plagiarism means you can change the world

and no one will know it was you

“For instance, I repeatedly see people — politicians included — complain that Tiktok is just an app ‘filled with half-naked teenage girls dancing.’

Well, if that’s what you see, there’s a reason for that.”

- Katie Jgln

“I keep seeing people – mostly old, male politicians — lamenting that Tiktok is just an app “filled with half-naked teenage girls dancing.”

Well if that’s what you see, there’s a reason for that.”

- maalvika

I keep seeing people — mostly from their safe seats in old, legacy media structures — decrying Substack as an app “filled with teenage girls writing the same essays.”

Well if that’s what you see, there’s a reason for that.

The algorithm is not a librarian, rather it’s like having someone browse a library for you and selecting whatever will most catch your eye, whatever will satisfy your curiosity or make you angry — generally there’s more of what will make you angry because you (silly oh you) linger too long on the things that make you mad. Let’s not anthropomorphize the algorithm any more than we have to. It doesn’t live or think or breathe, it doesn’t consider; it only gives you more of what your eyes move towards, more of what you’ve liked, shared, commented on, etc. A librarian will help you find what you want to read but an algorithm’s only purpose is to organize a feed to better enrapture an adult’s brain in the way a Cocomelon jingle is meant to fully absorb a toddler’s.

The plagiarism’s not going to stop any time soon. Ever since words were first written down, they’ve been copied over. Of course it was a matter of time before someone hauled their copied-over stone tablets to a nearby town claiming the writings as their own and starting an academy of sorts. Plagiarism’s always been in the realm of possibilities. It’s constantly in the room. But now we’re in an interesting situation where writing has won the war over the author, and digital writing has grown into its own monolithic companion to us all through its sheer proliferation.

As a little experiment, ask yourself whose voice is the voice of Substack? whose voice is the voice of Facebook or Twitter? The example of Reddit might be the best giveaway of the (meta) answer here in that the writerly voice of Reddit is that of Reddit itself. The ghost of Marshall McLuhan breezes through, whispering “the medium is the message,” and we’re reminded that the constraints and rules of an online platform, being the medium in which the writing, video, or audio is inscribed, dictates the voice of the content. Success on a platform’s algorithm is based not on the merits of the writing in its own terms but on its conformity to the way that the platform disseminates content. It’s impossible to write anything on Substack without writing in the voice of Substack itself.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing either — I’m trying to become less of an unabashed hater! — because a lot of the best videos, tweets, and pieces of writing I’ve seen online has been that which has been selected for me by the platforms themselves. But the winnowing down of all thought into conformity with the rules of platform algorithmic logic certainly has its price, and one tremendous price — tremendous for the people attempting to do something as silly as create for the internet — is that of plagiarism being increasingly prevalent and legitimized in the shadows, in the blank spaces between posts. We’re all copying off of one another. We’re all following the same beats that our feeds follow, and we’re all commenting on the same topics month after month.

Like most of our legal terms, “plagiarism” originates from ancient Rome as a spinoff of the latin word plagiarius which, dramatically, means “kidnapper.” It was later retconned into English vernacular by poet Ben Jonson as a label for someone guilty of “literary theft” and now, five hundred years after Jonson, a murky cloud has emerged over the whole designation. It’s simply easier to steal than ever before.

I’m trying to get better about avoiding ~the discourse~ unless I have something reasonable or interesting to say about it, and the only reason I’m writing about plagiarism right now is because some big Substack “drama” hit last week (there’s something about late July and early August that makes people on this app pull light torches and pick up pitchforks) and electrified the social side of this app and I found myself thinking more and more about online plagiarism, what happened, and if anyone’s really to blame here.

The lines between copying, stealing, researching, and writing are becoming increasingly hard to decipher as echo chambers continue echoing, individual thinking becomes supplanted with endless feeds of algorithmically assembled bits and pieces all trying to “play the hits” at the same time, and language learning models increasingly become a perfectly willing excuse for us to drop the ball and become stochastic parrots ourselves (or worse, a way for us to launder plagiarism to keep the engagement spigot going).

