introductions 

I have never told this story from beginning to… middle (because here I am, in the thick of things). What a failing that is. Recently, I’ve understood that many of you all thought of my existence as a radical public scholar to be… inevitable? Somehow? So I have taken the time to detail all the little choices I made on the way to this middle bit, where I understand myself as someone who makes and re-makes the worlds around them. At no point in the past nor the present has anything been inevitable. I continue in my day to day with all these teeny choices that force me to pause, reassess, and recreate my internal bounds of possibility. This has inspired the necessity of review; we’ll be going back through the evolving political thought of me (ismatu, the pen behind this essay) as I continued to choose paths that pulled me towards a life which demanded creativity, risk, and true love for the masses which touch and change me. 

Video Transcript:

I have been experimenting with my own life in front of you all (and with you all!) to live in and spread a new mode of being. I call this the

@ISMATU.GWENDOLYN EXPERIMENT

It’s come in three distinct parts:

PHASE I: RISK.

PHASE II: LOVE.

PHASE III: CONDUCTION.

The central inquiry behind this experiment: how does a public figure love their masses and receive love back?

Sincere love, not the love of adoration or the love of being powerful, but the love of the people there. How does that happen? And how does said public figure receive love back despite the fact that they cannot cultivate an individual relationship with each and every one of their audience members? And love here (defined by me): love is the feeling, the compulsion to being dedicated to someone’s highest good, bolstered by the consistent action to achieve and sustain that reality. Love is both the feeling and the action of wanting and moving towards somebody else's highest good. That's what I mean when I say, do I love my masses? How do you all love me?

I feel like I'm actually a bit ahead of myself. Probably many of y'all's first inquiry is:

WHO THE HECK IS ISMATU?

[ismatu introduces their mug]: Oolong tea, milk, oolong with honey and coconut.

EES-mah-too. ‘i’ like E. ‘S’ like ’S’, not like ‘Z.’ EEEEEEES-mah-too. Same emphasis as Jonathan. EEEEES-mah-too. Great. Hello!

ismatu is:

• a 26 year old addicted to tea.
• a descendent of sovereigns in both of their home places (Black America and Sierra Leone) picking up the mantel of their predecessors.
• a young hustler who’s like… ten consecutive bad days away from going right back to the strip club. 
  • I actually keep a pair of shoes on me at all times, not just because I can't stand civilian heels; you just literally never know.
• perpetually sleepy. 

THE CONTEXT

For starters: I didn’t pick up the social internet because I had some grand desire to be… what I am now. Some force for good? A source of inspiration? Capable of material change? A reason for hope, as a lot of you all tell me that I am. 

I picked it up originally because I thought I would be good at it! And becauase I was bored with my life as it stood. This was the winter of 2022 and I thought I wanted… a lot of shit that didn’t end up mattering in the long term. I thought I wanted to do well at my quasi-corporate private practice field placement. I thought I wanted the apartment I had, with all the custom lighting fixtures. I thougt I wanted to be a skincare influencer. All these hallmarks of stability and growing up that we’re all conditioned all throughout adolescence to want: a good job and a beautiful place to live and money on the side being cute and young and pretty— I thought I wanted these things.

I had made a few TikToks for me and my twelve followers (all of which were friends from college that I know IRL) but nothing like… serious.

I also had really regimented social media use from a life of not going up on the social internet— my friends bullied me into having an instagram when we all got sent home for Covid lockdowns in my final year of college and even THEN, someone else ran it. So I had a pretty easy time having designated TikTok time (on Wednesdays and Saturdays in one to two hour blocks) and then putting things down. All this is only relevant to say when I started gaining traction, I did not notice at first. I opened the app, made a video, captioned it, and then closed the app. I would not have seen the snowball if my bestie hadn’t texted me something like, “babes you’re going viral.”

It was the first video I ever posted for the general TikTok public. It got about 60,000 views in five or so days. I went from 12 followers to two thousand. And then we were full steam ahead. Dyed my hair pink and instantly unlocked main character anime story plot line: one million views, two million views, three million views, 100,000 followers in about… three weeks.

I need to fill in some blanks for the next part to make sense:

• I was initially radicalized by studying religion as a child and as an adolescent. I firmely believe that the force I am most compelled by the God of the Oppressed, and intimacy with that divinity requires obedience and praxis to draw close. Throughout my retllings, you will hear me mention the Voice of God directing me towards decisions I felt were… buck wild banana nuts coo-coo crazy. Understand: God is an imperfect name for the collection of divine force that compels me in this life, but I do mean, quite literally, that I am acting on divine compulsion. I did most of the things in this story because God told me to. If you are someone that does not experience any sort of divine compulsion in your life, I must ask you to suspend your disbelief. Or if you do, and you call this divine source by a different name, just fill it in as you engage with the narrative.
• ismatu gwendolyn (hi, yes, that’s me) was further radicalized when they went to college. Remember that radicalism is a significant departure from the systems that we have in place. The desire for radicalism ( a desire to depart) began as a youth and was bolstered and made actionable by the disciplined study I engaged in when I got paid to attend university as an undergraduate student. Black feminist thinkers from jump, trans instructors, queer Black professors, indigenous professors— many of which pulled me aside and demanded more from me than they did of my peers. I mention this because this background equipped me well to handle what you all regularly demand of me, which is this constant process of expansion into things that I previously didn't conceive of as possible. I will get back to this.

