So yeah, all of this, except I have a real hard time dealing with the notion of presenting someone who plagiarized someone else’s text as a parrot, a mirror refracting someone else’s thoughts, a confused person who simply didn’t realize the rules of writing civility frown on this sort of thing because, you see, in the land they’re from that’s the custom.
This all makes the plagiarist into a far more interesting thing than I suspect she really is. An ingenue misunderstanding the complex decorum and committing an unwitting faux pas. A new thing that is more and less than a mere person, an AI girlfriend of a person who just runs her code, not able to contemplate its potential moral implications.
Yet I’m pretty sure it’s a more banal thing than this, and less Black-Mirror-Poetic. After all, even if one is ‘a TikToker’, one is also a human person. And has presumably heard of the concept of copying in other contexts. Maybe in school, idk.
In the world of Content Creation, two archetypes shine most clearly - those Trying To Say Something, something of their own, no matter how much their thoughts naturally grow watered by the Global Discourse, and those trying to salvage the most effective material in order to Make Engaging Content. The latter group cares little for the process of fermentation that lets us transform the things we read, see and experience into our own thoughts - they haven’t the time, you see. The mill must keep churning.
This is also why they grow larger audiences, which is again what makes the people trying to say something, who are largely saying it to an empty room (or a sparsely populated one at best) really really mad.
And this is hardly weird. When you make pins and another maker makes a suspiciously similar pin that’s frustrating. When Zara makes a suspiciously similar pin, that’s profoundly infuriating. It’s not simply ‘hey you copied my work!!’. It’s more... ‘You have ALL THAT, and you still want the tiny scrap I pulled together with my own hands?! Really?!’
But that is part of the mechanism - those who take without qualms don’t see why they should care about the integrity of someone else’s work. And we’ve organized society so that it is this very quality that lets them always win.
So this is an excellently written, cutting piece, and it has got me wondering (as good writing often does)! I’m caught on this line: “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.”
The way Substack disseminates content is by offering readers three main mechanisms to engage with posts: like, comment, restack. So then, the success of a piece is not based on how readable it is (and by this I mean how worthy it is of being read, which is just my way of saying “the merits”), but how easy to engage with it is. In this way, it makes sense that the most viral posts are the most inflammatory (lots of comments) or the most benign (full of easily restackable lines), right?
But this is deeply troubling to me because engaging with a piece of writing on here doesn’t actually require reading it (if you’re just liking it or restacking the whole thing) or examining its quality critically (Because who cares how this problematic piece is written? I’m too busy typing my furious rebuttal in the comments! If it’s awful, even better! More fodder!). Everyone on Substack opts in to being perceived and engaged with— two core elements of any social media platform— because they desire perception and engagement. If we didn’t, we’d fuck off somewhere else alone because really, reading and writing don’t require an audience. Which makes me wonder, are people really reading all of the stuff they engage with, or do they just want to engage with it to imply that they are? And if it’s the latter, how do they make judgments about what it’s “cool” to be perceived as reading/thinking about?
There are “trendy” topics and ideas, like yearning (as you said) or AI (probably also as you said… this is meta, I feel like I can’t remember if this idea is my own or lifted from your essay), but can a person actually force their brain to “follow the trend” by having creative thoughts on certain things at will? Surely not, right? Could that be another reason to explain why people end up plagiarizing? Because, in a desperate attempt to be perceived as “on trend,” they force “new thoughts” on old topics out of their poor, tired, largely uninterested brains, and those thoughts aren’t so new after all?
If this is the case, the ending image of the echo hall sort of comforts me. These voices will be absorbed into other, existing echoes (their origins), but other, genuinely interested and thus instinctively creative voices might stand on their own and create a new sound echoing, waiting to be amplified. And even if they don’t get credit, no one does, so isn’t it enough to hear your ideas in the hallway at all?
I think you're right about all the points, and I think most of the people who treat substack like social media don't read as much as those who treat substack as a newsletter platform, i.e. only engaging by checking their email and actually reading.
And you're spot on with the second to last paragraph. That's the risk of being too online where you stop being able to tell between "on trend" and "new thoughts", as you describe it.
