Georg Simmel, the German sociologist writing around 1910, observed that every new medium of communication doesn't just carry content — it restructures who counts as a valid speaker. The telegraph made distance irrelevant to authority; the telephone made voice the new credential. What Simmel couldn't have predicted, but what his framework predicts perfectly, is what happens when the medium starts generating its own speakers. When an AI drafts your email, writes your argument, or summarizes the meeting you missed, the question of who is speaking becomes genuinely unanswerable in the old sense — and that ambiguity isn't a glitch. It's the medium doing what mediums always do: renegotiating the social contract around voice. The practical consequence is specific: in high-stakes communication, the person who cannot be asked to defend the reasoning behind their words is no longer, in Simmel's sense, a participant in discourse. They're a relay station. The discipline isn't to write everything yourself — it's to know, before you send anything, whether you can defend the argument as your own if challenged. Not to perform authorship. To actually hold the position.

Take the last substantive message you sent with AI assistance — if someone pushes back on its core claim tomorrow, what's your second sentence?

Drawing from German sociology / Philosophy of communication (Georg Simmel) — Georg Simmel (Soziologie, 1908; 'Sociology of the Senses', 1907)