Great! So I started laying seeds to matriculate my selling skincare products to you all and because I am phenomenal at sales, this was going very well. And in the background, this life that I was living off screen, between convincing myself that I wanted this like shiny, silly life, there was this… honed and pointed and blessed anger that had few embers going within this hollow place in me that I just consistently ignored. I didn't think anger was practical. I wanted to be employed, right? Like. Don’t we all?

And then: 

Roe v. Wade gets overturned in the Supreme Court. 

There was a lot of panic and not a lot of source material.

I read exactly one source.

And the outpouring from people that could see me— mind you, this was… a little less than three months of me being on the platform, hadn’t even been a full quarter… it shifted something inside of me. Those small embers of anger that were barely flickering, barely alive, found tinder. I forgot why I had been mad; all of a sudden, I remembered. We’re adding something to the board.

Ismatu Gwendolyn: skinning their knees.

(1) I forgot how unusual it is to be as studied as I am. (2) I forgot how unusual it is to be as studied as I am, as young as I am, with no desires to be in the ivory tower whatsoever. The radicalization I experienced as a youth studying religion was supported and deepened when I went to college and had professor after professor assign radical, black, indigenous, feminist, world-making texts to apply to otherwise “straight-forward” educational focal points. I studied English and Global Health. Did I need to read Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Black Feminism Reimagined in those courses? No. yet, my educators made pointed decisions to steer their students in the direction of focused, disciplined liberation by whatever roads of access they had. A Third University Is Possible by la paperson talks all about this i fucking love that book anyways.

I took the radicalization that I experienced from childhood, understanding that God is the God of the Oppressed and oppressed peoples will eat until we are full, throughout adolescence and early adulthood, tripled down on it, and went through the summer of 2020 in active work… and then entered into the strip club. Which is the other thing that was happening off screen. I was blowing up on TikTok with my cute pretty hair; I was also shaking my ass in the club for rent money (which is still something that people are finding out despite the fact that I have a text called Former Stripper, Part-Time Visionary). Anyways: the strip club is a pressure cooker when it comes to cementing thoughts. You rely on the ideologies that keep you alive and safe, so if you come in thinking your safety is best found in stacking money, networking, or relying on yourself… guess what you’ll do? The club was a radicalizing experience for me because I was already interested in unions and stratified class organizing and investigating how close most people are to deviating from the systems we have in place. 

I met every kind of person at my home club. There was not a racial majority. There wasn't a class majority. I met everybody from union workers working in steel and railroads to people that worked in meat distribution on the corporate side and on the butcher side. I met corporatists. I met immigrants. I met gang bangers. I met everybody. And I sat down with everybody. If me and a club regular talked about politics, we were doing so with the anonymity the internet provides you— we don’t even know each other’s real names! You’re Slim and I’m *insert stripper name here.* Brandy. Whatever. We had the anonymity that the internet provides us, but we’re speaking face to face. God I learned so much! No matter how conservative someone seems at jump… everyone is compelled by their material circumstances. I will die thinking this. Everybody is compelled by the things that they see and touch and taste and live in and wear and drink on the day to day. We are compelled by our material circumstances. Everybody wants a good and dignified life for themselves and their families. We just have different opinions about how to get there. But so many people— WAY MORE THAN I THOUGHT— would be willing to deviate from the systems we have in place should they now how to support themselves. That’s what radical is. Radical means to significantly deviate or depart from current systems. We’re not that far, you know? There's so much doubt right now, this particular moment in the United States, in the American populace. There is so much doubt in the desires of the nation and the fabric of reality as it stands. There are so many people that are willing to hear a new system out…I gotta digress. That's not the point of this essay. 

The point is: there's only so long I could pretend to be glossy and head empty on TikTok. I had really enjoyed learning to succeed at the algorithm, the attention, having a new medium to look really fuckin pretty and receive applause… but I figured out the game and so I was bored. And: something stirred and changed inside of me when Roe v. Wade was overturned. I was both bored with the game, now that I knew I could play it successfully and I was also suddenly very cognizant of… beginning to feel overwhelmed at… the amount of responsibility that visibility endows you with. I said one night, praying before bed, I was like, “God, I'm all right. I think I'm ready to be done with TikTok.” And I received a very firm:

Nah.

This is the direction you are supposed to go in. Walk.

I am spelling this out because this will continue to be relevant: my spiritual life dictates the rest of my decisions and responsibilities. I had taken fundamental steps backward from walking towards any particular calling in the previous year, mostly because I wanted a chance to experience irresponsibility while I was still young. Obedience to God is my primary vehicle of divine love because it results in delicious intimacy with my benevolent divine. There is nothing like being close to God. There is nothing like that spiritual high— religion is truly the best drug I’ve ever done.

My point is: it had been a while since I had been given a direct order. It had been a while since I had positioned myself to even receive direct orders from God (or really, as I refer to it— God et. al, a signifier we use in academia when there are too many authors to name succinctly). We have this moment in time where the fabric of reality and what we've always conceived of to be true and good and possible has been ripped in significant ways. Once the last big ripping was during the COVID Black Lives Matter dual explosion, right? The world had been wrecked twice. And then we had this way more recently in 2023 with the onset of the bombardment in Palestine. Like the fabric of what we knew to be true and good, what we knew was, what we know was supposed to happen, just got ripped in two. And even though there's been a lot of work to restitch that fabric together to make sure that we didn't see what we all thought we saw, there's a lot of opportunity here to take us from, “I guess this is what we're doing and our disaster is assured” to “…maybe we can do something else.”

So this is the soil that I've come to TikTok on. I am in the extremely privileged position of having had four years straight to be paid to study and got to study— not economics or the stock market, but world-making, new modes of construction, application and endurance. Whereas most people experienced free time to read and think and study… for however long your one-time stimulus check lasted in 2020, I am in this position of having studied revolutionary and radical world-making not having come from the ivory tower or having desires to end up there, but having survived poverty in the United States with immigrant parents, having been further radicalized in the strip club… basically I was still skinning my knees with the theory i was learning from the books, you know? Like, all this shit was very real to me. It wasn’t just academic.

When I started reading Belly of the Beast: Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harris I was like… negro ain’t no way you can get on this app and sell skincare products knowing what you know about the world.

Remember, this was the top 2022: I’m coming off of about a year and a half of refusing to think critically… about anything. I’d forgotten how much work I did developing my politic. I was so tired. I had put everything down, every discipline that I had (especially my spiritual disciplines) down by 2021 because I just… wanted to be irresponsible. 2020 held so much fuckin trauma, g. I was willing to give up power and intimacy with my divine if it meant that I didn’t need to be responsible for anything, you know? If it meant that I had a pretty life with a pretty apartment and a pretty job. 

I say this to say: there was nothing inevitable about me becoming @ismatu.gwendolyn. 

What happened was a bunch of little choices that took me towards a life which deviated the systems I had witnessed more and more and more. I say this to say— even I, someone who was well radicalized, well nourished in how much was possible within liberation, how many different kinds of ways there were to revel in freedom… I still defaulted to the sale of the plastic-wrapped American dream once I found out how much getting there could hurt. I was this close to being… nothing different.

So here now was a bunch of power— the power of visibility. I’m gonna save expanding on this particular bit for Phase One… this is just the soil we’re soaking in. But it was never lost on me that having the listening ear of the public was a deeply powerful position to be in. And at that point in time, right, we had just gotten here, we had just gotten it poppin’, I had some of my favorite skincare brands emailing me, right? I did my first advertisement I fucking hated it.And I couldn't mentally reconcile noting how obvious the man-made hierarchies of beauty are detrimental to liberation as a whole… and the selling of skincare products that I personally do not actually need.

There was an insidious moment in time in which I honestly thought like, well, what if I like talk about like dialectics and Marxism while like patting my face down with hydrating toner? And the scary part is… I could have gotten away with that. The state that my general public is in… we’re still, on the whole, are relatively infantile when it comes to political teeth. I don’t think most people would have been able to see how insidious that would have been… someone that knows enough to do basic education on world-making theory and praxis should not be selling you skincare products as an extra stream of cash. Do we realize how insidious that is…? We’ll come back to this.

So if I’m not up here to sell shit and get rich… what am I here to do?

PHASE ONE: RISK

Risk puts skin in the game with the understanding that you could bleed.

The process of realizing I have a genuine love for my public came slowly, through anger actually. Understand: I am a pretty stoic person. I don’t experience a ton of emotional highs and lows. There are few forces capable of moving me to great emotion, and each and every one of those forces has a direct pathway to my heart of hearts. If I’m moved to something like anger, it’s because something has brushed across me capable of touching me and leaving a mark.

When I talked about the fact that the idea that poor people should not reproduce is just… genocidal, white supremacist nonsense and received vitriol in response… I took the longest break from TikTok that I had since starting. I felt angry for like three seconds but it was really just anger masquerading as deep, deep heartbreak. I wrote a series of essays breaking that particular ideology down, but succinctly:

Some of the same internet people big and loud back then about how poor people should not reproduce, that they were irresponsible for doing so, expressed horror and disillusionment at the bombardment that began in the Gaza Strip one short year later. But the year before, they would have argued that Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip— under conditions of poverty manufactured to kill them— shouldn’t have had children in the first place. That’s how the stigma of poverty is designed to work. Poverty is designed to be weaponized policy such that people suffer and they suffer so horrendously, so needlessly that we would rather blame them for their suffering than understand that they are just like us. We never ask why those people are impoverished in the first place. We only look at people and their individual responsibilities who continue to survive extermination attempts and chide them for the audacity to continue their people.