I think the hall of echoes is a good thing and a bad thing. Writers like Matthew Yglacias prove that no matter how knuckleheaded you are, if you get up to write three-four times a week every week for 20 years, you can eventually make a substantial impact on the world, and hopefully in a way that's much better for the world than Yglacias. However the flipside of this is that the loudest echoes are the most dramatic, or the most reaching, echoes, and to make them one might feel pressure to change their voice into something else, and by repeating that echo making a couple times every week for a handful of years, there's a real risk that the author becomes someone completely different and reshaped by the algorithmic processes of reaction and engagement — and that's truly a very scary thing, imo.
Enjoyed reading this piece! I was particularly struck by the imagery of "the endless hall of echoes in which every voice is displaced" at the very end, creating anonymity behind "world-changing" ideas. Though there remains the irony that the echoborgs, plagiarists, and AI writers dig out this chamber to be recognized as a distinguished voice on these platforms (imo). At the end of the day, I think it's people's desire to be seen, heard, and followed on the internet that pushes them toward conformity in the algorithmic sea, ultimately drowning out their own voice. Personally, I don't subscribe to the idea of art/writing needing to be necessarily "pure and 100% original;" however, I think there is a line of intention or purpose that gets crossed.
I think you're right about that—people want to fit in with the social whole that they see on the internet, and as the internet fills up with more bots, the (natural) response is to conform to that, right? I also don't think there's any critically acclaimed art that's 100% pure and original tbh (maybe any 4 year old's drawing of a house could be considered 100% pure and original) and I think the line of intention goes alongside a line of a consistent practice, and the thought, intention, and practice are essential to the work over a long period of time because it's usually the combination most capable of creating something actually new and not a reheated take cobbled together from six or seven tweets
absolutely diabolical opener mate, i just knew this piece was a banger after that
you bring up a really interesting point about how every social space has an in built amount of copying and emulation, possibly the same amount, but whether its a cover or plagiarism depends very much on the platform (copying tiktok dance is a cover, copying substack article is plagiarism) and that’s a uniquely cool way to frame it honestly!
there IS a meta to success (metrics wise) on substack just like literally anything else and as harsh as it is to admit it’s probably not so far from being metric-wise success strategies on medium or instagram or twitter or god forbid linkedin. it’s a social media like every other social media with a different coat of paint, and that’s ok! but it’s not heaven and not immune to cases like these :))) and with all that, is house to some awesome writers like yourself. thanks for your take Mr. Glue
haha thanks yeah i thought it was a funny way to open the discussion
i think that as we delve more deeply into a social climate where the private is the public and the public private, everything is going all topsy turvy and in many ways the old lines of "plagiarism" or "covering" are blurring with the real world habit we all have of picking up social cues from one another.
there's a meta to success online, absolutely, but there's certainly also a meta for success in the real world (only it's not, rightfully perhaps, calculated or put down into numbers); the replacement of that real social world with the platform economy means that while we can keep track of our successes through metrics based on strangers' impressions of us, the real world's lack of metrics the anxiety of not understanding like we might online engagement drives us away from one another, making everyone a little more antisocial
My husband wrote a thing recently that feels like this pieces cousin, removed from the substack discourse. On humans defining characteristic being idea generation. All this has me thinking the whatsherfaces of TikTok and Instagram are the disrespected superspreaders that let humanities ideas germinate beyond the bubbles of the brainy.
There's this thing in gaming called "optimizing the fun out of the game". Once you find the opitmal way to play, the game ceases to be fun and it becomes a repetition of practiced moves over and over again. I can see this happening on social media as well. There are always going to be people who figure out how to "game" the platform; how to "abuse the meta", so to speak.
My main concern with the whole situation isn't the plagiarism. Like you said, it's inevitable. It's the direction we're slowly headed to (online): a bottomless pit of content that more or less cannibalizes itself. More and more "meta slaves" who just repeat the same ideas over and over. At some point the overall quality and richness of the Internet will go down. Going online won't be as fun anymore. You won't be able to discover something genuinely interesting (not original, but interesting). Just a void of content that mirrors itself.
