Busted: Substack Plagiarism and The Matthew Effect

On authentic writing and being.

Photo by SIMON LEE on Unsplash

Back in my 20s, the “best writer” in my graduate program plagiarized her writing sample. It was uncovered about a year in, when she kept begging her professors for deadline extensions and evading seminar projects. Finally, she started turning in copy-pasted garbage, and that’s when everyone got suspicious. By then, she had already snatched up a number of stipends, awards, and fellowships. The department let her keep the money, then she pretty much vanished.

Of course, what hurt even more was sitting around in writing workshops, watching professors heap praise on her for work that just wasn’t that good, except for these little moments of glory that often felt, well, out of place. Some of us even talked about it, in the quiet corners of coffeeshops.

We wondered to each other, “Is there something wrong with us?”

“Are we just jealous?”

So we judged ourselves. We scoured this plagiarist’s prose for clues about what we should be doing to earn that same praise.

We felt guilty.

The whole time, we were trying to conform to standards set by a plagiarist, someone who had nothing at all to teach us about… anything.

You’ve probably endured a similar experience. You’ve watched someone cheat their way to success, and then they just kept winning.

There’s a term for this: It’s called the Matthew Effect. Someone who enjoys early success, for whatever reason, continues to accumulate advantages—even when they’re not earning them. Often, they can even get away with taking credit for someone else’s work. They can exploit and appropriate everyone around them. They’re kind of like a vacuum cleaner. Psychologists have found evidence for this effect across various fields, including science and economics.

I’ve been writing for a while, and I’ve seen my work show up in some popular posts, without credit, and I’ve always tried to brush it off. Then, today, I came across a post by Katie Jgln, calling out a popular Substack writer for plagiarism. I’ve been reading Katie’s work for years now. She’s legit.

Mama, There’s a Plagiarist Behind You

As it turns out, this popular Substacker posts article after article talking about the virtues of slowing down and doing the hard work to earn moments of happiness and meaning. Imagine the irony of saying that, while grifting off the work of others, pumping out hyper-polished versions of articles that take credit for all the hard, imperfect labor they didn’t perform. I’ve read plenty of articles I wish I’d written. If all you had to do was touch up and repackage stuff you liked, and you could just take credit for it, writing would be easy. That’s not how it works.

Real writing takes a ton of effort. We’re the ones tracking down the sources. We’re the ones wrangling the words. We’re the ones who juggle writing time with our other jobs and responsibilities. We’re the ones who take all the risk of saying something that might cost us readers.

Some of us go to great lengths to produce our content. We make sacrifices. We write with kids in the background. We write between shifts at our day jobs. We write late at night, instead of getting sleep.

Our work is filled with interruptions, frustrations, and disappointments. We struggle through those to produce writing that resonates. Even when we’re not at our computers, a part of us is always thinking about the next piece. So, it’s sickening to see those endeavors simply polish someone else’s halo.

Extremely sickening.

In fact, as the plagiarist’s most recent article laps up enormous praise, some of us (including me) have been sitting at our kitchen table, on “vacation,” banging out prose, wrestling with words, trying to make next month’s bills, pushing through canceled subscriptions and unwarranted payment disputes, and getting accused of cheating, while reading this “perfect article” and beating ourselves up about what we should be doing better. What a racket.

We all draw influence and inspiration from each other. We all imitate and emulate each other. We learn by copying each other, at least a little bit. Every new piece of writing we put out there draws from a well of previous work. Sometimes, you just happen to post on the same topic as someone else. That’s all fine. There’s no such thing as a completely original piece of content.

There’s a big difference between that and ripping someone off. There’s an even bigger difference between that and feeding a bunch of original content into a database that robots mash together. When someone simply traces over someone else’s work and then sells it for ten times more, that’s theft. It doesn’t matter whether that theft is done by a machine or a person without a conscience.

We sweat over our writing, so it’s infuriating to see influencers out there just rebranding that work and then collecting rewards. It’s twice as infuriating to see platforms throw their hands up and say there’s nothing they can do about any of this, when many of those platforms waste no time targeting and silencing those they consider “doomers” or “killjoys.”

How does that encourage thoughtful writing?

While we’re at it, I’d like to take a moment to address all the life coaches, influencers, and “spiritual” readers on the web who fawn over this kind of content, disengenuous at best, and plagiarized at worst.

What, exactly, is the point of being a mindful person who ignores crisis after crisis? What’s the point of reading all these articles about self-awareness and critical thinking if they’re just going to shrug off politics, public health, fascism, the planet, or any opportunity to stand up for what’s right?

That’s not genuine mindfulness or intellectual depth.

These kinds of writers, even when they’re not committing actual plagiarism, are often trying to pass off a kind of fool’s intellect that promotes the virtues of personal cognitive, emotional, and spiritual growth. That content pretends we can be smart, mature individuals without ever having to adopt an unpopular position or do something that generates discomfort in the real world.

This kind of writing preaches a false way of being in the world. It would have you believe that writing something down and dropping it in a jar means you’re grateful. It would have you believe that saying the right thing matters more than doing the right thing, and that’s the world we live in now.

But you can’t live inside a personal development essay. Outside the flattering words we might consume, it’s messy out there. It’s hard to do the things those essays talk about, and we’re often punished for trying.

In the end, plagiarism can mean even more than copying someone else’s work. It can mean pretending to be an intelligent, thoughtful, caring human when they’re really just calling themselves that, and then going on to celebrate an entire economic and cultural system that relies increasingly on exploitation and pandering. You can plagiarize even more than content.

You can plagiarize a whole self.