Do we see now how the conditions of suffering were and always are easily manufactured? There's a reason that I say that the bombardment started and not the genocide started: because Palestinian people were under the conditions of genocide before the carpet bombing started. And they were under the conditions of genocide by use of targeted and weaponized poverty, which was the argument that I made then. So do we see how arguments for genocide (and ones for sterilization, which is just genocide by a different name)— do we see how these ideas are in bed with one another? Can we see how that might be true for the rest of the world? That all of these other places that are experiencing abject poverty are experiencing poverty because it is a violence that has been weaponized against them by the world makers in place. That they're not suffering for no reason. They're suffering because somebody designed it that way, and somebody designed it that way to make it easier to kill them en masse? Do we see it now?

Cause it wasn't clear then in 2022.

And that really broke my heart. 

I remember seeing some of these comments and just like, I spent an entire day just like staring at the ceiling. And it was the first time that I had ever really experienced the anger and the heartbreak under that anger for what it was. It wasn't that I was angry that people were calling me mean names or being rude to me on the internet, whatever, right? It was a genuine anger and a very genuine heartbreak that the propaganda of the war machine was so totally effective that there were scores of people telling me that other people didn't have the human right to reproduce.

Like, I didn't know that I could feel that way about the general public, that I felt a responsibility to change people's minds. I've never felt that before. That was the first time.

To catalyze this anger, grief, and heartbreak, I ran a fundraiser to garner farm equipment for my father’s tribe— my tribe— in the top of 2023. It was a great way to level out one year of being on the internet. That was also when I began to pop off on instagram with a similar exponential rise. Here, we are re-introduced to responsibility within the use of hyper-visibility in a very obvious way: ismatu can garner attention to both educate and change the material circumstances of entire groups of people at once.

That’s a lot of power.

By now, the ways I’m getting radicalized off screen are catching up to the ways I’m radicalizing on screen. I make publicthe previously secret life I had as a sex worker, that I’m striking out as a life coach because I do not want to take licensure (in direct relationship to my history in sex work), and that I’ll be starting my private practice anyone who wants to apply to be my client at $75/session.

I get two major responses. $75/session is for some people, less than their co-pay, and for others, an inconceivable bill to take on voluntarily.

This is when I begin to realize what I am doing here. Here is where we get to our central inquiry:

HOW DO I LOVE THE PUBLIC THAT I CANNOT SEE AND TOUCH? HOW DO I ALLOW THEM TO LOVE ME IN SINCERITY?

I type this out now with the understanding that love requires risk, always— most central of which being the risk of being changed. To love someone up close is to consent to the ways that they change you. If I had not had access to a direct public that likes me enough to tell me that this wasn’t doing it, I probably would not have gotten to this point.

The reason that I stopped charging for client services— of any sort— is first, of course, because I felt compelled to by God (wayyy back in February, but I was ignoring that). Then you all said the same thing, and here, here made me fully realize how much I loved you all. Beyond duty, or obligation, or principle… I feel love. I didn’t know that was possible. The only way you could have a direct line of access to my heart like this, to change my mind on something as fundamental as livelihood, is if I consented to loving you up close. And I do. I want the highest good for my general masses and I am willing to act on this belief, even if that means living in ways I previously conceived of as impossible.

Political education needs to be free. Healing work needs to be free. I am willing to stake my life on the provision of these needs because I love you all. And if I love you all, reasonably: how do you love someone and keep tools that you have to help them hidden away behind the paywall? How do you love someone and tell them that they can only come if they can pay you?

How do you love someone and take the smaller life of selling skincare products?

This is the game of risk… how much am I willing to stake my life serving these people? That’s my part in this experiment, the ismatu.gwendolyn experiment. How much is ismatu willing to risk? As they become more powerful, as they become more lauded— will they default to private wealth and private systems? Or do they continue to risk what they know for the chance… just the chance… finding their way back to loving their masses? Rather than using them as an endless site of extraction? Even though that’s not something I 

Two more events unfolded in the category of risk:

• I publicly declared I’m not taking sponsorships in “Information Anarchy: The Case Against Sponsorships.” It’s one of the best essays I have ever written and the unfolding implications haunt me from its grave. That’s an entirely separate essay.
  • No sponsorships means that I have fundamentally decried every reasonable mode of being online that there is. We understand that the life of the hyper-visible is only possible because of endorsements. And that's true for every single kind of celebrity: political celebrities, music celebrities, celebrities via Instagram— all only have money because they take their word and they sell it. So me saying, “I, ismatu gwendolyn hereby state in public in the full view of my constituency that I am never doing that shit ever,” means that truly the only means of sustenance that I have is from what you all choose to give me voluntarily. Because I already said that I am not charging for the work, any of it.
• It means I gave— and give— much of the money you all give me back to the community we have here.
  • I’m about to say buck wild things! But hear me out!