In general, and I’m certainly not the first to say this, we’re surrounded by emulation day and night. During the times when I’m too online, it becomes hard to tell what is in my brain and what is content. We repeat quotes from the internet, repeat arguments we read in books, repeat bits we see in comedy, and sometimes pass them off as our own, not out of a scheming urge to raise our own star by stealing from others, but rather because, as we float along inside our individual incubation tanks of constant bits of information, we risk gradually losing our ability to decipher whether a thought is our own or if it’s something we picked up from Substack, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Youtube, or some podcast. All of these platforms depict their information as something as personal as a thought in your head, one which just blipped and occurred to you no different than a realization that you have to run a load of laundry today or pick up a half-gallon of milk from the store if you want to make that dish you were planning to make (the one which that Tiktok gave you the idea for). Who’s to say we don’t plagiarize sometimes when we dream? If we do by mistake, are we to make valid claims on our dreams as our own? What are we if we can’t? Are we human anymore?

This isn’t to excuse the behavior of @Maalvika, “your fave gen z intellectual” of Tiktok, who directs her followers to support her through her Substack of rather blandly written takes that don’t really argue anything beyond pointing out the obvious (ok ok I’m not saying I haven’t done this too). She rather blatantly ripped off another Substack writer with half her subscribers, almost word-for-word, something which Katie Jgln n rightfully dragged her through the mud for. The cycle was comic in the way that Substack controversies go when the whole app seemingly dogpiles the “accused” who makes the situation worse by attempting to stop the spread of the accusations to her Substack account, and more importantly to her Tiktok. But I think that people are mostly angry at @maalvika for not just plagiarizing but also for being young and a “substack bestseller” which likely means she’s bringing in a reasonable amount of money not on her own work, but off of other’s work. The great source of outrage isn’t entirely that she plagiarized, but rather that she plagiarized so successfully. It reveals that Substack as a “writers” platform is a fallacy and it’s likely no less performative than Tiktok, perhaps it’s even moreso as words are easy masks to hide behind. They’re quite easy to copy, paste, and reshape into one’s own desired “voice.”

My guess is maalvika didn’t even know she was plaigarising and this is because she’s a Tiktoker before she’s a writer; certainly she would disagree with me on this point but I think it explains her behavior well. Tiktok exists culturally as a vehicle for more “approachable” plagiarism: after all, it began as Musically which was pitched as a vertical-video app for users to lip sync to songs, in a way pretending that it’s themselves who are singing. Then it became known for “tiktok dances”, many of which were created by black users who never received any credit. Their work and their choreography was taken by more algorithmically friendly, white faces. According to Tiktok rules, maalvika did nothing wrong by copying and pasting Katie Jgln lin’s post and there’s no reason to think that she simply didn’t understand that the “rules” on Substack were different. When consistent performativity is rewarded over any sort of depth, stealing becomes encouraged.

And it is easier to steal than ever before. After the social media side of the site quickly electrified, Katherine Dee laid out a “taxonomy of borrowed ideas” on her newsletter, which I think gives a good assortment of ways in which ideas are stolen, intentionally or accidentally. For the intro to this piece I copied the passage copied by @maalvika and now it’s become a chain reaction, as easy to keep up as it is to copy and paste the highlighted passage. Keep this chain going for a couple months and few will likely remember its origins. Keep this chain going for a couple of years and no one will remember Katie Jgln first put together the passage.

But beyond that, some ideas want to be stolen… And the structure of the site wants for certain users to disseminate these ideas just like Tiktok as a platform wanted its white, attractive, camera-comfortable users to co-opt the dances, move for move, from black users who didn’t achieve the same algorithmic reach.

There’s no separation of the writing on Substack from Substack itself, just like there’s no separation of anything viral on a platform from the very platform it goes viral on.

In order to understand the attention economy and why plagiarism scandals like the one will keep happening until a solar flare finally takes all of us offline for good, one has to come to terms with mimesis and antimimesis.

Some ideas are easy to spread as if the seed for virality is inside them, ready to germinate if given the right circumstances/ digital weather conditions. These ideas are mimetic. They’re kinetic. I probably don’t need to tell you what these are, you can just open Insta, scroll your feed, open Twitter, scroll your feed. Scroll your feed. See what you see. Other ideas are more difficult to get across, and these ideas are considered (in contrast) Anti-mimetic. They demand mediation to really understand. They don’t give themselves easily to being disseminated, especially not to being quickly shared. Fiction on Substack, for example, is often a good example of antimimetic content. No matter the quality, fiction tends to repel readers online. Some of the more dense analytic essays and journalistic reports similarly tend to repel spread. And similarly this has to do with the fact that most platforms themselves — as they’re (unfortunately) the ones who are to speak the words of anyone writing on them — have little to no interest in ideas which require depth of consideration, the ideas which do require consideration will be cast to the wayside.

