We live in a culture of magpies
We live in a culture of magpies
Internet fame usually requires theft
How does he or she do it? you might have wondered at some point while browsing the feed of some highly prolific poster. You scroll past intriguing links, hundreds of words daily, images featured, interesting graphs, fact-checks—a cornucopia of fascinating tidbits thrown out as chum into the waters to the gathering of more and more fish. And then the disappointment at the lack of traction in your own activity, nowhere near as prominent. Perhaps accompanied by an internal acknowledgement that you will never be as witty, as interesting, as share-worthy.
Well, I am here to say the hard truth: the answer of how they did it is usually (not always, but usually) by stealing other people’s content and repackaging it without linking to the original source. That’s it. That’s the only strategy that can reliably build large audiences from scratch on websites with high content demands. Meaning that, on many websites, especially on social media, there are basically only two types of very large accounts. First, people who have a good reason to already be famous (e.g., pop stars, well-known academics, politicians). Second, those unbothered by what might be called the consistent “minor theft” of ideas, images, or links, usually in a way that starts innocently but grows bolder over time as they build their nest of stolen things. Third, some tiny remainder who struggle to remain honest.
How do I know that this is how most large grown-from-scratch accounts operate? Because I’ve been writing online for a while and eventually you catch them in the act enough to realize that behind most clever and interesting accounts there are small grabby hands and the mind of a magpie.
Knowing you live in a magpie culture is worth keeping in mind. If, as Isaiah Berlin once said, “foxes” are people who know many little things, and “hedgehogs” people who know one big thing, then the more recent “magpie” is someone who knows nothing yet manages to maintain a beautiful nest of ideas that aren’t theirs. A culture of such individuals has its own dynamics, many of them negative (although the nests sure are beautiful). Here is how these magpies, who make up the bulk of successful accounts online, actually work: