Companies like Exxon Mobil, Shell, and Kraft Heinz enjoyed bumper profits as consumers struggled with historic inflation.
"Profits for companies in some of the worldâs largest economies rose by 30% between 2019 and 2022, significantly outpacing inflation, according to the groupâs research of 1,350 firms across the U.S., the U.K., Europe, Brazil, and South Africa."
I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.
My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.
It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.
I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.
But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.
@venus-light I hope you don't mind me responding to you here. I have no intention of killing you! And if I went around killing people for this kind of misunderstanding, I'd have to kill a lot of my students, which I suspect my employer would not like. This is a really common problem. I'm glad the video helped, and I too hope you're not the only person it helps.
It sounds like you have a much better grasp on this now, but I want to take this opportunity to expand on the point a bit. I'm home sick from work today and not in a position to do anything but read and write, so I'm going to write a bit about plagiarism in university essays, and what I think is the best way for an undergraduate to avoid it. I've addressed it to you, because you're the one who replied, but this is really for any undergraduate who happens to be reading it.
The common pitfall that people fall into when thinking of plagiarism is thinking of it as the violation of some discrete set of rules. Thou shalt cite thy sources. Thou shalt not copy and paste. Thou shalt format thy citations according to the divine command of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). Rules like that. Trouble is, that approach can only ever be so useful. There's a lot of contextual variation when it comes to the question of how much paraphrasing is appropriate - for instance, an assignment that's just asking you to summarize a particular text will have a lot of paraphrasing from one source in it, and that's not a problem. What will serve you better than specific rules is a more general heuristic.
Let's zoom out a bit and ask a larger question: what's the point of a college humanities essay? Why do we professors make students do them? It's certainly not for our benefit - they're difficult and time-consuming to grade - and we certainly know that students don't like them. It's not because we want to be informed of facts, or even because we want to make sure you have command of facts. In-class testing is a way more effective way to establish whether or not you have command of relevant facts, and it's also a much easier method to grade. So, an essay is doing something different.
The point of a college essay is to give you an opportunity to practice joining a scholarly discussion. We don't just want to see that you've read parts of the existing discussion, we want you to try to add your own voice to it. That's why professors will often ask for a minimum number of different sources in an essay - if you have to synthesize many voices and build them into a coherent body of text, you'll probably end up offering some authorial insight of your own along the way (in a way, this is what Somerton could have been doing, had he been less lazy. There is a real skill in synthesizing and comparing disparate sources!). Your job in an essay is not merely to use sources, but to judge them. If you find two sources that conflict, you get to explain which you think is in the right (if either). If you think two seemingly different perspectives can be put into productive dialogue with each other, you get to say so. And if you think that everyone you've read is wrong, actually, you absolutely get to say so. That's how academics treat each other, and that's the point of an essay. We want you to try to be a historian or a philosopher or a literary critic for a few days (yes, a few. I know you think you can do it in one. Everyone thinks that and everyone's wrong).
Often when I tell students this they respond with a kind of deference - after all, they're not experts, but the people they're reading presumably are. Who are they to judge? And that's true! Students are definitionally not experts. We're not expecting you to be. If you miss something that anyone who's gone through grad school would know about, that's fine. We know that's going to happen. It takes years in grad school to achieve mastery of the canon. It's okay to not already have expertise when we're trying to help you achieve it! Deference to expertise makes sense in other contexts, like when you're writing for the public, but it's not what is being asked of you in a university essay. Gaining expertise requires you to practice thinking like an expert - not just learning, but judging. Reading broadly in the relevant subject is vital, of course, but it's only half the battle. The other half comes from you. The university essay is a safe space to try to figure out what the part that comes from you sounds like.
This may be a surprise to hear, but I actually still remember quite a lot of specific student papers years after I graded them. And that's because I remember what specific students brought to their papers. I got to see them learning that they could intervene in a discussion - that they could bring their own judgement to the table. That their voice could matter. This is one of the great privileges of teaching.
