After years of building intellectual life on platforms I do not own, I am bringing my public scholarship back to Unfit Christian. This is not nostalgia for blogging. It is a return to owned land, archive, sovereignty, and the publication world my work has always deserved.
A Digital Homecoming to Owned Land
Before I tell you about the land I’m building, I need to tell the truth about the land I abandoned.
Prior to this week, the last time I published a new essay on UnfitChristian.com was June 27, 2022. For nearly four years, this house sat mostly quiet while my voice kept moving across borrowed platforms. I did not stop thinking. I did not stop writing. I did not stop building audience, language, community, credibility, or public trust.
I simply kept planting elsewhere.
Facebook. Instagram. Threads. Patreon. Messenger. Voice notes. Captions. Comments. Screenshots. Livestreams. Digital rooms where the work moved quickly, fed immediately, and returned the intoxicating reward of instant response. I became fluent in the harvest rhythms of rented land: post, react, clarify, defend, archive nothing, begin again.
And while I was there, the work grew. Millions of views. Thousands of followers. Book readers. Speaking invitations. Media opportunities. Lives touched by words that never fully belonged to the platforms carrying them.
But I also watched what happens when brilliant work is scattered across lands I do not own. Posts disappear into timelines. Algorithms bury what once moved people. Platforms reward my labor only when my crop keeps people scrolling. And no matter how much intellectual atmosphere I create there, the landowner keeps the soil.
So this is not merely a blog return.
This is repatriation.
A return to owned land after years of sharecropping my public scholarship across the social media stratosphere. A decision to stop treating my website like a forgotten storage shed while continuing to build cathedrals on platforms that can throttle, erase, monetize, or misread me at will.
Unfit Christian is awake again. Not as nostalgia. Not as a personal blog trying to recapture an old internet. But as a Black independent publication where my essays, op-eds, cultural witness, public theology, spiritual critique, and Black public thought can live, gather, and compound.
Now, let me tell you why that matters.
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 had freshly graduated from high school on 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, neither before nor after it became housed under Meta with all of its acquisitions over the years.
It’s not 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.
Social Media Accounts: The Original 360 Deal
TThe infamous 360 Deal became cultural parlance only after its victim count was high and whole careers had been swallowed. 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.1 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. 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.
The landowner “settles accounts” at harvest by calculating the Crop value MINUS your debts. Well…so long as I’m producing the desired crop.
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 Return? 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.
THIS 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. I looked to purchase a second domain to add to my Unfit Christian asset portfolio.
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.
I mean it in the sense of digital real estate, 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
🌿 So I’m moving out from the Wilderness and back into my Homeland of UnfitChristian.com as my publishing home. 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.
No, this is not instant abundance, yet it is freedom from extraction. Here I am raising Black Public Public Affairs alongside Cultural Witness, Black Interior Life, Faith Deconstruction, Conjure & ATRs, Identity, and the other editorial spaces this work has always been building toward.
On this land we plant for civic life, law, power, and the material conditions of Black survival. We offer Cultural Witness for reading media, celebrity, spectacle, grief, and collective memory. Black Interior Life for the private ache that becomes public meaning. Deconstruction for disentangling faith from supremacy. Conjure & ATRs for the Black spiritual technologies the church demonized while borrowing their power. Faith, Identity, Gender & Power, Love & Relationships, Race, Sexuality — not as scattered categories, but as rooms in one publication world.
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. And I invite your investment of presence, patronage, and amplitude.
✌🏾 With love🖤,
D. Danyelle Thomas
Founder, unfitChristian.com
- The term “digital sharecropping” is widely credited to technology writer Nicholas Carr, who used it in 2006 to describe how Web 2.0 platforms capture economic value from user-generated labor. I use the phrase here through Black historical memory, land theft, debt, extraction, and the afterlife of sharecropping. ↩︎