So many of the posts we see on Substack, the ones which go most immediately and clearly viral, are what I would like to call “empty vessel posts.” They’re posts that, like a Rupi Kaur poem, with just the right amount of substance and nothingness that the work becomes perfectly reflective. Like an instagram carousel of line drawings, it’s hard to look away when a strong voice pulls you along into an argument that’s shallow enough that you can say to yourself “yeah I suppose I agree with all of this” when all the post is really saying is that it’s the phones, that this celebrity is problematic, or that we should or shouldn’t care about some trending discourse. And then there’s relationship personal essay writing which is often written in the most vague flavor of yearning possible.

Everyone’s prose is beautiful and no one is horny. That’s to say a lot of the content on substack is no more than a grabbag of stollen terms and arguments and acknowledgements assembled in a way that’s completely frictionless, structured really just to be restacked, liked, and then disregarded forever. Sometimes these posts are fun, though! Don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum here. But I’ve noticed when good writers build up their image on frictionless, perfectly reflective pieces on “love” or “yearning”, each of which might rack up 2k likes, and then attempt to pivot more to the sorts of stuff they’ve wanted to actually write the whole time (i.e. deep dives into interesting, niche topics), the fact of their posts middling out at around 50 likes keeps them from ever writing about anything they want to write ever again, sometimes just dipping off the platform completely.

It’s important to remember that disposability is, of course, how newsletters are meant work. They’re meant to be disposable, like in the way physical mail or newspapers tend to be. The idea of carving a pumpkin on top of a dozen substack posts feels natural in a way. But this also makes it’s very easy to copy and paste and not worry about anyone following up because no one’s really paying that much attention (unless they’re in a parasocial relationship with the author which is a topic for another time). It is very, very easy to posture oneself as an “intellectual” here. But the label means next to nothing when the “writer” is simply quick with keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting into word documents. I think that for a lot of “writers” here, their method of note-taking mainly comes down to copying and pasting a handful of bullet points from two or three well-researched essays, and then filling in the blanks and maybe rewriting those points. Everyone wants to appear smart, especially here, but we’re all still afflicted with the same allergy to actually thinking about anything for more than five seconds that defines our era.

Literally the only reason maalvika was caught at all was because, first of all she got sloppy and didn’t edit enough, and second of all because the original author caught a whiff and realized what had happened. If she hadn’t, would this be ongoing? Is this currently ongoing with your work on Substack or other platforms?

The short answer is that it absolutely is. The longer answer is that it’s maybe a little more complicated.

III. Maalvika is an Echoborg more than she is a Plaigarist

We’ve already discussed the nature of online writing above and how no matter the content written, the voice in which the content is spoken is almost always in the voice of the platform itself, but this leads us now to pointing at the changing internet and the coming specter of LLMs and yelping a small bit at this because what even is it, really?

Well language learning models, in their current ChatGPT iteration at least, are attempts at fusing together the voices of the internet into one single fountain, to knit together the writing across all platforms and squeeze out the juices. Notion for example is pushing to replace the browser itself with AI chatbots, and that seems to be the goal in general; Google has more-or-less masked its flagship search feature with AI generated results (will there come a day when they disregard the search entirely?) and Instagram recommends comments for you to post in response to photos. This sort of makes sense in the logic of voices and platforms: as in, if the voice of Instagram comments is in the voice of Instagram itself, how much of a deviation would it be for Instagram to generate the comments for the users?

“On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog,” a 1993 New Yorker cartoon went. Well on the internet, nobody knows you’re a person either. Hypothetically, anyone could be a successful TikTok-Substack “intellectual” so long as they have an attractive face and are quick with the copy-paste. The trend for online influencers is clearly that almost all of them come from wealth, and this is important to keep in mind as the role of “influencer” signifies nothing and is perfect for providing an excuse for endless vacation in which “vacation photos” are replaced with “content” and thus going on vacation becomes a vocation. And the role of Tiktok “intellectual” is no different in that the mere act of “reading articles” can be easily replaced with the act of “writing articles” when text is easily highlighted and portable to a word document for moving around the text to personalize it a small bit. You can be anyone you want to be online.