It may feel like we've come a long way from plagiarism, but we haven't. Because this is why plagiarism in education actually matters. In assigning you an essay, I am handing you a microphone and asking what you want to say. I'm not interested in hearing what someone else has said. If you only give me a bunch of stuff paraphrased from elsewhere, there's a real sense in which you just haven't done the assignment, because you haven't said anything. That's the same problem that the youtube plagiarists have - in their rush to talk as much as possible, they say nothing. What does Illuminaughti actually think about Wakefield? What insight does a self-proclaimed Internet Historian have about the tragic tale of Floyd Collins? Somerton mashes up a tonne of different people's writing, but the different people think different things - who does he think is right? We don't know. They said nothing, and then deceived us into watching them say nothing. What a waste of time.
That's the heuristic. That's the thing that will help you avoid plagiarism in the future. Be proud of what you have to say, and don't miss the opportunity to say it! Indicate clearly where you're drawing on other people, not just for their benefit, but for yours - so that it's absolutely clear that your words are your own. You have thoughts worth hearing about, and this is one of the few times in life where you can be sure that at least one person is going to hear about them. And if you can look at your essay and know that it says what you wanted to say, then you don't need to worry about plagiarism anymore. You'll know it's yours.
If you've read this far, thank you for indulging me in my little speech. I hope the end of the semester treats you well, and good luck with your future studies.
As someone who by and large dislikes BookTok, I hate these handwringing BUT WHAT OF LITERATURE takes more, because
--"Books are fast fashion" is empirically ridiculous. It misses the actual deep issues with fast fashion and why it's bad for society. The fact that you're buying cheap clothes that fall apart quickly is really only the surface level problem that affects you the buyer in the (relative) short term.
The actual serious problems with fast fashion is that the clothes are made in highly unethical factories that exploit and actively harm people. It's more accurate to compare fast fashion to fast food than to BookTok, and let's say the quiet part loud here--what these takes are often critiquing is not actually "BookTok books" (what is that), particularly when they use the terms "fast fashion". They critique certain types of books that BookTok focuses on. Particularly romance novels; particularly indie romance novels.
These books hurt... no one. Worst case scenario, you spent like $5 on a book you don't like. "But the art"; well, I'll get into why I, so snobby about art that I once got an (undergrad, I'm not made of money here babes) degree in art history, do not care. "But the influence on society" oh yes, the books are what is affecting the self worth of women today, not the ever-eroding rights we have, actually sliding backwards in the US at least. It's not the radical far right and the school systems that won't allow us to teach girls about birth control, it's the Ana Huang book.
--Again, to be clear: I'm not a big fan of BookTok. Most of the books I love are not popular on BookTok--I will say, though I alluded to indie books (which are probably popular in part, yes, because they are cheaper in E and often available on the seemingly cost efficient Kindle Unlimited) I have seen... basically any type of book get big on BookTok. I've seen traditionally published ("trad") books that came out a decade ago have a delayed blowup. I've seen old indies have delayed blowups. I've seen new trad books have blowups (see: The Love Hypothesis, one of the few BookTok faves I did like).
One legit issue with BookTok, and here there are people whose lives are actually negatively affected by it directly, is the way it can impact marketing and acquisition of titles. Publishers are desperate to save cash in any way they can. As such, they will pretend that they can pass the buck on to BookTok. No need to give your debut author a marketing budget--tell them it's on them and make sure they hustle over to BookTok. No need to acquire fresh authors when you can buy out an indie book that blew up on BookTok, tack on an extra chapter or so, and sell what used to be $5 for $18.99. But to be frank, this isn't even really BookTok affecting authors and the trends negatively; this is publishing, the big guy in the sky who keeps books from being "made like fast fashion" exploiting BookTok and using it as an excuse and a cost-saver.
