On December 2, YouTuber Harry Brewis, better known as hbomberguy, slid in just under the wire and dropped what might be the best, and certainly the most widely talked about, video essay of the year. It is a YouTube video essay about YouTube video essays — specifically, about the prevalence of intellectual theft and laziness in the format, done in the most thoroughly researched and un-lazy way imaginable. “Plagiarism and You(Tube)†is three hours and 51 minutes long. That’s 25 minutes longer than Killers of the Flower Moon. You might think such an inside-baseball topic with such a sober-sounding focus (when’s the last time you’ve had a lecture on plagiarism? College?) would draw an insular, self-selecting crowd; instead, the video has 10 million views and counting, largely because Brewis is really, really, really, really, really good at making videos. Take one of his most famous clips — eviscerating Ben Shapiro while slamming an ax through a wall like a righteous Jack Torrance — for the way he combines researched footage, production design, and above all, humor, full of takedowns toward people and institutions that do, in fact, deserve it.
Brewis has been at this game for a while, getting his start as an underpaid editor for a larger content channel before breaking out on his own, offering funny, insightful, and exasperated “measured responses†to YouTube pickup artists, climate-change deniers, and misogynists, and doing video-game and pop-culture analysis. In this video, he addresses the unchecked plagiarism that’s been allowed to proliferate in this space, and the scammy, scummy creators who don’t do much original creating at all while profiting off of fan bases who put their faith in them. The first half of the video focuses on a handful of cases, including one-woman content farm Iilluminaughtii and meme explainer Internet Historian, but it’s the second half that has ignited endless analysis on Twitter and TikTok. Brewis focuses on one creator in particular: James Somerton, a business major who pivoted to doing queer-media analysis in bisexual lighting for over 300,000 subscribers and 3,000 Patreons. Only he wasn’t doing any of the analyzing, instead ripping off entire passages from other, often less famous, queer writers’ work, and in some cases, taking clips and footage from their videos and documentaries and passing them off as his own. These include the written work of Stephen Spinks for defunct regional LGBTQ publication Midlands Zone, The Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo, and Tinker Belles and Evil Queens author Sean Griffin.
Part of what makes Brewis’s video so powerful is the way he explains the stakes of this issue: the erasure of queer thinkers’ work, the silencing when they tried to call Somerton out, the manipulation of an audience who trusted him, for his own financial gain; Somerton made a living off of the ad revenue from these videos and encouraged his audience to invest in film productions that never got made. With the help of his producer Kat Lo (because what we will be doing is giving credit), Brewis relates this to questions of art, queer community, and identity itself. He has pledged that ad revenue from his video will be redistributed among the creators Somerton stole from.
In the wake of this video, Somerton went offline. Other YouTubers published their own videos, both about plagiarism and Somerton, specifically. A conversation was ignited. On December 21, he posted (and later took down) a tearful half-hour apology video, which does begin with him disclosing that he was hospitalized, implying self-harm, in the fallout from the essay. In the rest of the video, he dodges the word “plagiarism,†insists that he did not write any of the more offensive material (something probably disprovable, as he doesn’t show where he did get it from and insists that he’s not throwing his co-writer Nick Herrgott under the bus), and says he will be reinstating his Patreon. The backlash has been … considerable.
We spoke with Brewis in the week after his original video went up, prior to Somerton’s reemergence, going in depth on topics like AI, the moral quandaries of “drama†videos, and why he didn’t even want to have to make this in the first place. “I don’t like starting fights,†he said. “It’s just I feel obligated to at a certain point. I hope this video gave the impression of someone who was dragged through the process somewhat against his will.â€
This video has broken out way beyond your usual viewer base; even though you’ve had some other videos do that in the past, none have been quite a moment like this. How does that feel?
This video is my Atlas Shrugged in the sense that it’s far too long and inexplicably has crossover appeal despite being far worse than everything else I’ve ever made. I’m kidding, but it’s a shock, because I made this video to talk about an issue that I think affects YouTubers, which is ultimately a small group. I expected it to be popular with other YouTubers at best. I didn’t expect it to be popular with everyone, especially when the second half is largely about an intercommunity problem dealing with a few specific people.
There’s something that feels correct about this video coming out at the same time as George Santos being ousted from Congress. He and James Somerton are spiritually brothers.