I guess one hopeful way of looking at it is that there will always be people who don't conform. Perhaps they won't be as "big" and "trendy", but their ideas will reach their intended target. And because everything is cyclical, perhaps the AI-lovers will get fed up with slop and suddenly those who are popping off on social media will be the "authentic" ones. The algorithms will shift in their favor. In 2050 we'll all be making 2-hour-long video essays and nobody would even care about Sabrina Carpenter.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the scattered critical thoughts Hannah Arendt has on “intellectuals” and intellectualism as a mental activity. There may have been specific contexts informing her thoughts–the rise of Nazism, Martin Heidegger’s collaboration with Nazism, and less well-known her scathing critique of elite American’s stumbling and then management of the Vietnam War. I studied and am interested in social and cultural history and its central question what is the nature of time–how history flows around and into us and we into it. I read academic history books where they’re still debating the nature of the Roman Empire!!! Forget the present, it takes a LONG time to create a picture of the past. Much as the intellectuals Arendt is criticizing were certain of their grasp of reality, the algorithmic discourse is just as dangerous if not more so: Substack intellectuals. The thought makes me shudder because if past intellectuals got us into all kinds of quagmires…add the internet and that’s an infernal combination. I’m not anti-intellectual. But I’m most suspicious of it as an elite political project to recruit a mass base to their cause. Or as a grift to create revenue. Then there is the psychic damage all do this has caused and is all around us. Media has always been a medium that distorts our conception of reality but the internet’s story might be the apotheosis of it if there isn’t some guard against it.
delighted to say that your piece is the first i've read about plagiarism gate and i'm glad it was. it rings with integrity; thank you as ever friend for making sense lol
So yeah, all of this, except I have a real hard time dealing with the notion of presenting someone who plagiarized someone else’s text as a parrot, a mirror refracting someone else’s thoughts, a confused person who simply didn’t realize the rules of writing civility frown on this sort of thing because, you see, in the land they’re from that’s the custom.
This all makes the plagiarist into a far more interesting thing than I suspect she really is. An ingenue misunderstanding the complex decorum and committing an unwitting faux pas. A new thing that is more and less than a mere person, an AI girlfriend of a person who just runs her code, not able to contemplate its potential moral implications.
Yet I’m pretty sure it’s a more banal thing than this, and less Black-Mirror-Poetic. After all, even if one is ‘a TikToker’, one is also a human person. And has presumably heard of the concept of copying in other contexts. Maybe in school, idk.
In the world of Content Creation, two archetypes shine most clearly - those Trying To Say Something, something of their own, no matter how much their thoughts naturally grow watered by the Global Discourse, and those trying to salvage the most effective material in order to Make Engaging Content. The latter group cares little for the process of fermentation that lets us transform the things we read, see and experience into our own thoughts - they haven’t the time, you see. The mill must keep churning.
This is also why they grow larger audiences, which is again what makes the people trying to say something, who are largely saying it to an empty room (or a sparsely populated one at best) really really mad.
And this is hardly weird. When you make pins and another maker makes a suspiciously similar pin that’s frustrating. When Zara makes a suspiciously similar pin, that’s profoundly infuriating. It’s not simply ‘hey you copied my work!!’. It’s more... ‘You have ALL THAT, and you still want the tiny scrap I pulled together with my own hands?! Really?!’
But that is part of the mechanism - those who take without qualms don’t see why they should care about the integrity of someone else’s work. And we’ve organized society so that it is this very quality that lets them always win.
So this is an excellently written, cutting piece, and it has got me wondering (as good writing often does)! I’m caught on this line: “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.”
The way Substack disseminates content is by offering readers three main mechanisms to engage with posts: like, comment, restack. So then, the success of a piece is not based on how readable it is (and by this I mean how worthy it is of being read, which is just my way of saying “the merits”), but how easy to engage with it is. In this way, it makes sense that the most viral posts are the most inflammatory (lots of comments) or the most benign (full of easily restackable lines), right?
But this is deeply troubling to me because engaging with a piece of writing on here doesn’t actually require reading it (if you’re just liking it or restacking the whole thing) or examining its quality critically (Because who cares how this problematic piece is written? I’m too busy typing my furious rebuttal in the comments! If it’s awful, even better! More fodder!). Everyone on Substack opts in to being perceived and engaged with— two core elements of any social media platform— because they desire perception and engagement. If we didn’t, we’d fuck off somewhere else alone because really, reading and writing don’t require an audience. Which makes me wonder, are people really reading all of the stuff they engage with, or do they just want to engage with it to imply that they are? And if it’s the latter, how do they make judgments about what it’s “cool” to be perceived as reading/thinking about?
There are “trendy” topics and ideas, like yearning (as you said) or AI (probably also as you said… this is meta, I feel like I can’t remember if this idea is my own or lifted from your essay), but can a person actually force their brain to “follow the trend” by having creative thoughts on certain things at will? Surely not, right? Could that be another reason to explain why people end up plagiarizing? Because, in a desperate attempt to be perceived as “on trend,” they force “new thoughts” on old topics out of their poor, tired, largely uninterested brains, and those thoughts aren’t so new after all?
If this is the case, the ending image of the echo hall sort of comforts me. These voices will be absorbed into other, existing echoes (their origins), but other, genuinely interested and thus instinctively creative voices might stand on their own and create a new sound echoing, waiting to be amplified. And even if they don’t get credit, no one does, so isn’t it enough to hear your ideas in the hallway at all?
I think you're right about all the points, and I think most of the people who treat substack like social media don't read as much as those who treat substack as a newsletter platform, i.e. only engaging by checking their email and actually reading.
And you're spot on with the second to last paragraph. That's the risk of being too online where you stop being able to tell between "on trend" and "new thoughts", as you describe it.
I think the hall of echoes is a good thing and a bad thing. Writers like Matthew Yglacias prove that no matter how knuckleheaded you are, if you get up to write three-four times a week every week for 20 years, you can eventually make a substantial impact on the world, and hopefully in a way that's much better for the world than Yglacias. However the flipside of this is that the loudest echoes are the most dramatic, or the most reaching, echoes, and to make them one might feel pressure to change their voice into something else, and by repeating that echo making a couple times every week for a handful of years, there's a real risk that the author becomes someone completely different and reshaped by the algorithmic processes of reaction and engagement — and that's truly a very scary thing, imo.
Damn, the Rupi Kaur comparison was savage. I’m glad someone said it.
haha thanks, they felt too similar to not bring it up
Enjoyed reading this piece! I was particularly struck by the imagery of "the endless hall of echoes in which every voice is displaced" at the very end, creating anonymity behind "world-changing" ideas. Though there remains the irony that the echoborgs, plagiarists, and AI writers dig out this chamber to be recognized as a distinguished voice on these platforms (imo). At the end of the day, I think it's people's desire to be seen, heard, and followed on the internet that pushes them toward conformity in the algorithmic sea, ultimately drowning out their own voice. Personally, I don't subscribe to the idea of art/writing needing to be necessarily "pure and 100% original;" however, I think there is a line of intention or purpose that gets crossed.
I think you're right about that—people want to fit in with the social whole that they see on the internet, and as the internet fills up with more bots, the (natural) response is to conform to that, right? I also don't think there's any critically acclaimed art that's 100% pure and original tbh (maybe any 4 year old's drawing of a house could be considered 100% pure and original) and I think the line of intention goes alongside a line of a consistent practice, and the thought, intention, and practice are essential to the work over a long period of time because it's usually the combination most capable of creating something actually new and not a reheated take cobbled together from six or seven tweets
Excellent article. Immediate subscribe.
absolutely diabolical opener mate, i just knew this piece was a banger after that
you bring up a really interesting point about how every social space has an in built amount of copying and emulation, possibly the same amount, but whether its a cover or plagiarism depends very much on the platform (copying tiktok dance is a cover, copying substack article is plagiarism) and that’s a uniquely cool way to frame it honestly!