THE BANK OF ISMATU GWENDOLYN

I have never acknowledged this publicly before, because I knew that once I did, it would open the floodgates of people asking for cash assistance… but people email me to ask for cash assistance A LOT. And most of the time, the answer is yes. Even if I think the answer is no, the answer ends up being yes. If I have it, I will give it over. This started when I did a series reading Mutual Aid by Dean Spade and, because I had read a book, people decided that must mean I personally an expertly connected in this web of mutual aid networks that can get people money to like… not get evicted and stuff like that?

No! Not at all. I want you— whoever you are watching this: increase your skepticism for online figures. Someone reading a book is not the same thing as someone doing the thing! Anyways!

People wrote to me frequently, ismatu, I am about to get evicted. I am in the hospital. I just had a baby. Can you connect me with your mutual aid networks so that I can get money to deal with this particular emergency.

Again… cannot stress enough… no secret mutual aid network existed. I never claimed know… anything like that! I never claimed to be doing anything like that! All I did was read a book.

For people to be so desperate to email me, an internet stranger, for like life-saving cash assistance, for them to have enough faith in me that I could like actually fulfill such outlandish requests, it clicked for me one day. Like this is like, this is the modern day version of shining like the Batman symbol into the night sky. Batman, we need you.

To be clear, this is not mutual aid. This is not how mutual aid works, okay? I feel like we actually need to revisit that book. But for me, receiving these requests and breaking my heart to tell people, no, I know of no such thing that exists. I can't help you. I don't know… one day it just clicked for me when I was sitting in a garden with a friend that if all these random people thought that this thing was possible and thought that I could do the thing… then maybe it's because I could.

So then the secret web of mutual aid that many of you all wished for was spoken into existence because of the money that all these different constituency members gave me to survive— I pinched off what I needed and then sent the rest on like this giant digital game of mancala. And the practice has only grown and expanded over time. I will come back to this in the final section, but I began to give thousands of dollars away.

I didn't really keep savings on me because I didn't feel good about like stacking money for personal emergencies when there are so many people asking me for money right then experiencing a personal emergency. SoooOOooO I… gave it away!

That same fateful day in that garden, said friend handed me a copy of How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind. Imagine that.

PHASE TWO: LOVE

We have two great trust falls: your trust in me over your minds and my trust in you over my livelihood.

My decision to stop charging was a complete trust fall back into you all witnessing me. I had a hunch.. a gut-driven, God-given feeling, that all of this was gonna work out. But did I have proof? NO! I’ve never seen what I’m doing here before. There’s no blueprint for publicly funded influencer. Influencer isn’t even the best name as this point; what we’re doing goes so far beyond that.

It’s not that I didn’t feel crazed. I did. It’s that above feeling crazy or off-kilter or unsafe is the feeling of being compelled by God. And God very clearly told me to stop charging. Once I get a command like that… the only real choice for me is to obey. I can’t even sleep at night when I don’t do what I’m called to do. There’s no escape from the work but the work.

You all stake your trust in me by imbuing me and my work with energy and power. This happens in the following ways:

(1) You engage with the long-form materials. You don’t have to pay attention but you do. You do so with the understanding that your attention is capable of production, and giving your attention over to someone, for however long, is an intimate act of trust. You don’t have to pay attention but you do— out of trust for the work and out of love for me.

(2) You talk about the work! You don't have to talk to the work about me or about the things that you see me do, the things that become possible because we do it together. You don't have to talk about it to the people that you know in real life, but you do. So many of you will speak to the people that you know around you, your family, your friends, your hairdressers. You know how high praise, high praise. Hey, I was showing your videos to my braider and we talked about you. Are you kidding me? High praise.

You don't have to talk about it, but you do. You talk about me, you talk about the work that you witnessed me doing. And so many of you all tell me that it galvanizes the work that you do, that you feel compelled to do by witnessing me. That comes out of trust, and it comes out of a sincere love.

(3) You do not have to pay! For anything! But many of you do! This is the wildest part, and this is by far the least amount of people, but for those that can and choose to: you ensure that I am safe and housed and fed enough to continue the work I put out. You help guarantee this work for your internet neighbors. You do not have to (because I don’t charge for anything! if you just wait, anything that’s ever existed behind a ) but yet you do.

So the hypothesis trust the people and the people become trustworthy was true in both directions. You all trusted me to do right by you, even when it required risk. And I trust you to keep me well and safe, even when the work itself does not cost money. These lies that we were told about scarcity and exploitation and the necessity of selling and intermediary things like —they're all not true! Phase I and Phase II of the ismatu.gwendolyn are in orbit: 

increased risk, which necessitates trust, which creates more and more love.

I am astounded.

I didn't know it was possible to love the world this much. This is such a beautiful life.

And it feels like we don’t understand what’s happening here. I was very recently a regular person. And now I am someone radicalizing on the world’s stage. And so sometimes you will see me expand, and it is unravely and awkward and charged. Don’t push me towards “sanity.” Do not look at my revolutionary love in precarity and say, “Please do better to take care of yourself.” It’s not about what I individually deserve. It’s about what we owe to one another as people in community— or at least, people trying to be.

