Why I’m Leaving Public Scholarship on Rented Land

I labored faithfully on borrowed lands where attention is the new crop and platforms are the new plantation. All freedom begins with possession, 'cause power has always belonged to the owners.

I’ll Give You the World for Your Email Address & Likeness ✅

I recall the day that I signed up for Facebook vividly. September 1, 2005 — I was freshly graduated from high school that May 25th, and I was newly 17 as of June 1st. At that time, a collegiate email address was required and I had one courtesy of my acceptance to Clark Atlanta University.

Today I’m 37 and for 20 years I’ve shared my evolving thoughts from a singular digital storefront.

In that time, I’ve earned $0 from Facebook before or after it became umbrella housed as Meta for all of its acquisitions over the years.

It’s not been completely absent of reward, many of the benefits I’ve gained in two decades have been intrinsic and others more tangible. I built public credibility, a platform I leveraged for new stages and pages, and access to folks life would’ve never brought me to.

Still the truth is, I had no idea of the extent of the contract I was signing that fateful day in 2005. Not a single one of us did. It was impossible to fathom what conglomerate was forming at our expense then.

To understand the origins of this dynamic, we have to go back to the birth of social platforms — where the illusion of agency masked a deeper logic of extraction.

Social Media Accounts: The Original 360 Deal

The infamous 360 Deal became cultural parlance only after its victim count high and swallowed whole. Not until after the recording industry’s wrought iron curtain had fallen on the careers of so many hopefuls, trapping them in arrangements where record sales, touring, merchandise, endorsements, and publishing are all subject to record label taxation.

And now, in 2026, I’m uncovering the terms of my 2005 contracts with social networks that evolved quicker than we could’ve ever known.

In 2005, we had not yet witnessed the birth of a star incubated in the womb of social media. YouTube had only formed in February of that same year, MySpace was fading into its sunset — and though it was not the first social platform, it was the preeminent one of its time. If any platform produced a star, it would’ve been MySpace.

To be fair, we witnessed the formation of the mechanics of social platforms as incubators of stardom and wealth that are now normalized. But back then it was neither an assumed nor legitimate pathway to the traditional celebrity status.

Well I do suppose it produced two stars, but at the time we never expected it to be repeated or systematized as it is now. There’s MySpace founder & our friend Tom Anderson 🤣 and Soulja Boy whose stardom heavily began on MySpace in the mid-2000s.

Soulja’s got every right to demand his dues. He quite literally pioneered a music marketing engine that has now been institutionalized. He is the first to understand the impact of creating a direct, interactive connection with fans digitally. His page gained massive popularity, millions of plays, and a formidable career as an independent artist.

MySpace founder Tom Anderson walked away with $580 million.
Soulja Boy’s net worth today sits around $5 million.

The landowner extracted the real wealth.

And now, we lather, rinse, and repeat — until all that remains is the filth of soils tilled in borrowed lands as the landowner gets richer by the day.

A Sharecropper’s Retirement?

As a Black woman who is only 3-4 wombs removed from the plantation, I am not casual in my language or labeling here.

I’m not being cheeky or cutesy when I call the production of intellectual labor in the space of social media Digital Sharecropping.

The horror of sharecropping was never just the labor. It was the trap.

We were an agrarian people before we were a stolen people — of Africa’s total land mass, it possesses 60% to 65% of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land.

Estimates suggest the continent holds over 870 million hectares of land suitable for, but not currently used for, crop production.

Although despite this potential, it remains a net food importer — but that’s a problem I’ll unpack in depth in a future Black Affairs conversation.

Returning to my point of origin, the true horror of sharecropping is that it is a deliberately engineered economic trap that recreated slavery in everything but name.

After the violent revocation of promised land, white landowners kept the lands while Black bodies continued to labor them in plots. Repeated slave labor in exchange for a “share” of the crop — usually 30–50%. But it’s rigged from the go, because of course it is.

Billy Preston told us the math in 1974, “nothing’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.”

You start with nothing. No land, tools, seed, food, or cash. All you start with is debt. The credit system begins with debt for survival, given at insanely high interest rates at 30–70%+ — and if you check most lending systems structured around poverty like payday and title loans or even store credit cards, ain’t shit changed.

The credit came with contracts that our folks usually couldn’t read — and that we as descendants infamously do not read now.

Sunup to sundown, all year round working land you’ll never own and paying debts you’ll never outrun. Even in good harvest, you’re left owing money every damn year.

Sharecropping kept land ownership white and Black labor cheap. It sustained permanent generational poverty while it criminalized mobility.