I love the joke of “people love to say be gay, do crime†until you actually do it. We’ve entered a new era of complicated queer characters. It was difficult to be gay and complicated before, so I appreciate that we live in an era where you can be a gay person and a criminal. That’s a new tack. Â
You normally don’t make things that could be considered YouTuber drama videos, so how do you feel about this being the video that has broken out?Â
It’s something I’ve always wanted to avoid doing because people are immediately rewarded for it, and then you have a very strong incentive to make worse videos that make your life sadder, because of the income and attention it can bring you. And when I realized I was making a drama video about a guy, I panicked and thought, This isn’t who I want to be. How do I make this morally acceptable to myself before I continue, when obviously I would like to keep all of that money? Then there would be nothing stopping me from doing another one, and keeping that money, and what if I didn’t want to stop? You get to make one of these, and then you stop, or you become evil.
What has the reaction generally been like?
Within the hyperspecific community of queer people who engage with James and not much else, because he says there’s not much else, the effect has been, I think, really good. I’ve introduced a lot of people to a lot of alternatives. Very few people have come to James’s defense. I was worried that if there were any holes in the video, there would be defenders. I wanted a clean shot. I have had a few people whose usernames ended up in the video [among James’s subscribers] reach out to say, “I’m really embarrassed that it was me that was highlighted.†So we’ve considered going back and maybe adding a blur to those sections of the video. But the people who it was made for have been really positive about it so far. And when the video hit, James immediately panicked and deleted his Discord server so no one could discuss it, and a lot of former Somerton fans have opened their own server to discuss it. My producer has gone in their server to talk to them and ask how they’re feeling about it. Overall, the last thing I wanted to do was make people feel more alone. I want to remind them that there’s a bigger community than they thought.
Did you see James’s co-writer Nick’s post in the Discord about how he doesn’t do research?Â
I did. That’s a very unfortunate thing for him to have written. He might have been panicking, so he said it in a very inarticulate way. I think what he meant was he was writing based on how he felt about things, so of course he can’t be stealing because he’s writing his authentic feelings. He’s made so many posts severing ties with James, so I think he’s had a chance to think about his place in all this. He was told there were two instances of maybe-plagiarism and that James would fix them, and he believed him because he was his friend, and that’s completely sensible. I don’t blame him. I wish he’d not said those things, though, because it makes me look bad for giving him the benefit of the doubt. When we looked into Nick, one of the things we wanted to know was, Does he know? And how is he, quality-wise, as a writer? And something we left out in the video was James edits out a lot of Nick’s writing. In the video where he steals four minutes about Bob Iger, or Bob Chapek —
One of the evil Bobs of Disney.
One of the many evil Bobs in the world, all of whom work for Disney, Nick wrote a section connecting the two stolen articles together that almost makes the video make sense. And in the final edit, James cuts immediately to the next chapter. It’s such an awkward and strange cut. I didn’t want to get into that, because it felt like a pointless aside for the video.
Another thing we looked at was, we found that Nick is a true writer, in the sense that he has a blog he updated three times and then gave up on, which we’ve all done. The way he would write around issues implies he has no idea what he’s talking about. Like when he was explaining what Orientalism is in this blog, he got his quote explaining what it is from the Wikipedia page for a book about Orientalism. And it wasn’t even a quote from the page itself. It was a quote from a review of the book, cited on the page. You know something’s bad when someone explains something and the quote is attributed to “Wikipedia Orientalism book.â€
As if you can’t find a free Said PDF on the first page of Google results.Â
It was the Said book. I have a lot of respect for my producer Kat Lo. She’s so much more intelligent than me, and it’s probably the reason why the video ended up good and not being a nightmare. I visited her a couple months ago and out of the corner of my eye saw Orientalism on her shelf. It was such a serendipitous moment. It’s fascinating seeing how easy it is to get away with not knowing anything while being a video essayist. It definitely made me think about how many more people are not plagiarists, but definitely charlatans, and am I one of them and I just don’t know it?
I think people tend to fool themselves. People think they’re good at what they do, and they don’t question their practices. Because James and Nick both thought they were experts on the topics they talked about, they bumbled into so many blind alleys. I mentioned making this video to my friend Todd and he independently started watching James, and fell down all these rabbit holes, and made a video about him as well. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, when you’ve managed to stay at the top of the curve so you think, I must be an expert, and you never do any work that can disconfirm your hypothesis. It’s scary how easy it is to do that.
