Sorry mum. It’s no secret that in my homosexual singledom I’m on Grindr, a gay hook-up app. Here’s how it works: You chat to someone and in less than a blink, they’re at your front door. However, in the intervening time between starting a conversation and arrival is a lot of chat. By the time they’re here, I know everything about them. Dick pics, kinks, tattoos, childhood traumas (we all have ‘em) – and even one time, a minute-by-minute itinerary of what they’d like to get up to. Wild.

When we finally get around to having sex, I know so much about them that the fun we’re meant to be having feels less fun. Nothing has been left to the imagination. All expectations have been set. What is there left to talk about? To discover? To explore? It becomes a transaction and less of an experience. Less of a story. Right now, so much storytelling is this way. Brands’ desire for efficiency is killing creativity’s ability to deliver distinction and memorability on social.

We’re in a world of creative surplus defined by algorithms: Spotify pays artists for completed listens so tracks are shorter; there’s so much content on Netflix that if we’re disinterested within the first two minutes we’ll find something else; social posts are giving away the punchline before we’ve heard the joke; and endless trails of remade films divulge every detail before we’ve even stepped foot in the cinema. This is our copy-and-paste culture.