Every harvest moved value from Black hands to white hands in perpetuity. Now Black labor is trained to know it’ll never be enough within these systems. Freedom does not bring security and effort does not bring advancement. We replaced physical chains with eternal hopelessness structured into law and economics.

🏜️The Real Estate Is Redefined, The System Remains Unchanged

The dot com is the new real estate, the digitized platforms are the new arable lands upon which all new things are built.

Algorithmic labor, unpaid intellectual work, platforms owning the land, creators doing the work, profits flowing upward, and “opportunity” replacing wages. That’s where we live now.

That structure isn’t accidental.
It’s the same damned logic: You may work here, but you will never own here.

For at least 10 of the last 20 years I’ve worked on my plot of digital lands, I’ve produced copious volumes of intellectual labor, political education, social commentary, and entertainment. The longer I keep you in the app, the more the landowner rewards my content with algorithmic mercies.

Well…so long as I’m producing the desired crop.

The landowner “settles accounts” at harvest by calculating the Crop value
MINUS your debts.

And at present it desires videos more than words, so my crops aren’t as valuable as before.

Sure, I keep you in-app so they’ll show my posts to a few, but I’m deprioritized for premium crops of livestreams, short-form video, and constant updates that bait emotional responses, increased ad views, higher click-through.

Why Black Affairs? Why Now?

Because I’m finally fulfilling the ancestral promise that for those of us who live to see it: go IN and POSSESS the land.

It’s happening here because now is the time to own the house my work has ALWAYS deserved to live in. No longer working plots of borrowed space and praying to algorithm’s mercy. Not filtering myself by someone else’s platform rules.

My Domain Registration of blackaffairs.org is the quiet beginning of an institution, and a clear reminder of the cost of prime real estate. Before this idea was even formed in the womb of my spirit, the landowners have already assessed the price of the land and its crops.

BlackAffairs.com is currently $1,788 dollars. The dot com TLD is still the premier site of domain name ownership, despite the introduction of a hundred other dots over the years. And before I ever pitched a tent, the real estate was already priced at a debt point for me. Valued most likely for its potential use in sex work not the Public Affairs work for which I intend it.

$1,788 is mortgage, rent, and utilities money for the average person, hell it’s a total monthly income for others. And I’ve been sharecropping digital lands in hopes of paying off the debts of institutionalized anti-Blackness that disadvantaged me before I could choose. Tried to pay it with earned degrees and 6-figure educational debt. Tried to pay it with intellectual labor in hopes that the next landowner might help me debt jump from social media to higher pay opportunities that might let me purchase my freedom. Instead I found myself simply charging debt owners, not actually closing my debt.

So now? Now I understand deeply how power is built & I’ve decided to build my own.

I’ve been a brilliant public intellectual publishing on rented land. And I’m immediately reminded of scripture. Not the way that Deuteronomy 1:8, 11:8 has been hollowed out to mean.

When I say it, I’m taking you to exile, to borrowed land, to coerced dwelling, to survival under someone else’s sovereignty — my proof of how deeply I read power.

But truly in the sense of understanding digital real estate and, borrowed lands, algorithmic mercies, and digital sharecropping. I’ve tilled, planted, and harvested attention. But the landowner owns the soil, the tools, the distribution, the profit, and the rules.

And at any moment they can throttle reach, erase my archive, demonetize my labor, ban my voice, and change the algorithmic weather. Just like Pharaoh changing straw quotas. Just like empire changing tribute.

So this act of land possession is not the prosperity-gospel version of “own the land. This move is done in the way that God’s people might’ve felt being forced to worship and live in dry and borrowed lands.

“How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

That wasn’t just grief.
That was powerlessness over the container of life.

That’s exactly what platforms do.

You can write brilliance every day — but you never control:

• who sees it
• how long it lives
• whether it’s buried
• whether it’s extracted

That’s borrowed land.

Now I own the land. And I will choose the crops I wish to see. My work has always been valuable. It was just being extracted inside someone else’s economy.

🌿 Black Affairs is Wilderness-to-Homeland

Not instant abundance, no, but freedom from extraction.

It marks a place where the archives remain, labor compounds, my audience belongs to me, and my voice can’t be quietly erased!

Here is where I build slow, steady, sovereign. I’ve survived and grown on borrowed land, (biblical) Israel did too. But there comes a moment when staying there becomes unnecessary captivity.

This move is about dignity. The work now has a home — not a plantation.

I’m building in freedom now.  I invite you to study, share, and sustain the work. Black Affairs is not just a publication — it is a public record of Black life and power.

With love,
D. Danyelle Thomas
Founder, BlackAffairs.org