introductions
Ismatu, July of 2022
You have to be under the parent of someone who's evil. I don't want to be a data analyst for anybody! And I still have like— and then you only own your thoughts in partial. You get to own a lot of your time, but it's like there were all these trade-offs. The only way that I don't have trade-offs is if I get to own my thoughts and I can do something with them.
[ismatu takes a puff]
So I'm not gonna work for the fucking UN. I'ma make shit on the internet and hope that this gets me to a place where I can earn my thoughts— OWN, sorry, not earn.
Where my thoughts are mine and I get to share who— and I get to choose when I'm intimate with my thoughts and not somebody else because of the money that they give me to buy time. It feels like I'm buying my own freedom papers. Like, I'm gonna buy my own time.
The Question Of Agency And Creation [transript, aug 1 2024]
Hi, good afternoon or actually whatever time of day you're listening to this. I have some thoughts to share about the nature of being publicly funded— in that I published my first Paid Subscriber Only post in quite a long time (after I said I would not be doing that) because I needed a smaller audience to experience like what it would be like to share a first rough draft. It's since been taken down because I… don’t… likeeee… I don't like it! Not the draft itself. I don't think first drafts are something to have like intense emotions about liking them or not liking them. They just need to be what they are. But the process of having to seclude this space that I really want to be accessible to everyone— especially because only about half of the people that read or listen consistently are based in the United States and everybody else, that other 50 %, is from everywhere else.
There's a lot of places in the world where something that feels like a nominal fee to us— you know, $6 a month for people that live in the United States is not that much money. But there are places where that's a lot of money and that that like is not a reasonable thing to pay for them. I don't want to be exclusionary.
I'm balancing, well, I'm balancing the capitalist logic that I fight and have been fighting, which is, “Well, if I don't provide incentive or reward for people to pay for this work, people just won’t.” And in some ways that's true.
I don’t have, uh— from the metric that things like Substack give me or things like Patreon give me, they're like, hey, you don't retain a lot of these people. And I think it's because most people don't actually want— most people, you know, want to trade money for a service that is exclusive to them. That's the reason that you're paying money. So the idea that you're paying money so that everybody can provide— can enjoy this service, can just feel like you're like out, you know, however many dollars you decided to invest.
I am grappling with that feeling, this like space of discomfort of going, I want to reward the people that choose to pay for this service such that it is free for everyone because I consider art-making, intellectualism, understanding political theory and turning that into political education, free mental health services, the expansion of all those things and projects. I consider this to be a public service. I work for the public.
I don't have a desire to be exclusionary. So this post is going to remain paid members only for the first 24 hours because I want to hear from you about what you might want.
How do I reward you and say thank you well without making things that are exclusive to you? Because that kind of defeats the point of being publicly funded and being a public service. The moment that there are some things that are for the premium, privatization begins. And there's this worm in my head that burrows deeper and deeper into my psyche of, “find a way to be motivated by money. Make sure you make money. You and your family will die if you don't make money.” I get it.
But I also don't want to be controlled by the fear of lack and what happens without. I know that's very like… squishy woo woo. Sorry. I unfortunately am going to become more squishy woo-woo, I have decided, because it's a part of my personhood and I don't want to hide it to be marketable (lol). But I don’t. I don't want to be compelled by fear of lack. I said that way back when, almost a year ago now that I started doing everything for free. Everything. Online things, mental health things, things I was doing in my physical life, all of the work that I was doing for my community. I was like, it's community work, belongs to community, it's happening for free. How do I say thank you properly?
I also revisited some older words that I had about the Patreon. The Patreon was the first thing that I started to have like a paid space. And I was over there existing without curation, which is really funny to look at now. Also, looking at the ways that I've grown, that my life has become more of my own, that I feel more of myself now, and I'm not so cynical about the world. Existing in this way, being supported by the public, has really disengaged me from the cynicism of believing that, you know, like, life is not worth living, or that people are not good, or that people have no desire to be good or see good things happen. I could not believe that now if I tried, having been on the receiving end of just like, sincere benevolence by strangers. It was interesting to see my thought process back then. The things that I thought about, the conclusions that I came to, the things that I complained about.