All this work that I do— making political education and seeing people for free— I’m gonna continue to do it for free, because that’s what I am called to do. And the two things I ask of you are (1) help me if you can and (2) don’t ever ask me to shrink like that ever again.

I am very capable of taking care of me and only me and that is so much smaller than what my life now has the capacity to be.

I didn't know it was possible to love the world this much. So thank you all for showing me that that’s possible.

—ismatu, july of 2023, shortly after announcing they were working for free

Trust the people and the people become trustworthy was true. You all trusted me to do right by you even when it requires risk; I trust you to keep me well and safe even when the work itself does not cost money. Phase one and two of the ismatu.gwendolyn experiment are in orbit— increased risk, which necessitates trust, creates more and more love.

We are now in Phase III.

PHASE THREE: CONDUCTION

I am now engaging in projects that are bigger than the initial ask, which was just to keep me alive. 

The only thing that I wanted was to continue the work that I had set out to do and not die. However, 2024, which was a year mostly spent off screens, bolstering these projects that are half going on offline, showed me how much was possible, expanded like quite rapidly, what I think that we can get done in my tenure here on the internet. If you remember, or maybe you don't know, I'm only here on the internet until about this time in the year 2028. We have three more years, three more years to get shit shaken, right?

I think that we could do more than what we've previously done.

There's this comment that stuck with me— it was on a platform I no longer publish on, so I don't have the comment to show you— but it said, response to a post that I made grieving about the lack of enthusiasm present for this universal basic income program I introduced in partnership with Social Income, which is ostensibly the coolest thing I've ever done. And the reception was just… invisible. Especially where it compared to supporting me. The donation discrepancy, for example, was two orders of magnitude, which means that for every dollar someone gave to this universal basic income fund, I personally received from the same group of people $100. So it was really heartbreaking to experience because it meant that you all did not care about what I can clearly see as important. And someone commented back to me; basically they said, you are the thing that I find trustworthy here.

I can't speak for everybody, but it could just be that you, ismatu, are a better conduit of wealth than the projects that you propose.

Whoever said that, thank you so much. That was a really necessary reframe for me. For one, it helps me remember that I, of course I see things as important that you all don't think is important yet. That's the job of a teacher. I think I expected you all to just like get it without me teaching you why it mattered. And while there was heartbreak present in the reality that I have to teach us why a universal basic income program for an impoverished, actively weaponized poverty, right? Impoverished African country that eradicated an epidemic that they had been condemned to just die of in infintium. I didn't realize that I was going to have to explain to you why that it was important, but I do. I'm a teacher. It's my job to make plain the things that I feel are obvious. And for two, again, whoever said this to me, thank you so much.

I forgot that I’m…

I don't really consider myself to be all that important if I'm real. I don’t think of myself as powerful. I don't think of myself as necessary or a keystone to any of this. I think of myself as ismatu. Like I don't, I would argue in fact that I don't think of myself very much at all. 

I the community think session that I had in Chicago like two weeks ago now, there was the ardent assertion that I do not give myself enough credit. And that's right. You all don't necessarily trust in the projects. You don't necessarily trust in the work. You trust in those things because you trust in me. I'm not just like an empty vessel, right? Like we have a relationship here, me, the person, and you, the people interacting with me on what is for right now, or really one-to-one basis.

Here now, I would like to explain why I call myself an algorithmically elected official. 

It's because my relationship to you all mimics that of my tribal relations. Remember that I am the direct descendant of the last great Supreme Chieftaincy in my tribe, the Limba tribe. The last great Paramount Chief was my grandfather. And the job of the chief is to build out works of public good with the comforts, the support, the labor, and the funding that his people bolster his power with. That's their job. Good chiefs bring riches upon their community. So at this point, I am doing the same thing with you all. I thought that the best way to love you all was to stake the power that I'm given on an individual basis and use it to create public works of good, like political education that's free, like emergency aid that you can just request, like… libraries that exist in various places in the world.

I give my money away, the money that you all give me to live, building systems. And I give my money away to my constituents in a manner that some might call reckless. And in fact, many people call reckless, but I only want to— I want to remind us, right? It's only reckless if we are imagining the system that I am existing in, the system that I'm bolstering from the lens of capitalism, which says that you are supposed to stack individual paper for individual means. It tells us our primary job is to get money for ourselves and keep onto it like it is no tomorrow. 

I am not compelled by this.

I already did my time (!!!) trying to convince myself that I wanted the pretty job and the pretty life and the pretty husband (LMAO) and the pretty apartment with the pretty lighting fixtures, okay? It bored me quickly. This is far more interesting work! The interesting fruitful work of trying to figure out what's possible is leading me to take the powers that I have been personally blessed with: funding, visibility, Beauty— and use them to build public works of good. Tell me that's not better!! Come onnnn. Don't fuckin lie. You're trying to tell me I ain't clean? Don't fucking lie!

This is dope! 

This is something that I now call the process of conduction. This is where we are in the @ismatu.gwendolyn experiment. Phase III: conduction. Conduction!