Did you reach out to James at all during the process?Â
I didn’t, mainly because when he’s been tipped off that someone has criticized him in the past, he will just hide the videos and not acknowledge it. I didn’t put the video up early for patrons either, because I didn’t want to tip him off. This was unfortunately a circumstance where I have to report without having his answer. With the other sections, I reached out to people for comment. And I reached out to people he’d stolen from, like Sean Griffin, for example. James claims he got permission in the end to republish Griffin’s video, but no one who’s ever emailed Sean Griffin has got a response. So I find that extremely unlikely.
Did you hear from anyone who found out that he stole their work through watching your video?
Yes. We reached out to a lot of people who James stole from who we trusted not to talk about it. To put it bluntly, I know some journalists in this video who I know would have immediately tweeted about it. So to be careful, there were a few people I reached out to and said, “Your work is being covered in this video,†but I can’t say who, and in fact one of them actually came out and said, “[Hbomberguy] didn’t tell me because he knew I would have talked shit immediately.†I didn’t reach out to Jes Tom, because I wasn’t sure where to reach out correctly because they seem to be traveling a lot, doing a lot of comedy shows, and I didn’t want to intrude. So they found out through the video. They reached out first once it went live, and what’s shocking is that they went on to write for Our Flag Means Death — a show James has made a video about, with plagiarism in it! Not only has he ripped this person off, he’s ripped off other people who review the show they work on.
How about Somerton’s reaction to the video?
We’ve been watching like hawks to see which videos he takes down since this came out. “Society and Queer Horror†was obliterated on impact. Before anyone could have conceivably finished watching the video, it was gone. And a further ten videos have disappeared in the intervening time. It’s been fun; these seem to be ones that we haven’t caught anything in … yet. My one shame is that I didn’t finish this video in time to prevent him from making a video about Utena. That was up for his patrons early and steals from Wikipedia and is bad and everyone hates it. I wish I prevented its existence entirely by being faster.
Is there guilt that comes with doing such a thorough and complete dragging?Â
Yeah, absolutely. I don’t like assuming that I’m going to destroy someone’s life. That feels self-aggrandizing. But making this video, I thought about the damage it would do. I’m not happy. I wish I could make this and then not have to deal with the fact that I did this. I feel very responsible for my actions. As a YouTuber, you hit a certain level of size where it occurs to you that someone can be horrible to you on the internet, and if you acknowledge it, the people who see it might respond to that person and do more harm than you ever received. You have to learn to accept the burden of not being able to fight back against certain people and accusations. There was this sense of, Is James big enough that this is worth talking about? And for a long time, the answer was no, until it kept becoming more clear that he’d profited so much off of people who are less successful than him. That made it more of a real issue. But I do feel guilt. I wish I didn’t have to make it, but ultimately, one person is responsible for making that video.
Plus, you bring to light all of these queer writers and creators with way smaller platforms. It’s a greater good.
It’s been incredibly invigorating, finding new people whose work I can read. I’m a huge fan now of Bart Bishop, who wrote a review of Aliens. And you can tell why it was discovered that he had been ripped off; people wanted to know where those words came from. They wanted to find the source of the quotes because he was so astute in finding good writing to quote. We can maybe reach out to Midlands Zone Magazine and try and get some kind of archive of their good articles together, because that stuff I read through [that Somerton stole] was fantastic. It means a lot to me because I grew up in the Midlands, thumbing through companies of that magazine when no one was looking.
