The New Sharecroppers of the Digital Age
By Kenneth Howard Smith, ThD., for SDCNewsOne
Once, sharecropping meant tilling someone else’s land—doing the labor, producing the value, and watching most of the profit flow upward to the landowner. Today, the same dynamic plays out in feeds and timelines instead of cotton fields.
“Digital sharecropping,” a term that’s begun to circulate among critics of the modern internet, describes how millions of users—content creators, influencers, even small businesses—pour their creativity and labor into platforms they don’t control. Their posts, videos, and stories generate enormous engagement and revenue, but the land they work on—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok—belongs entirely to the corporate landlord.
The platforms harvest the data, sell the ads, and dictate the terms. Creators are left tending virtual fields that could be wiped clean at any moment by an algorithm tweak or a policy change. Entire livelihoods can vanish overnight, not from lack of talent or effort, but because a digital landlord closed the gate.
The parallel to the 19th-century system is more than metaphor. Like sharecroppers dependent on the landowner for credit and supplies, today’s creators depend on platforms for distribution and visibility. Their followers aren’t truly theirs—they belong to the platform’s infrastructure.
This wasn’t the internet’s original dream. In the early days of the web, owning your own domain or publishing through an independent blog meant you controlled your audience, your message, and your data. Now, convenience has replaced autonomy. Building an audience through a personal website or newsletter takes time; a TikTok clip can go viral overnight.
The tradeoff is subtle but steep: convenience for control, reach for permanence.
Some creators are waking up to that cost. A quiet migration is underway toward independent newsletters, personal websites, and decentralized platforms. Others stay put, knowing that the crowd—the attention economy itself—still lives on rented land.
For now, the field remains fertile. But the lesson, as old as the soil itself, still stands: if you don’t own the land, the harvest isn’t truly yours.
The Learning Story of 1873: Seeds of Renewal
The year 1873 cracked open like a fault line in America’s rise. The nation’s stock market had collapsed, and with it, the dreams of thousands of railroad men. Miles of track lay rusting in the sun—iron veins gone cold. Among those who saw possibility where others saw ruin was Hattie Robinson Green, the so-called Witch of Wall Street, a woman both feared and admired for her brilliance. While others panicked, she bought.
From the wreckage, she gathered land, rail, and dust—assets abandoned by greed. One gift she gave to her son, Colonel Edwin P. Greene, then just twenty-three and already a disciplined officer in the U.S. Army. It wasn’t gold or factories. It was a forgotten stretch of railway: two miles of track and the promise of towns scattered along the Texas horizon.
Greene traveled west by private coach to see what, exactly, he’d inherited. On the road, he met another traveler—Dr. George Washington Carver, a quiet man with a pack of seeds and ideas that would someday feed nations. Carver was bound for Alabama, to teach freedmen how to farm new life from exhausted soil. The two men shared a campfire and the kind of conversation that shifts destinies.
Carver warned of the Boll Weevil, a small, determined insect moving through the South, devouring cotton at a hundred miles a year. The land, he said, was tired. The cotton monoculture was bleeding it dry. “Plant the peanut,” Carver told him. “It heals the earth while it feeds the people.”
When they parted at the fork in the road, each man carried the other’s thought like a seed pocketed in the mind.
Colonel Greene reached El Paso and looked over the ghostly rails and towns that now belonged to him. He saw the same thing Carver had seen: tired land. The farmers along his lines clung to cotton, even as the weevil came. But Greene had seen the map of the future—and he began to turn his railroad into a lifeline.
Each stop became a station of learning. Farmers traded cotton for peanuts, corn, and alfalfa. The towns became small laboratories of resilience. He brought in teachers and scientists, many trained under Carver’s methods. Baseball fields were carved beside the tracks—small, bright ovals of joy amid the work, where the rhythm of the bat and ball met the rhythm of planting and harvest.
By the turn of the century, Greene’s network of experiment stations and teaching farms formed the living root of what would become the United States Department of Agriculture. He would serve as its first director—a soldier who learned from a scientist that the true defense of a nation begins with its soil.
The lesson for mankind: progress rarely begins in wealth or invention alone. It begins when one person listens—truly listens—to another whose truth grows from the ground up. The meeting of Greene and Carver was a passing moment between a man of means and a man of purpose, but from it sprouted an idea: that healing the land and feeding the people are one and the same act of civilization.
When we think of the future, we’d do well to remember that every age of crisis hides its own seeds. Some are made of iron, others of earth—but both need vision to grow.
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What is Digital Sharecropping?
Digital sharecropping is a term that was coined around 20 years ago as a warning to people who were using the new social networks that if they didn't pay for the product, they WERE the product.
Sharecropping was a system that arose in post-Civil War America to make it appear that former slaves were now free. It involved allowing them to live on and farm land in return for a share of their crops. But most were forced to take out loans, often at exorbitantly high interest, from the landowners to cover supplies and living costs. This left them trapped in a cycle of debt that amounted to a new kind of bondage.
Similar systems have operated in different countries in a way that looked generous but in operation kept people poor and dependent on landowners for their safety.
How many people now are reliant on digital sharecropping for a living? They have monetised their interactions on social networks, betting their living on their ability to stay on the right side of the algorithm, for a share of the crop they planted in the fields of Meta or X or TikTok.
But those 'farms' can go away. Your ability to plant crops in them can be removed in a heartbeat if you use a banned word or fall on the wrong side of an ever-changing algorithm. Your account could be closed. But they would still own your crops. Meta, for instance, is now feeding all your pics and words into AI unless you specifically opt out. They're still getting fat off your crops whether you're there or not.
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When people click a 'link in bio' most don't have a website now. That means that most Influencers, Creators, and Solopreneurs are digital sharecroppers who've swapped the life of being imprisoned in a cubicle for a life imprisoned in an algorithm.
You have a voice! Use it while you still know who you are!
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