The primary goal of this essay is to argue for a healthy skepticism of sponsorship-saturated media amidst a new age in information sharing, with secondary goals as following: * to commit myself to The People and my people publicly by way of refusing to sell my word online, and * to name explicitly the ways refusing traditional sponsorship places me in a decent amount of precarity. * I’ma spoil the ending for you: I don’t want to run from precarity. Being unsteady forces me to lean on the communities that I say I value. I continually argue that refusing sponsorships as my primary mode of income forces me to expand. Now, I must trust the people for care instead of trusting them as a willing and endless site of extraction. * Plus… willing? How much can you consent to extraction anyways? Bah. I get ahead of myself. I wish to belong to The People and that means my word needs to be mine. Thank you for listening ismatu.substack.com/subscribe