Was James’s behavior an open secret among YouTubers? How much was unearthed for the first time in your video? I’m thinking of Folding Ideas’ Twitter thread about James’s expensive equipment.Â
There’s a streaming service called Nebula which I’m on, and James wanted to be on it violently. So much so that he was deliberately asking followers on his Discord, “I am once again asking you to email Nebula to insist I get on the platform.†Then he started claiming Nebula didn’t support queer people as a result of not letting him on, and accused them of blacklisting him, which was just not the case. He just saw a podcast by one of Nebula’s creators saying that they blacklist people if they’re really annoying, and then assumed that that must be him because he knows he’s been annoying; he had started a lot of fights with various YouTubers who were queer and on Nebula. When that happened, a lot of people started going, Hold on, what is this guy’s deal? As a result of that, several creators have definitely spoken to each other about him. I wouldn’t call it an open secret, but everyone has a James Somerton story. So when me and Todd and Dan were speaking, we would share what we’ve discovered about it. I’d be like, “This thing is stolen too,†and Todd would be like, “He thinks the Nazis invented health programs†or “Gay porn invented Skype.â€
The thing that really got to me was, for a while, I shot my videos with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k, and it was far too advanced for YouTube videos, so I don’t use it anymore. And Somerton has a much more expensive version of that camera, and it’s a B-cam that he doesn’t shoot anything with. It’s just a background prop in several of his videos, sitting there unused. And that fills me with a kind of disgust that can’t really be described unless you also do this and know how wasteful that is. So I feel Dan’s pain when he talks about the sheer, vast expense of all of this.
In the video, you say that while YouTube doesn’t do an effective job addressing its plagiarism problem, you believe that if it actually tried, it would make the problem worse. How so?
It has to be addressed on the creator level, where artists and creatives discuss what standards we hold each other to, as opposed to there being a formal process. If you plagiarize someone right now, you can just get away with it. No one can fire you. It needs to be a process of people publicly denouncing it when it happens, and being able to talk about it, to let people adjust who they want to watch accordingly.
If YouTubers have to hold each other accountable and act as their own whistleblowers, where do you think mainstream media is failing in covering this space?
Mainstream media doesn’t know how to cover YouTube because it is also a competitor. It’s a different form of media that is actively replacing a lot of people’s consumption habits. So it’s very difficult to address anything happening on YouTube without an underlying message of “here’s what happens when you let a bunch of upstarts start democratizing media.†Mainstream media has had so much trouble keeping itself accountable in so many ways for so long that its inability to address this sort of discourse is not a surprise, and just an extension of that failure.
You briefly touch on AI in the video, but I’d like to hear your further thoughts on AI codifying plagiarism, like literally operating on stealing other people’s work.Â
If people were frank about their use of AI and also if we lived in a postcapitalist utopia, AI would be a very interesting experiment. I would love to see what people do with it. People talk about “prompt-mancy,†where they learn how to write the exact line of text to make something really interesting come out of this machine. I wish we could enjoy it on that level without in the back of our minds going, This is going to put so many people out of a job. So many other people’s work was stolen, unpaid, for it to be able to make this.
In the first half of the video, you talk about Iilluminaughtii lifting from documentaries whole cloth for her own videos. Do you think her audience legitimately doesn’t care, because the version she offers is un-paywalled?Â
Yes and no. Now that people are aware that you can just make a computer write something, I think they’re going to raise their standards. As soon as I started asking myself, “Am I just watching trash a computer spat out?†a lot of YouTubers I used to watch became boring to me. I thought, This is interchangeable. Even if a person wrote it, I hate this. Ninety percent of everything has always been bad. And the fact that we now have to think about what we’re watching and if it’s bad in this very active way, people will be more discerning about what they enjoy. We used to live in a time when there were three channels. If you wanted to watch something, you had to buy it on DVD or you had to go through the effort of stealing it from a torrent site and finding one that wasn’t a virus. But now, it’s convenient to just keep watching anything forever. We hit that stage seamlessly without having a moment of stopping to assess the quality of what we do with that time. It used to be, you’d watch an entire anime, and then you’d have to do work to find what you’d follow it up with. Now, if you have Crunchyroll, there’s 500 million episodes and you can just keep going forever. It’s much harder to stop and reassess. In a way, the badness is so omnipresent now, people will have to actually rethink their practices in a way that is maybe better than what we had before.