All of this being said... There's a very decent likelihood that BookTok will be absolutely irrelevant in 5-10 years. On a social media level, TikTok ain't that old. There was a time when Myspace owned this town. Where is it now? Facebook used to be tHEEEE network for everyone. Marketing that primarily targets teens doesn't even mention Facebook. Or Twitter, sorry, X; and that was before it became X. It was already losing relevancy because the younger gen did not give a flying fuck. (Shit: we are discussing this on TUMBLR DOT COM.) BookTok is a trend within a trend. Right now, a lot of eggs are being put in its basket, and y'all notice this more because the entire point of TikTok is to be LOUD. It will probably be... not a thing anymore... at least in terms of its relevancy to publishing? Sooner than you'd think.
I say this because Bookstagram was everything authors were told to put proverbial eggs into like... frighteningly recently. And Bookstagram is still relevant? But not nearly as relevant as BookTok. When was the last time you saw anything mentioning Bookstagram? It still sells books, but it's not LOUD.
So it's no wonder that authors, including established authors, use BookTok. It's no wonder that publishers use BookTok. It does have an influence, yes, but I get a bit eye-roll-y at it being pointed to as the root of all evil, because I don't think it has that kind of sauce, and I think that the things people hate so much about BookTok books existed long before it and were bound to grow anyway.
Like, for example: so much is made of fanfic-turned-books, and so much of it is thrown onto these romances that blow up on BookTok. But lmao, that shit existed well before TikTok. Cassandra Clare did it with her YA series. Obviously, 50 Shades did it with Twilight fanfic, and Christina Lauren's original debut was also based on Twilight fanfic. There is an entire wave of authors whose origins are rooted in Twific. These things have long existed, but BookTok makes it easier for y'all to notice.
--In the same sense.... This idea of "fast fashion" books was always going to take off when indie publishing became easier. When you no longer needed to engage with an small press and sell your indie books in paperback like the "wanna buy a sundial" guy in Disney's Hercules (king shit) but could simply upload a file to Amazon, edited or not edited as you saw fit, and make it accessible to kindles and tablets and eventually phones.
Look at Amazon. I speak as a romance reader who loves all types of romance novels and likes to learn about its history as a genre. There was a huge boom for certain indie romance authors after the 'zon made self publishing something almost anyone could do. For a brief period, a few authors made a fuckton of money off of it, and while they often couldn't maintain the income stream, it was well-publicized, creating this idea that you could make a lot of money off short, hot, less edited books. And every time there is a boom in any genre, there are authors clustering to get in on it--take the YA Fantasy boom. Booms come and go; generally, the authors that can maintain and stabilize in between the booms not only have a strong backlist of titles, but the kind of quality and distinctiveness that keeps people interested after the boom ends. But until that boom does end (and yes, to an extent after too, depends on the author and their goals), the name of the game for many authors is cranking out titles written to market.
And titles written to market have always existed, and always will. Authors do, in fact, need and want to make money. If you write something and just do not care if it makes money at all--you're either dashing shit off with no effort just for a bit of fun and don't care if it sells (and that ain't these "fast fashion" writers, they're cranking it out because they want to make money ASAP) or you're incredibly privileged and don't need to worry about devoting a job's worth of time to something that won't offer any kind of income. That is not the vast majority of writers. While most know we won't get rich, we sure would like to see some kind of return, if possible. Writing to market isn't a sin. I mean, penny dreadfuls were written to market.
What makes it more complicated is the fact that Amazon, which dominates publishing, is both exploitative and poorly regulated. Arguably one of the best ways to get the attention of readers early in your career, especially for true genre categories like romance and fantasy, is to publish your first books in KU. Your book is accessible to a huge range of people who won't spend $5 on an unknown author's book, but will "borrow" it on KU. However, aside from the other things that make KU sketchy, it also pays by the page read. So if you're an author, it's tempting to stretch your 300-page book to 350 pages, creating a flabby read. OR you convert your single fic into three books.
Again--all Amazon issues, all existed before BookTok, all will exist when it withers into nothing. Or into Tumblr. We'll see.
--I would also say, because again, let us be real and admit again that the BookTok books people largely get upset about are romance, that we're in a romance boom that is proooooobably beginning its downturn, and would exist with or without BookTok. Because romance does tend to do exceptionally well in times of great crisis. Check out when the 50 Shades books took off. Think about what was happening then. Now? We are crisis-ier than ever. Romance took off during the pando, and publishing grabbed it and ran with it and slapped "romance" labels on books that are objectively not romance (see: Colleen Hoover's biggest books, but publishing sure would like you to think otherwise).
