Nebula, and James Somerton
How a major publishing studio destroyed a man's career for profit - and disguised it as moral reasons
The internet is currently abuzz with discussions about plagiarism. Who on YouTube is a plagiarist? Who can be canceled? The internet is out for blood. I intend to make a short article here to argue that this feeding frenzy is entirely artificially constructed to benefit one film studio.
In early 2022, a man named James Somerton launched a campaign to get funding to start a film production company called “Telos Pictures” promising that it would “produce short films, feature films, and series that focus on LGBTQ characters and stories, written and produced by LGBTQ people.” He raised tens of thousands of dollars and by summer of 2023 things had kicked into high gear, having been fully incorporated and preparing to hire staff.
At the same time, a major player in online content Nebula began releasing PR statements saying that they were going to be releasing new premium content by YouTube creators signed to them, including a large slate of queer content from authors like Jessie Gender, focusing on queer content in Star Trek, to Broey Deschanel, writing a series on Taboos in film-making.
Now, this entire time Somerton had his own very successful YouTube channel. However, unknown to most of his audience, he had been engaging in extensive plagiarism to keep up with his schedule of video production.
On December 2nd, 2023, famous YouTuber Hbomberguy dropped the aforementioned video detailing for over 2 hours instances of Somerton’s plagiarism as well as an additional 2 hours of content about the whole topic of plagiarism.
On December 4th, another creator Todd in the Shadows, normally a music YouTuber posted another takedown of Somerton, this time from a moral angle, citing a great deal of sketchy behavior over the course of an hour and a half.
In the past several days, almost everyone on YouTube has weighed in, as well as publications in the media. By this author’s count, there are over 60 videos from major creators on the topic of plagiarism or reactions to Hbomber’s video in this week alone.
Now, another major creator, PhilosophyTube has posted a video also on the topic of plagiarism.
Now, other authors with better prose than I have already written extensively about the internet reaction to these video dropping, and what it means for systemic critique. The question remains though - how did this get so well coordinated? How did many of the most successful creators on the YouTube left all decide to make long form content on the same topic at the same time?
I want to put forward a theory of how this unfolded.
Approximately a year ago, Hbomberguy’s began working on a video about plagiarism on and off, along with the large number of other videos he had been working on. This was a personal peeve of his. During his research, he discovered that James Somerton was plagiarizing content, and decided to dive deep on him.
Hbomb did not talk to Somerton about this, or bring the evidence to him - maybe because he did not have any channels to speak directly to him with. But, he did have channels to talk with his fellow creators on Nebula.
Now, this is pure theory from here on out, but I suspect he talked to his colleagues at Nebula, and among them many queer creators like Jessie Gender, PhilosophyTube, and Hbomb himself decided not to bring it up with the public at that time. Somerton was an openly gay creator and they did not want to start a controversy with him. Rather, they decided to remain quiet and not mention in, but would keep the evidence in their pocket in case it was ever relevant. My real only evidence for this is that Hbomberguy has a history of changing sides where they wind blew when it came to minority content creators so he would always stay on the “right side” of the cancel mob.
When Nebula announced their own studio doing literally the exact same thing as Somerton, I suspect that Nebula's bosses (including the board at Curiosity Stream, the sister company which includes a USAID member) Sent the orders down. They told their creators "Hey, we're launching our queer film studio. We cannot have competition for this. Kill Somerton’s company."
And so they all went and make a coordinated strike to ruin Somerton’s studio and career. They launched a multi-prong attack to ensure something sticks. They main angle is to use the plagiarism accusation to crush him. With Hbomb as the vanguard, and with PhilosophyTube and the crew making followup videos about YouTube plagiarism right after in wave after wave to turn the entire internet conversation to plagiarism.
Hbomb’s producer then went on Reddit to further drive the conversation. Encouraging people to go out and find other “baddies" to find and generate tons and tons of engagement.
My theory was for the first several days that Hbomb was merely trying to get clout by attacking other creators. However, given the HUGE push for Nebula’s advertising, it’s clear that it's not JUST a "get the baddies" cancel wave for clout. Rather, it's more like an ARG to shape the whole conversation toward promoting Nebula's new queer content shows.
Everyone is encouraged to post queer creators they like, to attack the baddies, and it’s all a big game. In fact a pregame before Nebula releases their videos
Of course, if it didn't work, they had Todd in the Shadows as their backup plan to destroy Somerton on moral outrage issues by turning him from a queer creator to a cis white male transphobic misogynist.
Well, it did work. Somerton’s studio is dissolved. His videos are private, his Patreon’s canceled.
This might seem like a big conspiracy theory - well it is, a conspiracy of a bunch of YouTubers who have been known to conspire. It is not at all beyond the grasp of big studio executives to create an idea like this and tell others to put it into place. Let alone a studio controlled by a member who works for an agency centered entirely around using economics to control entire countries. And there are still people out there that say Breadtube doesn’t serve imperialism.
It is just a theory, but it’s worth exploring.
Stay turned for a future post on how turning regular people into internet cops is harmful to all online discourse. Thanks to everyone on Peter Coffin’s discord for helping me put these ideas together.
i have a few questions about your assumptions and conclusions, if you dont mind. first, even if you are right about neblua intentionally directing several content creators to attack james, the conclusions they found are still legitimate criticisms, so im not sure why its a bad thing. specifically, james did actually plagiarize the majority of his videos, and he did actually modify other peoples works to both erase their personal identities and also make them more misogynistic. even telos, in the several years between its founding and hbomberguy's video about james, it produced nothing except announcements of new projects to replace abandoned projects that never got worked on or even any updates for; all of this together means he and his studio would've failed on their own without any intervention, with the only difference being even more people are hurt by his actions. as for todd in the shadows, all he did was point out the factual inaccuracies, and the actual misogyny, present in james' videos. there was no manipulation or twisting of events going on, simply highlighting things that already exist. this is just my personal opinion, but i dont think "being queer" is a good defense against also harming several other queer communities that you arent apart of