You have 25 extra minutes of material on Iilluminaughtii on your second YouTube channel. What else did you leave on the cutting-room floor?Â
I have a lot more footage of Internet Historian just reading the Mental Floss article [that “Man in Cave†was stolen from] that I just didn’t have time for because it’s an hour long. There’s so much of it. I have so many little mini-tangents about James that I cut out just because I thought if I talk about this, I feel like I’m just being mean. Kat felt very strongly about the misogyny section. Initially, I thought it should be a smaller aside, but as we kept looking, we realized this was a pattern of behavior that needs to be talked about. There’s a lot of other stuff we worried was poisoning the well. At the beginning of that section, I talked about how I’ve always had trouble watching his videos because they’re full of mistakes, and also he used to aggressively promote himself at me. He followed me on Twitter and linked me all of his videos. And then eventually when I didn’t respond, he unfollowed me. It’s very strange, and I decided not to talk about that. Even when you’re dealing with a vile person, if you talk about it wrong, you come across as vindictive, and I genuinely have no vendetta against James. I frankly still don’t believe I know who he is after having consumed so much of his material because there’s so little of him in it. But I wanted to make sure that I gave him a fair shake.
One of my favorite lines in the video comes toward the end, after going through all of these great queer writers that you discovered through unearthing the work Somerton stole from. You say, “I’m proud of us. Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it.†It’s so clever and sweet. It made me wonder what your scriptwriting process is like for something this long.Â
A lot of the good lines are ad libs. I fell into that line, and it’s so good. I try to make it clear when something is a written joke. A lot of the stuff that happens on the spot comes from having my fake notes, and I get into my emotional space of how I feel about what’s happening, and I just talk. If something funny happens, I feel good that it came out of me and that I didn’t have to plan it. It’s a process of slowly, continuously working at something until the good ideas emerge. I’m proud of that line. It feels so corny, but it came out of me without having to plan it.
Toward the end, you expand your focus from this deep dive into this very humane musing about authorship and identity. How do you structure a video this long, and how do you plan for that final big thesis?Â
I made the process of making these discoveries, and the struggle I had even making the video, part of the video. So even if the video went really bad, you’d experience the narrative of me making a bad video and regretting it in real time, and it would be a journey through a nightmare as opposed to just a bad video. It’s annoying. Last year, I deliberately made a video I felt was too long, because I was trying to find what my time limit is. It was about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and the whole joke of the video was just about how this game is fine. It’s three hours, 33 minutes, and 33 seconds. I thought, That’s the limit. People will hate this. I’ll be punished for it and then I’ll know where the line is. Instead, I got 10 million views, and now I don’t know what to do. As long as the video feels authentic, the length dissolves away. I’ve had so many people say that they started watching it out of curiosity, and then they got an hour in before they paused it. Just because it flows. It’s not because I’m a genius at pacing. I just tell people how my experience is going.
It really goes against the conventional wisdom of the internet giving everyone shortened attention spans.Â
One of the problems with modern discourse about attention spans is that a lot of it is secretly a judgment of literacy. They’re not saying, Everyone has ADHD now and needs to have other windows open at once. What they’re really saying is People don’t want to read. When the honest truth is people might read less books now, but the average person reads more words than ever in human history. People read a book’s length of content on Twitter every day. So people are absolutely ready to spend four hours watching a video or a documentary or a movie that’s that long. We just also have been given the option of watching a thing that’s quite funny and is 20 seconds long. And who would turn that down?
They think there’s a “right†and “wrong†type of media literacy?Â
Especially if you’re in the video-game space. So many games have come out that are effectively books. People like to make fun of visual novels for not being games, but people love them because they do enjoy reading. It’s just that the slight game aspects make it more fun. So yeah, I’m averse to the idea that TikTok is ruining people’s brains. It definitely is having an effect. But as for its effect on literacy, I think you have to be extremely literate to understand what the hell is happening on there. I don’t understand it. And I take that as a mistake on my part.
Are you looking forward to going back to video-game playthroughs after all of this?Â
I’ve not played any games for, like, six months, except Counter Strike. I’m really looking forward to playing that new survival horror game everyone loves. It’s funny that for years, when I made the Deus Ex video, I joked that my next review would be of the director’s cut of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I can’t wait to do that. And I want to finally do a video about the grants program that we ran and what we learned from artists who worked on it. The next video might deal with AI some more; it’s going to be about the modern state of digital creative tools and how Adobe has eaten all of them.
What would you like to see come from this video’s success?
Toward the end of the video I say, and this was Kat’s suggestion to put this in, so thanks to her for bringing this up — there is definitely value in adapting essays and books. There are so many good words that are yet to make it onto YouTube. What James has done could have easily been an amazing piece of queer activism, if he just was honest about it. And I would like to see more adaptations of people’s writing done with their permission.