there IS a meta to success (metrics wise) on substack just like literally anything else and as harsh as it is to admit it’s probably not so far from being metric-wise success strategies on medium or instagram or twitter or god forbid linkedin. it’s a social media like every other social media with a different coat of paint, and that’s ok! but it’s not heaven and not immune to cases like these :))) and with all that, is house to some awesome writers like yourself. thanks for your take Mr. Glue
haha thanks yeah i thought it was a funny way to open the discussion
i think that as we delve more deeply into a social climate where the private is the public and the public private, everything is going all topsy turvy and in many ways the old lines of "plagiarism" or "covering" are blurring with the real world habit we all have of picking up social cues from one another.
there's a meta to success online, absolutely, but there's certainly also a meta for success in the real world (only it's not, rightfully perhaps, calculated or put down into numbers); the replacement of that real social world with the platform economy means that while we can keep track of our successes through metrics based on strangers' impressions of us, the real world's lack of metrics the anxiety of not understanding like we might online engagement drives us away from one another, making everyone a little more antisocial
My husband wrote a thing recently that feels like this pieces cousin, removed from the substack discourse. On humans defining characteristic being idea generation. All this has me thinking the whatsherfaces of TikTok and Instagram are the disrespected superspreaders that let humanities ideas germinate beyond the bubbles of the brainy.
Here’s his thing if you’re curious
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/definitive-guide-becoming-smartest-person-room-joe-burns-hftwe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via
thanks for sharing! will read as soon as i get a chance
Such an interesting take on this whole plagiarism drama!
There's an even simpler way to view this. Substack is an MMOG and you too are a player. The "echoborg play" is a good game move, but a bit windy.
this is a great way to view it
“echoborg war cry” inflicts 20 damage points and induces a state of rage in the opponent
or something like that
Precisely
wait this is the BEST TAKE i have seen on the whole situation
There's this thing in gaming called "optimizing the fun out of the game". Once you find the opitmal way to play, the game ceases to be fun and it becomes a repetition of practiced moves over and over again. I can see this happening on social media as well. There are always going to be people who figure out how to "game" the platform; how to "abuse the meta", so to speak.
My main concern with the whole situation isn't the plagiarism. Like you said, it's inevitable. It's the direction we're slowly headed to (online): a bottomless pit of content that more or less cannibalizes itself. More and more "meta slaves" who just repeat the same ideas over and over. At some point the overall quality and richness of the Internet will go down. Going online won't be as fun anymore. You won't be able to discover something genuinely interesting (not original, but interesting). Just a void of content that mirrors itself.
I guess one hopeful way of looking at it is that there will always be people who don't conform. Perhaps they won't be as "big" and "trendy", but their ideas will reach their intended target. And because everything is cyclical, perhaps the AI-lovers will get fed up with slop and suddenly those who are popping off on social media will be the "authentic" ones. The algorithms will shift in their favor. In 2050 we'll all be making 2-hour-long video essays and nobody would even care about Sabrina Carpenter.
Maybe. Idk. Wonderful piece!
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the scattered critical thoughts Hannah Arendt has on “intellectuals” and intellectualism as a mental activity. There may have been specific contexts informing her thoughts–the rise of Nazism, Martin Heidegger’s collaboration with Nazism, and less well-known her scathing critique of elite American’s stumbling and then management of the Vietnam War. I studied and am interested in social and cultural history and its central question what is the nature of time–how history flows around and into us and we into it. I read academic history books where they’re still debating the nature of the Roman Empire!!! Forget the present, it takes a LONG time to create a picture of the past. Much as the intellectuals Arendt is criticizing were certain of their grasp of reality, the algorithmic discourse is just as dangerous if not more so: Substack intellectuals. The thought makes me shudder because if past intellectuals got us into all kinds of quagmires…add the internet and that’s an infernal combination. I’m not anti-intellectual. But I’m most suspicious of it as an elite political project to recruit a mass base to their cause. Or as a grift to create revenue. Then there is the psychic damage all do this has caused and is all around us. Media has always been a medium that distorts our conception of reality but the internet’s story might be the apotheosis of it if there isn’t some guard against it.
delighted to say that your piece is the first i've read about plagiarism gate and i'm glad it was. it rings with integrity; thank you as ever friend for making sense lol
thank u thank u i thought it’d be funny