I am just conducting these powers, moving them through myself and my person and my body and creating things that did not usually, that did not exist!! Like the fact that there's actually— there actually is this like secret underground network of mutual aid. That you all spoke into existence because you demanded it from me?? That's so fucking dope.

I've been doing this in secret and in public this whole time, taking money that you all give me and conducting it towards homes that not only do I think need it more, that I think will be more fruitful than me just, you know, balling out or whatever. I've taken personal funds and fulfilled emergency aid requests. Helped gofundmes, have rented space to build libraries— 30 acres! Thirty acres of rice harvest is happening because of this mode of conduction.

And the more that I give, the more that I realize how much more we have the capacity to do. It's just that I'm only doing it with a little bit.

I've only ever asked for a little bit. It's taken me a long time to like, realize that there's a trajectory to all of this. I only ever really wanted to survive. The only goal was just to not die. I'm just gonna continue to be alive. Like that's shocking and beautiful. I mean, I've spoken like a bit glancingly every now and again about how much your worldview changes when you grew up thinking that you're not gonna live like past adulthood in any significant. I was growing up thinking I wasn't gonna make it to 18. So the fact that I'm still alive, it blows my mind.

And I genuinely don't feel like I would have ever dreamt past what it would be like to survive if you all did not expand my sight on what is possible. Conduction.

The biggest reason I've never asked for more up until this point is because I didn't trust myself quite frankly. You all found me trustworthy, but I did not feel that way about myself and my own person. Imagine how this is for me on my side. I know that this might feel silly to say it to you now, but for example, right, you all trusted me with money for a rice harvest that didn't exist yet. Now it does, but when you gave it to me, I had no… guarantee of my success. You all trusted me. Hold on, I have to do, God, fuck. no, is it gonna end my live? I didn't do the capture right. You all trusted me enough to ask me for help for these like secret dark web mutual aid networks that didn't exist. And now they do because of you. 

We've reached a point in time where I want funding to do more than just survive. Like it took me a while to trust me and to believe that I am not just an active part of this, but that I'm an important part of this. And that I can trust myself with this power, that I can trust myself with this authority. But I do.

We reached a point in time now where I'm thinking about what more is possible. What I actually wish to do, like:

• parallel libraries in Freetown, Sierra Leone and on the South Shore of Chicago and the United States. 
• hot food programs. 
• aggregated news sources with tools to critically analyze current world events. 

I've been planning these projects, public works of good— literally that's what I spent the whole last year doing. I just, I've just never asked for the funding to materialize them. There were limits on my mind about what is possible that don't exist anymore because you all love me enough to trust me. And I feel galvanized by that trust to move past what I previously thought was real.

Now the question is not, can we love one another and do we love one another? I'm quite certain that both those two things are true. Now the question is, what more is possible and how much more can we do?

FUNDRAISING!

This is the part that scares me. I'm going to do it anyways. I've never fundraised for myself before, but I'm gonna take the next 30 days to do so. I think this is going up on Thursday, June 19th [essay circulating Sunday June 22]. I'm doing a paid subscribership funding round.

I gotta talk about paid subscribership. Cause I've never really, I don't really plug it. I'm not really motivated by money. So long as I was getting enough to survive, I was good. Like parallel libraries— foreign exchange student programs!!?? We could do so much more. 

Paid subscribership means that you experience the material first, which is arguably its worst form, quite frankly. All of these things that I'm about to say are made available to the public. So you have no dollars to give, please remember that your time is investment enough. I promise you, if you have no money to give, just wait and all these things will be made available for free. But I will tell you, okay? 

$5 a month at threadings.io grants you access to the Small Prophecies course, 

the first iteration of it anyways, the online portion of the tour that is happening in the fall. In this fall with this book that is finally out. It is out! Instead of gnawing at my bones! I'm so happy about that.

$10 a month at threadings.io grants you access to blueprints as they happen live.

This frequent request of ismatu, how do you do these projects? Can you keep track? Can you make tutorials? Basically, can you keep your receipts and can you show your work about how these things are getting done? I do! I do! I just haven't talked about it. But it happens. It happens live. They happen weekly.

Last quarter's blueprints are public on the second YouTube channel, but if you want to experience them live, it’s $10/month. And really the only reason that these are behind the paywall is because it has a lot of information about whereI am in the world, and that it's just straight up not safe to make to the general public (not everybody that sees me likes me). But if you want it in real time, the minimum investment in my wellbeing is $10 a month. 

Then, $25 a month gets you in the door for the budget meetings as they happen live. 

Again, this will be made available to the public after the fact. The first of these budget meetings is happening in the second week of July. They were supposed to happen earlier than this. My mom has cancer!! Very sorry about that. This talks about the money flow. What happens with the money? How much do particular things cost? And what projects are that just need a little bit more funding? If you really want to know the itty gritty nitty bitties of that, that's where you go.

So the goal for total project fulfillment is 10,000 recurring paid subscribers via threadings.io in the next 30 days.