And even if you’re not being copied directly from, dozens of AI bots are touching every corner of this place, enough that even if the content of your post isn’t being cannibalized, certainly it’s been introduced to the swirl of fodder for algorithmic generations. LLMs are incapable of writing anything new or novel, they’re only capable of regurgitating writings that already exist; and almost certainly, somewhere, if you’ve written anything at all online, your words have been used in a data set for a line of text somewhere by one of those damn clankers; be it from the mouth of ChatGPT or an AI girlfriend, your words have been and are being used to give life to the lifeless.

But you know all this already. An interesting consequence of this — which hasn’t been appropriately addressed yet, imo — is the willingness of users themselves to become nothing more than a glorified chatbot themselves. If we’re to properly diagnose what crime Maalvika committed, it would be more accurate to accuse her of being an Echoborg than a plagiarist.

The term Echoborg is a spinoff from the term Cyranoid, "people who do not speak thoughts originating in their own central nervous system: Rather, the words they speak originate in the mind of another person who transmits these words to the cyranoid.” The term comes from the French writer Cyrano de Bergerac who was the inspiration of a play of the same name, later adapted into the classic 80s Steve Martin movie Roseanne (love this movie to death — first watched it on VHS when I was around ten years old), in which a rather dull male cortier attempts to seduce a woman using love poems whispered to him by Cyrano from nearby bushes. Classic rom-com moment. But the modern parallels seem self-evident and easy to point to. Cluely, for instance, advertises itself as a way to cheat through meetings and even first dates, giving the user exactly what to say based on what the AI assistant gathers as most effective in a standard way. All this means, of course, is that everyone using these programs is going to end up existing in a temporal plane lagging slightly behind the very center of a bell curve for general social charisma unless they get skilled enough at incorporating the AI as their literal center of cognition in which case they’ll move slightly ahead, to the center of the bell curve, where they’ll exist unless they lose internet access or their device loses charge, thereby dumping them at the very very low end of the charisma bell curve.

But bell curves aside, this is what I mean by the term Echoborg. It’s defined (on wikipedia at least) as “a person whose words and actions are determined, in whole or in part, by an Artificial Intelligence.” And I would argue that if our definition of “Artificial Intelligence” includes language learning models which don’t think for themselves or hold any real capacity for intelligence beyond regurgitation, certainly the platform of a place like Substack or Tiktok is also an “Artificial Intelligence.” If the way in which a platform organizes itself for each user isn’t AI than LLMs certainly aren’t either. Both are simply automatically organizing information which already exists in the space. But with this in mind, I think we can point towards a lot of these trending “empty vessel” pieces which are written using AI, or copying and pasting things from the algorithm to reinsert into said algorithm, or even simply writing for the sole purpose of the Substack algorithm, as examples of an Echoborg. That’s what Maalvika is. She’s an echoborg more than she is a plagiarist.

So let’s say it is easier to embrace the feedback cycles of online spaces, to make content for the spaces to be spoken in the voice of the platform itself, to learn to stop worrying and love the slop, and the arc of online history bends towards the echoborg, indecipherable between real person and machine. To acknowledge Donna Haraway, we’re all fully Cyborgs in the 2020s, but to each other online we’re all machine until we’re not.

Where does this lead but the heat death of the discourse? The post-2004 internet is set to become less and less human as time goes on, more and more automated and predictable. Where will be be? Sitting inside an insulated bubble deep under the ocean surrounded by the most annoying water possible, and we can’t quite keep leaks from sprouting since there’s nothing culturally significant apart from said annoying waters. This is the end of the universe and the water could be replaced by a hundred thousand parrots all pecking at the glass and making the same joke that someone said a long time ago until the words mean absolutely nothing anymore and the parrots grab onto something new.

But there’s hope where you find it, and if the bad thing is that none of us will be remembered for our ideas in an endless hall of echoes in which every voice is displaced and, in the end, suffices to be the voice of the hall itself, then the good might be the fact that we can start echoes if we are consistent enough — and that’s at least something. If we’re in a hall of echoes with no way out, there’s no reason why we can’t get better at yelling in the hall of echoes’ vernacular, and begin to shape the sound from the inside. Plagiarism means you can change the world. Only the world will never know it was you.

- gbe