YouTube plagiarism

I occasionally dip into the more earnest side of YouTube film criticism through video essays by channels like The Discarded Image, CinemaStix, Thomas Flight—recently recommended by Alan Jacobs here—and Like Stories of Old.

The latter posted an essay earlier this month called “This YouTuber Won’t Stop Plagiarizing,” with an enticing thumbnail of the Dude. After a week or so of YouTube’s algorithm pushing it to the top of my recommendations every day, I finally gave in and watched it.

It’s well put-together and presents damning evidence that a YouTuber calling himself Archer Green has been stealing everything from specific lines of narration to montages from other channels, and it approaches this vexing topic in the most charitable way possible. Certainly more charitably than I would.

While Like Stories of Old does a good job outlining the specific sins of the plagiarist and makes a strong case against such actions, there is one point that deserves more thought but was lost amidst the detail. To judge from the case made against him, Archer Green’s research for his videos consisted entirely of watching other YouTubers’ videos and taking notes on them. I don’t know how deeply Like Stories of Old or Thomas Flight dig when preparing a video, but I’m guessing it’s deeper than that.

Even if Archer Green hadn’t ended up stealing the words and ideas of other people, such a limited, circular, self-referential environment could only end up being intellectually inbred.

Indeed, this is certainly true of other parts of YouTube, where bad ideas or false information are endlessly recycled because, in pursuit of clicks, YouTubers copy and regurgitate sensationalistic material, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, which other YouTubers copy and regurgitate, and on and on. Witness this commercial pilot’s frustrated attempt to debunk aviation myths that have been repeated over and over by YouTubers and TikTokers. And that’s not his only video in this vein. Watch this, this, and this as well, and note how often the same misconceptions or outright lies come up.

This is not, of course, limited to YouTube. Check out this recent video—which I’ve already shown students—about a hoax Wikipedia article that was cited by a newspaper, whose citation then became supporting documentation for the fake Wikipedia page’s bibliography. The fake went undetected for over a decade.

If all governments naturally turn into monarchies over time, all online information environments turn into echo chambers or bubbles. Break out. Maybe start by reading a book on a topic rather than clicking the next video the algorithm feeds you.

YouTube readings of Griswoldville

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve created a YouTube channel, where I’ve uploaded two readings from Griswoldville. I don’t plan to become a YouTuber—at least not on the level of some of the more active ones—but you can subscribe to the channel for readings from my books and other reading and writing related videos. I am working on short recordings from each of my novels and hope to have some more up in the following weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve embedded my first two in the post below. They come from parts I and II of Griswoldville, including scenes from the homefront while Georgie’s father is away fighting in Virginia and in the rear of the Confederate army in Georgia itself once Georgie and his grandfather and cousins Wes and Cal have been called up to the militia. I hope y’all enjoy.

Here’s a longish passage from Part II:

And here’s a couple of chapters I have read several times at public events, passages covering Georgie’s grim, dusty summer on the road with the militia during the battles for Atlanta:

As always, thanks for listening—or, in this case, watching—and please check Griswoldville out if you like what you’ve seen. You can find out more at the book’s page on my website or at Amazon.com, where you can purchase it in both paperback and Kindle formats.