This feels buck wild. I've never asked for funding for myself before, but like, it's time, right? It's time to do these things that I've just like felt like were impossible or didn't allow myself to do because I didn't trust myself enough. 

Also, the resource form is also live here. 

You can click on it in the newsletter or in the description. 

https://www.jotform.com/form/251693630800151

If you have skills, connections, resources, something otherwise that you think would be helpful to these projects that you want to tell me about, experience, whatever, fill out the resource forum instead of sending me a DM where it will go sit in a dark hole and will never be seen. I don't check those. DMs are stressful when you have hundreds of thousands of people who want to talk to you at once. It's not happening.

I'm only here on the social internet until 2028, okay? This has a limited timeframe on it. And I really want to see what we can do while I'm here. And I can guarantee you that I will put my all into what I believe is possible collectively.

Yeah, let's all have a good day.

Conclusions

[ismatu to Lemon]: Do we sit on the ground lemon? What do you, is this all right?

Hi, this is editing ismatu here with a special guest. So as I was recording this on live, because I always do better when I'm talking to real people, there was an obvious question that I did not answer, which is 

why are there time constraints?

So there are two that I mentioned that I will expand on here with shitty audio. The first is the 30 day time constraint to raise funding. It's because I have other things that I want to talk about more that are more pressing, like the universal basic income program that I want to get back to talking about. Now that I am better equipped at self critique and have a roadmap that's a lot clearer.

The reason that that project is urgent is because it's directly attached to people's livelihood. Like these people are starving. They're experiencing chronic food insecurity. The longer I take to raise that money, the longer people don't eat. So there's only so much time I'm willing to dedicate to myself who, while I am still in certain amounts of precarity, I'm not foodinsecure and I haven't been for a while. That's just a straight up question of priority. 

The other question is,

Why are you leaving the social internet in 2028?

Because by this time in 2028, I will be graduating onto the projects that we're working on now. If last calendar year, 2024, taught me anything, it's that all of these projects have a trajectory. I spent most of the year offline working on the projects that I'm here in 2025 talking to you all about. So if I do all this work and plant all these seeds and do all the things that I want to do with this time that we have here, eventually that work is going to take me offline fully and I want to plan for that appropriately. I want everybody to be on the same page that me here sitting in front of a camera recording, editing, captioning, linking, source— all that takes triple the amount of time it takes for me to be on camera in front of you all. For every one hour video I make, I spent eight hours editing it. Do you understand? Like I don't have that kind of time if I'm actually running the programs that I want to be.

Alright, I gotta go. My cat really wants to go to bed and she's so irritated that I'm using my voice to project right now. Everybody have a good night. Wait, last thing. Actually—

[ismatu to Lemon]: sorry Lemon. Do you want to just get up? You don't have to stay here with me. 

[Lemon gives ismatu a lovely nose boop] Okay, the answer is clearly no.

The resource form is so that we can have different modes of investment because there's this um… I don't want to call it ugly… so instead I'll just imply :)

There's this habit in leftist online spaces where they will point out the problem and imbue folks with like a restless sense of hopelessness and or hopefulness. And the only actionable item is give me money. And while I do need money to continue the projects and expand the projects, there have to be more places to plug in than just like handing me your tokens, your blank tokens of power.

I'm not satisfied with that. I do need the money, right? I do need the money. We just took on full-time assistance and I will be giving her my living until I can get more of that.

But there are a lot of you that are really helpful and I want to make use of that help. I want to make use of the active labor, the labor that is available to us. Remember what I said chiefs do: it's not just that they take the money and the comfortsthat the people give them and stake them on building public goods. It's also that they take the labor. So I want to have a place to categorize labor so that I can put people to use. I can't guarantee that I have a job for everybody, but I can guarantee that I will benefit from some of you at least some of you.

Then if you do not have money to give and you do not have labor to give, you are most likely a young person or someone that is young and new in radical thinking. Whenever you radicalize, that's a new birth. You started at zero. So that's what I mean when I say baby leftist. I'm still in the baby years, right? I've only been doing this since 2018.

Think of this like when I was a three-year-old and my sister was a five-year-old going to kindergarten and she came back and taught me how to read. That's our relationship here. I'm only what seven years old, I'm talking to two-year-olds, right? I could teach you how to read! I could teach you the basics! If that's where you are, all I want you to do is pay attention. Read the essays. I know that they're available in audio. Listen to the audio while you read them. I know that I now make them available for video. Video is the most passive form of learning. It's the hardest to stick in your brain. Please, please, please, please read the work and do your best to engage with the sources that I link. 

Those are the three ways that I want to build up consistent constituency involvement in the projects that we have going on. 

I want the funding. 

I want the labor. 

And I want the time. 

And I'm going to give you for this for this period of time, right? I've kind of been doing social media low key with like my little pinky fingerl I'm going to give it my all for the next— [Lemon exits stage right] yeah, she's done. Everybody say goodnight to Lemon.

For the next three years, it's you and me. And also Little Lemon who's irritated that I'm still looking at a computer screen. All right, everybody have a good night.

ig