James Somerton and the Devaluation of Writing
Last month, YouTubers Hbomberguy and Todd in the Shadows created a gigantic commotion within the community by outing their fellow creator James Somerton as a plagiarist and a liar. I had no fucking idea who any of these people were except for Todd, but I remained glued to my computer screen for over five hours and a half on a tuesday evening and listened to everything the two had to say. I was riveted.
The main point of these callouts (at least in Hbomberguy’s case) is that a renowned queer creator used content from other, less known queer creators without their consent and without paying them and made a shitload of money with it. According to LGBTQ Nation, Somerton was making up to 170 000$ a year from his channel and turned himself into a well-known voice within the community. In other words, he got famous and made a living copying other people’s work (sometimes reading it almost word-for-word) and making up whatever he didn’t plagiarize. James Somerton exploited for his own gain the community he claimed to defend for years, but it’s not what I want to talk about in this essay.
If you want to learn about that, watch Todd and Hbomberguy videos.
I believe there’s another, broader point to be made from this fiasco. James Somerton is a symptom of a larger disease that’s been plaguing authors, journalists and creators of all sorts for close to thirty years now: the devaluation of writing.
Why Writers Don’t Get Paid Anymore
You’ve probably heard a writer claim that’s either unpaid or paid like shit at least once in your life. That’s because since the advent of the internet, the value of good writing has been going steadily downhill. There are reasons for that.
Before the internet, there were reputable places where you could find quality writing and these places charged you money to access it. I’m talking about institutions like publishing companies and magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated or even Playboy, which always had a well-earned reputation for featuring solid writing alongside tits and asses. Seriously. Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and even Haruki Murakami all were published in Playboy Magazine.
These places made good money selling the writing (and sometimes tits), so they could pay writers. All the outlets I just named are still alive today, but their content is mostly available for free on the internet.
Here’s the thing: none of these companies chose to do that. They were forced to. Because of technological innovation and greater accessibility (smartphones, 5G, etc.) everyone’s on the internet and everyone’s on it all the time. It’s a hub where you can get an infinite amount of entertainment for free if you’re willing to look for it. You simply have to be there if you want to be in your audience’s mind, but it’s a lot more difficult to make money on the internet than it is outside of it. Because you can’t control the offer and you have to compete with an insane amount of competitors on equal footing. Plus, the lack of legislation on the web makes it super difficult to keep your monetizing solutions working. For every ad banner and pay wall, there’s someone working on a solution to keep things free and adless.
Also, there’s a much greater accessibility for writers. Publication is not gatekept by ferocious editors, which is great in theory. Starting a website is free and the only currency necessary to fuel it is passion. Fuck, I should know something about that. But it multiplies the offer. Since a lot of it is free, why pay for something great when you can get something very good for free? A lot of the writers James Somerton ripped off for his video were published on these free sites created by the LGBTQ community in order to gain a much needed representation on the internet. They were voices that didn’t exist in a pre-internet world and that were cast into non-existence again by Somerton.
A greater accessibility also means that the perception of value is skewed. Everybody thinks they can do it now because they’ve learned how to write in elementary school. Also, you don’t need any gear that you wouldn’t already have to browse the internet. If writing was a sport, it would be running. You only need shoes and your determination to do it. As far as writing is involved, you only need a keyboard and your determination. The institutions who determine the difference between what’s great writing and what’s not have lost their monopoly on taste. Someone aggressively marketing their work, can get numbers and eventually opportunities.
A lot of these guys work for free. At least it’s how they start.
Good writing lost value over the last thirty years because it’s a lot more difficult to monetize it than it was before the internet. An exponentially greater offer, an insanely more competitive marketplace, an enhanced accessibility and a war against monetization have driven the prices down.
What happens to invisible writing
Here’s the thing about writing on the internet: the value of profitable writing is determined by how many eyeballs it can regularly get. If a writer cannot create an audience for his work, his writing will not get picked up by any paying institution.
Sometimes it’s because the topic is too niche. Sometimes it’s because it is convoluted and jarring to read. But a lot of times it’s also because the audience is somewhere else. If you write long, academic think pieces about Playboi Carti and promote your efforts on Facebook, you’re probably not gonna get any viable feedback because no one cares about mumble rappers over there. But if you cut up your 2000-word essay and film 50 TikTok videos with it, you might become a viral sensation. Because the kids who listen to Playboi Carti watch videos more than they read and they don’t browse the same social media platforms as their moms.
The level of profitability of writing is determined by the size of the audience it can craft for itself. What James Somerton (who’s a business major, by the way) did is so reprehensible because he applied a business opportunity to writing that wasn’t his and decided that it didn’t have any value without the presentation he crafted for it and decided to make it his own. Smart and academic stuff is REALLY popular on YouTube, so it wasn’t a stroke of genius or anything. It was an obvious road that many writers don’t choose because it required technical knowledge and the financial means to purchase quality gear. Somerton used his privileged ass to climb on the head of many, many talented writers.
My point is: devalued writing is susceptible to this. It’s susceptible to opportunistic pricks who will profit off the fact that it was virtually unknown before they correctly identified where the business opportunity lied. That shit is going to get worse now that ChatGPT and its horrifying rewriting skills are in the game. Get ready to get fucked.
The Art Of Defending Your Intellectual Property
But how can you circumvent this problem, right?
Well, I don’t have any bulletproof answer for you. If I did, I’d probably be richer and more renowned than I am. If you’re reading this in exclusivity in my newsletter, know that there’s 116 of you as things stand. It’s not a lot, but it’s the hard core of my audience willing to let me crash your mailbox once a month. I get about 12 000 to 13 000 visitors on the site each month, but I get a lot of them from Google searches because I don’t want to fight the social media battle with a trillion other creators. Although I have never tried to charge for Dead End Follies and probably never will (I have a day job where I write content), my writing is also susceptible to being stolen.
The least you can do is to be aware that forgotten and invisible writing is vulnerable to opportunists, though and take responsibility for your own marketing. I’ve been a critic for fourteen years now and I can’t even count the number of great, life-affirming indie projects that eventually ran out of steam because there weren't any business people to guide them to an audience. If you write in order to be read, you’re first and foremost a creator, but your creation enters a business arena as soon as it gets published and it’s your responsibility to get eyes on it before someone else does and takes the credit for it.
I don’t want to make James Somerton into an ominous boogeyman announcing a new dark age for creators. I do think he’s a reckless jerk who got away with thievery for a long-ass time and that he’s not going to inspire too many copycats given that he’s been appropriately tarred and feathered by his contemporaries. But it’s a logical endpoint for devalued writing to be picked from the side of the road and repurposed by someone who can see the value in it and these people are not always well-intentioned. People like James Somerton look out for themselves first and foremost.
So, I don’t have any clever conclusion for you, but if you want to defend your writing against oblivion and whoever plunders forgotten writing for their own gain, it needs to have value to you. You need to get in front of it and do what Hbomberguy and Tood in the Shadows did. If you don’t see the value in your own writing, few other people will and you won’t like those who do.