Obviously, publishing marketing books that aren't in-genre within a genre that's currently popular predates the pandemic and BookTok and all that. It's certainly happened with romance before (hello: Diana Gabaldon).
--So the thing is, I think people would be upset about all of these issues whether or not BookTok existed. BookTok is just the monster they can blame at the moment.
And there are a lot of shitty romance novels out there, don't get me wrong. (Also: a lot of amazing ones.) In general, there are a lot of shitty indie books, because anything can indeed be published within indie.
On the flip side, indie is an equalizer that I would never, ever have taken away. Because for all that we can uphold the "standards" of the old publishing system a) they still let a lot of subpar shit get published across genre b) publishing is uh, super straight and white. Indie empowers people who typically would not be allowed a seat at the table (primarily poc and people who aren't cis/het) to publish their books without interference from the white people who run Big 5 publishing. And I think that's pretty fucking great. And I think that any amount of influx or low quality books is worth it if we have that outlet available.
Let me acknowledge--BookTok? Skews heavily towards white reads about M/F (and to a lesser extent M/M) pairings. I won't deny that, ever. But to me, a lot of the language surrounding these types of posts and vids about BookTok are actually about indie. If the worst that comes from indie is that I need to make a somewhat bigger effort to find books that work for me... Well, I'm good with that.
--Honestly dude, whenever you get into the hyperbolic "I would've read this at 13", "this is like Wattpad" thing, I do have to wonder about how well-read a person is. Because that's such basic, meaningless critique. What does it even mean? Wattpad is a website. Yes, there are certain types of content that tend to be more popular there. I also know of an author who's been published across a wide variety of genres and won a Lambda Literary Award and posted some shit she'd written on Wattpad... why? Accessibility? Shits and giggles? I don't know. I don't really care.
(It's Tiffany Reisz, by the way, and the stuff she's made available on Wattpad is fire.)
It's also just so incredibly edgelord to act as if what 13-year-olds read is inherently low quality, that again, the critique begins to lose merit to me because I have to wonder about the experience of the original poster and their relation to their experiences. When I was 13, my favorite book was Wuthering Heights. I also went to see Twilight like, 5 times in the theater and owned several copies of each Twilight book. 13-year-olds can have vast experiences and tastes, like anyone. So again... this kind of criticism means fuck all and just suggests a level of shame that I find clouds an individual's ability to give good critique. Are you looking at shit objectively when you're comparing it to things you clearly once enjoyed and are ashamed to admit you enjoy? It confuses me.
--And maybe people's standards are "I just want to feel good when consuming something". I don't... super care if that's the case. Do some of the books people love read as... garbage... in terms of quality to me? Yeah. Do I worry much about their standards clogging up the publishing market? No.
--Let us also be super clear: the books people often consider "quality literature" (professionally edited, often not super genre) are not competing in the indie marketplace. (If they were, they'd absolutely get crushed, but that's another thing--I mean, how much can you really force people to open something they're just not interested in unless you have a trad publishing house's marketing team behind it?)
And when we look at the trad marketplace... I mean. The high lit books that fewer people organically want to open just of their own volition? Are able to happen, in part, because genre fiction pays the bills. I mean again--look at romance. Nora Roberts sells more books than God, her publisher reaps the benefits, and her publisher has the money to pay for a book called like "The Secrets of Fruit Flies" which is about a confused libertarian college professor discovering a secret crack in the moon, and critics love it and ultimately it's about the Vietnam War or something. The house can also afford to throw all the marketing power behind that book, because they're using BookTok to push their commercial work AND find them indie books to acquire.)
