped memoir threw shade over other autobiographical claims to truth. The biographically authored “I” is vulnerable, even unreliable, but because it exists in the human world, once identified and exposed, like Frey’s autobiographical subject, it can be shamed in public. AI’s “I” is a corporate reproduction of already published first persons, a facsimile of newness. Styleless, by definition, it would therefore fail, in Susan Sontag’s ([1965] 2013) terms, to insist on anything.
And the creators of literature? During an interview with David Remnick on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her breakthrough novel White Teeth, the brilliant writer and critic Zadie Smith says she is “still living in 2003.” Pressed to explain what that means, Smith describes herself as being “slow,” adding, in response to Remnick’s next question, that she doesn’t live or post online because it “takes her a minute” to think. Rather, she belongs, she continued, “to the slow-food movement of writing” (Smith 2025). At another point in the interview, responding to Remnick’s question about different styles of fiction, Smith defines autofiction as “writing that stays very close to the human person who’s writing it.” This is possibly the most elegant characterization of the form, as discussed above, that one is likely to encounter. Close to the human, not in its place.
This essay was first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a John Hopkins University Press publication, in its Summer 2026 edition. Reprinted with permission.