I'm grateful to be grateful now.
One of the things that I said, I put at the top of this, which is that I wanted to own my thoughts and I wanted to be an agency in control over their dissemination. I was talking about how abysmal employment processes were because that was the summer I had (almost not quite, but mostly) graduated grad school. I had one more credit. So… I felt… hmm.
I felt trapped. I remember my mom was pressuring me to work for the UN. I was like, it doesn't make sense for me to work for a multi -billion dollar corporation that has been “trying to end poverty for the last couple of decades.” I'm sorry, I don't believe in their mission. They're also gonna pay me pennies to keep themselves employed in the process of ending poverty. Well played. I just, I'm so sorry, I cannot do that.
I had my field placement offer me a full -time position for too little to survive meaningfully in the city. And what also felt like pennies compared to what I was making at the club. Stripping at the club was also becoming intolerable. One, the threat of disease was imminent, especially with the rise of monkeypox in Chicago at the time. And also, I had reconciliations about sex and gender that were causing so much disillusionment putting on The Girlsuit. My God. Like, it was it was almost physically painful, the amount of psychological— the amount that I could not hide from myself psychologically of like, gender is a performance. All of this is a game. So I just let all of those things drop. I sat down, I sat on my Chicago porch, I smoked a pre -roll. And I talked really openly and flippantly about the state of my life: that I do sincerely feel like I am brilliant and that I don't want to keep pimping out my thoughts and my intellectual labor and my time towards people that will pay me pennies. I wanna belong to myself. And I don't want the mindlessness that is coming with existing in the club because I can only exist there peacefully so long as I don't think too hard. And that's becoming intolerable. So I was talking specifically to the patrons in a Patrons Only Smoke-Sesh that I have since taken down, because I'm like, this gonna get me banned. You can't smoke online. As much as we wanna pretend like you can, you cannot. It's still a federally… What is it, a class one? You can't do that. So I took it down. But!
The sentiment of: this is the first space that I have had to be able to produce and own my thoughts so that I don't have to go be a research assistant or a data analysis for a big bad parent who is using my intellectual property to make a world that goes against what I actually wish to see.And this is a job where I get to think at all, you know? This is the first place that I have that.
So what I want is to not have to deal with the trade off of: you can own your thoughts, but you can't own your time and have time agency. Or you can own your time, but your thoughts will belong to someone else. Or you can own neither of those things!
My goal here is still to be in sustained agency of my thoughts and time, but there's a big addition now, which is also to be in service to what I call the Benevolent Divine, otherwise known as God or the universe or whatever it is that you systematically pray to if you are that type. I call it the Benevolent Divine. So it's not just that I want to be in existence or that I want to have that control. It's also that I want to produce things that are sustainably and replicably good. I want to do good things. I want to be a good thing. In so much as the concepts of “good: and “evil” like truly actually exist, but I know what it feels like to feel good. And in moving my life and my communities towards the lives that we feel like are good and feel good and are sustainable and are kind to ourselves and our bodies and our planet— I want that too. It's not just about what I don't want now, which is, you know, like to not being in control or to be outside of...
outside of my own hands. That was a season of life in which I was really moving on an autopilot that was dangerous, where I could not feel most days, most days. When I said, I'm going to try this, I'm going to give this a shot. I'm going to make things on the internet in hopes that I can own myself a bit and such that I have time to meet myself in this incredibly disheveled era of life. And disheveled it was!
So! I am through that particular neck of the woods. I am not— I am still like pretty disheveled, but not nearly as much as I once was. And I'm asking you all this question of agency and creation. What do these things mean to you? To be able to have sovereignty over your time and thoughts? How do you feel about that in relationship to me? And what do you want from being in this space?
I want it to be a public good.
How do I—
How do we be in public good together?
And then if you are listening to this and you are a free member of this space, tell me too what you want and what you think and how you feel about those things. Okay? Thank you very much. If you're free, if you're a free member, you can listen to this immediately. You just can't comment yet for the first 24 hours. Cause I, I want to make sure that I can hear from one group and then another. But yeah, thank you very much for listening.
I hope that you all are having a really lovely day, night, whenever.
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