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The video consists of like 2 hours of some examples of youtube plagiarism, with discussion of content mills and the beginning of an interesting point about how plagiarists view the people they steal from as lesser, which is not expanded upon as much as it should IMO.
The other 2 hours are about James Somerston, a gay video essayist that basically Frakensteined a bunch (if not all) of his videos from queer authors, some well known, a lot of them not. By the end Hbomb makes a good point about erasure, and how young queer people don’t understand their history in part because of people like Somerston.
I’m generally not annoyed by length since I’m a zoomer and watch everything at 2x or more, but in this case I get the point because it actually took me 2 real time hours to watch and I felt there was a lot that could have been cut. I still won’t watch the 3 hour scorcese movie, fuck all of you, movies ARE too long now.
I went on a ramble about the video that should probably be a separate comment, feel free to ignore
So regarding video length I think there’s some value in going into detail about how plagiarism takes place. Some of this context is also relevant as a way to preempt any shitty response (for example he took the time to explain that Somerston’s assistant writer is most likely not in on it and how his boss has shown signs of setting him up as a scapegoat).
He also seems to genuinely care about James’s plagiarism because he’s bi himself. I’m currently having a bout of insomnia, and was reading The Gentrification of the Mind before making the mistake of opening hexbear and seeing a new hbomb video was out, and while these two are not comparable in content, I found it interesting to experience them back to back, and since a bit of the vibe is there, I believe Harris is sincere about why he cares about it (also Vito Russo’s name popped up in both, so I guess this is a sign that I should add The Celluloid Closet to my reading list).
However, the video does feel petty. Hbomb has this mean streak to him that served him really well when he was directly responding to right wing talking points, but is a lot less useful when talking about stuff like this, which becomes a problem when it’s a large chunk of the video. He kind of recognizes it too, saying this feels like a drama video, and how he’s donating all ad revenue to people James plagiarized from.
It does feel more appropriate when you consider that most of these people are reactionary pieces of shit and that should have been a much larger part of the video. He mentions it a bit (the first guy is a chud, internet historian tries to hide that he’s a chud, Somerston came from business school and seems to hate women) and talks about contempt for the people they copy from, but I feel there’s a lot more to dig into. What about contempt for the audience? What is the frame of mind of people that trend chase for years, sometimes decades, in order to garner an audience? That think regurtitating Wikipedia is worthy of other people’s time? He says it was always like this mentioning AVGN copycats, but was it really? While the incentive structure didn’t change how plagiarism takes place, didn’t the kind of people that did the plagiarizing change? I think exploring this thoroughly is a lot more interesting than “showing the receipts” by comparing the copied work to the original for most of the runtime.
I still think it was worth a watch, but that’s because I was already familiar with Somerston and some of the other people and they gave me the video essay equivalent of the ick. This should have been 2 hours at most.
The video consists of like 2 hours of some examples of youtube plagiarism, with discussion of content mills and the beginning of an interesting point about how plagiarists view the people they steal from as lesser, which is not expanded upon as much as it should IMO.
The other 2 hours are about James Somerston, a gay video essayist that basically Frakensteined a bunch (if not all) of his videos from queer authors, some well known, a lot of them not. By the end Hbomb makes a good point about erasure, and how young queer people don’t understand their history in part because of people like Somerston.
I’m generally not annoyed by length since I’m a zoomer and watch everything at 2x or more, but in this case I get the point because it actually took me 2 real time hours to watch and I felt there was a lot that could have been cut. I still won’t watch the 3 hour scorcese movie, fuck all of you, movies ARE too long now.
I went on a ramble about the video that should probably be a separate comment, feel free to ignore
So regarding video length I think there’s some value in going into detail about how plagiarism takes place. Some of this context is also relevant as a way to preempt any shitty response (for example he took the time to explain that Somerston’s assistant writer is most likely not in on it and how his boss has shown signs of setting him up as a scapegoat).
He also seems to genuinely care about James’s plagiarism because he’s bi himself. I’m currently having a bout of insomnia, and was reading The Gentrification of the Mind before making the mistake of opening hexbear and seeing a new hbomb video was out, and while these two are not comparable in content, I found it interesting to experience them back to back, and since a bit of the vibe is there, I believe Harris is sincere about why he cares about it (also Vito Russo’s name popped up in both, so I guess this is a sign that I should add The Celluloid Closet to my reading list).
However, the video does feel petty. Hbomb has this mean streak to him that served him really well when he was directly responding to right wing talking points, but is a lot less useful when talking about stuff like this, which becomes a problem when it’s a large chunk of the video. He kind of recognizes it too, saying this feels like a drama video, and how he’s donating all ad revenue to people James plagiarized from.
It does feel more appropriate when you consider that most of these people are reactionary pieces of shit and that should have been a much larger part of the video. He mentions it a bit (the first guy is a chud, internet historian tries to hide that he’s a chud, Somerston came from business school and seems to hate women) and talks about contempt for the people they copy from, but I feel there’s a lot more to dig into. What about contempt for the audience? What is the frame of mind of people that trend chase for years, sometimes decades, in order to garner an audience? That think regurtitating Wikipedia is worthy of other people’s time? He says it was always like this mentioning AVGN copycats, but was it really? While the incentive structure didn’t change how plagiarism takes place, didn’t the kind of people that did the plagiarizing change? I think exploring this thoroughly is a lot more interesting than “showing the receipts” by comparing the copied work to the original for most of the runtime.
I still think it was worth a watch, but that’s because I was already familiar with Somerston and some of the other people and they gave me the video essay equivalent of the ick. This should have been 2 hours at most.