I feel like those of us who are longtime Video Essay Enjoyers™ have been aware something was suss about James Summerton (I remember when Lawrence called out Somerton for stealing their Hannibal essay years ago) for a while. But I think it’s cynical to reduce Hbomberguy’s vid to just a “dunk” when it’s more of an odyssey railing against how influencer and content culture devalues the work of culture critics, academics, and activists. As Harris said, it’s not a problem exclusive to Somerton, but a corrosive attitude baked into late capitalist “content” culture. The video is a clear exploration of the consequences of all media and art being flattened into “content” creates a system where the labor of marginalised creatives and storytellers are exploited and stolen by people with more privileges and resources. As someone who has witnessed rich tiktokers quote articles and posts I’ve written verbatim without credit to make money from their 1000s of followers, this video hit super hard for me. From James Somerton claiming the works of dead gay activists, to Charli D'Amelio building a career from stealing dances created by Black tiktokers - plagiarism is often inseparable from discrimination and exploitation of labor rights. Harris’ video is about how the nature of influencer content culture has further exacerbated the exploitative systems that already existed, wrapped up as YouTuber drama analysis. But I hope people don’t miss the forest for the trees and remember you should always be citing your sources, fact checking, and be very wary of people who don’t. And for the love of God, please stop getting your information exclusively from video essays, tiktoks and podcasts.
I’m mostly not on YouTube and I’m trying not to get swept up in this…
but this discussion of systemic capitalist forces driving plagiarism *definitely* reminds me of the last time I was anywhere near active on Twitter, years ago
when, as I recall, it was VERY uncommon for anyone to have a truly popular Twitter account without padding their content to about 80% stolen jokes and memes presented as if they’d come up with them on their own
and if you called them out for stealing, they’d laugh and say something like “you must be new here”
(I gave up on any attempts to really gain followers on Twitter because it became clear I was competing against people who were not bound by integrity, people who would scour the whole internet for the posts most likely to get them attention, with no regard for whether they had the right to harvest and use those posts. No matter how good my own ideas were, I had no chance if I stayed honest.)
(And that’s what capitalist competition does to ethics in… EVERY field, pretty much)
In a way, plagiarism in online content-creation is maybe a little like steroids in pro sports
You’re not supposed to do it. You get in trouble if you’re caught.
But it’s much more common than anyone wants to admit
And once you’re in the industry trying to make a living at it, you realize that your competition is so thoroughly saturated with cheating that you have ALMOST no chance of even scraping by
at that point… unless you have an exceedingly rare alignment of random luck and the exact right skills and ideas at the exact right time… you will have to choose between giving up and becoming a cheater yourself