(And of course, there are books people consider "high quality" that sell a lot of copies in trad. Often these are YA books. Often, I don't actually personally consider them high quality, but that is the issue we run into when we discuss quality and standards and the incredible subjectiveness of.... all of the above. One series I can think of that is frequently held up as a standard of quality... well. I enjoyed it in the beginning. Let us say that as the books continued to release and the quality, in my opinion, dropped steeply--my hunger for them dipped. But again, such is the nature of standards. I could tell you why I became less and less impressed with those books, beyond "I didn't like them". However, my reasons, however much I can back them intellectually, will never be objective. Art never is.)
--So basically: we blame BookTok for ~ruining publishing~ when a) I don't think the content is ruined, I just think you as the reader have to be more discerning when finding things that work for you b) I think these critiques are more about coming for genre work that has always been derided by those who prefer certain types of litfic, regardless of BookTok c) publishing is doing just fine imploding itself without the help of BookTok d) the issues people blame on BookTok existed before BookTok and will exist after BookTok, and it's honestly kind of insane to me to think that a single group of people that has existed for so little time could so dramatically change publishing, when KDP has existed since... what....? 2009? And trad publishing is still figuring out how to respond to the absolute game changer it turned out to be.
And ultimately, again--I'm really not super worried, because the amount of good books getting released hasn't changed (you do have to look harder for them, yes). If anything, there are more of them out there. But the trade off is that less qualified people are also publishing more. They aren't always publishing For The Art. Amazon doesn't have its house in order, so you will also have to contend with AI.
But also: this is a very boring critique, familiarize yourself with your own tastes to ensure that you pick up books you enjoy more often than not, and otherwise... Look to trad publishing and Amazon with your critiques of the industry as whole, if your issues are truly INDUSTRY-DRIVEN, and worry less about what other people enjoy otherwise.
the last paragraph hits home intensely. âBut also: this is a very boring critique, familiarize yourself with your own tastes to ensure that you pick up books you enjoy more often than not, and otherwise... Look to trad publishing and Amazon with your critiques of the industry as whole, if your issues are truly INDUSTRY-DRIVEN, and worry less about what other people enjoy otherwise.â
This is so on point. Also, I would like to point out as an English teacher that literally ANY reading is good reading. It literally doesn't matter what you're reading, if you're inhaling Wattpad fics, or Harlequin Desires, or if you randomly got really into Charles Dickens as a 13-year-old (speaking of someone who wrote to the masses, and padded his stories cause he got paid by the word). If you enjoy, it's good. Read what you like, and for fuck's sake be an adult and don't bully people for what they read.
OK THIS IS NOT A FUCKING DRILL EVERYONE FUCKING REPEAT AFTER ME. THIS IS WHAT YOU WILL DO WHEN YOU WATCH MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL THIS YEAR:
You will navigate to the page on disney plus (and it has to be here. Unless someone has actually uploaded the REAL movie anywhere else you cannot get it elsewhere)
BUT YOU WILL NOT HIT PLAY. You wonât do it. Because itâs NOT THE REAL VERSION OF THE FILM AND DISNEY IS FUCKING LYING TO YOU AS IT ALWAYS DOES
You will scroll down HERE. To EXTRAS instead. You MUST GO HERE. This is non -negotiable
THEN YOU WILL SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOTTOM OF THE EXTRAS AND YOU WILL THEN HIT PLAY ON THIS BAD BOY: THE FULL LENGTH VERSION
And you will watch it. And you will thank me for having been so blind and led astray by that stupid fucking mouse. Youâre welcome.
Pride isnât a âqueer-friendly spaceâ, pride IS queer space.
Kink doesnât âbelongâ at pride, kink IS pride.
To say that these things are just-kind-of-also-included is such a diluted view of what these things actually are. These spaces have been mentally purified for so many people as things that are âalso-okay-for-gays!ââ
No!!
These spaces ARE OURS. Not just âfriendly to usâ. Not just âinclusive to usâ. They ARE us. We donât just âbelongâ⌠Weâre the reason it exists in the first place!
The most commonly accepted age range that I have seen for Millennials is, in fact, Chris Evans to Tom Holland. (1981 to 1996)
At this point, the Millennials are, for the most part, no longer the kids on your lawn; theyâre your slightly-younger friends also complaining about the kids on the lawn.
