In light of the whole James Somerton situation I still want to reiterate the importance of everyone having the right to post the little half-baked rambles that come to their heads. The problem with James Somerton wasn't so much that he "lacked rigor" or "didn't put in enough effort" so much as he completely underperformed in comparison to the authority he presented himself as, and propped up his image as a serious scholar by stealing passages from people who actually had done the work. Academic rigor and hard work are not in themselves obligatory, but honesty is. My posts all sound like first drafts because they fucking are, and yet you all get plenty of meaning and value out of them.
I'm deeply frustrated by the possibility that a lot of people's takeaway from the HBomberGuy video is gonna be "you have to be this educated and this hardworking or you should just shut up" when like, no, plenty of video essayists got their start as low effort vloggers. Low effort posting is not a sin. Demanding money while peddling fraudulent products is. If you're not literally faking your work and qualifications? You're fine.
I run @VancouverTransit without any credentials. I do not have a desire to get an urban planning degree and at best I am a university drop-out who never finished her history BA. You don't need to have any sort of formal education to do this sort of work provided you are willing to put some effort in and be able to accept that you'll fuck up with the expectation you'll admit doing so.
Big agree. The amount of time & effort I put into things I write/make varies, but it's all me. They might not all be winners, some are even ginormous clunkers, but as long as you accept that and deal with it decently, you're fine.
(Kind of tangentially, but this is also one of my gripes with one of the "benefits" some people claim generative AI affords them. It allows them to quickly produce something that, at a glance at least, is stylistically polished, because they don't make (or even understand) the distinction between the presentation and the actual content of something.)
Also, and this can't be overstated enough: to get good (or even just better) at something, you have to suck at it first. It's very much a learning process to actually Do The Thing, and be bad at it, because only by doing it you're able to do it better. Be that music, shitposting, serious essaying, sports, crafts, drawing, cooking, you name it. Allowing yourself the (mental) space to suck at it is essential. If you do, in time you'll be able to look back at earlier things you made and realize how much less mentally onerous it is to Do The Thing, because you've cultivated your ability to embrace failure.
Plagiarism (and its close relative relying on the output of generative models) seemingly allows you to side-step all1 that. Except it comes at a cost. Instead of dealing with your internal hangups, you steal the work of others because you believe that the only thing of importance is the polished result. Confusing the destination with the journey, to abuse a metaphor. This doesn't help you cultivate that vital skill of allowing yourself to suck, on the contrary, it makes it even harder as now you'll have to address the dishonesty too. Lying about it only makes it harder.
It's a shame really, I'd rather see people share the flawed things they made themselves than very polished and plagiarized work. Maybe it sucks, but it'll be genuinely you. Even then, you might think it sucks, it's legitimately hard to not feel like that about the things you made yourself, but other people won't look at it through those self-critical goggles. It can really surprise you how much more others like what you made (I know I've been blown away with people's comments on things I made I genuinely felt meh at best about). Just throwing things out there, little sketches, half-formed thoughts, whatever, is especially important when you're dealing with the realm of ideas. Those kernels of ideas can convey a lot in themselves, or serve as the jumping off point for others. Getting your thoughts into the minds of others helps gestate them, sprout new and exciting trains of thought. If you never share them, that'll never happen.
Years ago there was a post circulating on tumblr about amateur ska bands doing basement shows. Sometimes what people need is to go and just watch people play music, however poorly, and enjoying doing what they do. It doesn't have to be a ska band, it can be anything, but I'd rather live in a world with zounds of amateurs making and doing what they enjoy, flawed and honest, than one where everything is polished but stolen.
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Painting with a fairly broad brush here. Plagiarism has more causes, quick financial gain, getting stuck academically (which, although less directly, is financial in nature too) to name two particular ones where this isn't quite as much the case.
