From co-founding the Sisterhood Sit-in LLC to launching BUUK World later this month, Cook-Kendrick is building a home where creators can claim their voice, own their digital double, and share their work within a community of fellow storytellers.

Her work is built around consent, collective economics, and the belief that every person’s “voice print”—their style, tone, likeness, and creative expression—deserves protection.

From Braiding Patterns to Code Patterns 

Cook-Kendrick was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the East New York projects before her family moved to Hampton, Virginia when she was nine. Her mother was a preacher, and their family belonged to the Pentecostal Church. 

She started braiding hair at the age of five, with her little sister serving as her first client. Cook-Kendrick graduated from New Horizon RETC with a cosmetology license in 1997 and was attending Rutgers University on full scholarship before getting pregnant with her first son at the age of 17. 

Her career in hair and glam really took off when she returned to New York and worked at Gerard Dure’s celebrity hair salon in Harlem. From there, she went on three world tours as the director of glam for Madonna and Miley Cyrus, traveling in over 40 countries. In 2010, she won the reality TV show Hair Battle Spectacular, and worked on a campaign for L’Oreal and UN Hairdressers Against AIDS. 

At the height of conventional success, Cook-Kendrick realized that fame and fortune did not guarantee happiness. She retired as a hairstylist in 2015 and transitioned into ministry and technology, trading hair patterns for pixels and coding. At the center of her work is her spiritual belief that our differences matter and deserve to be honored. 

“God is everything, and each one of us is an example of an expression of that everything. And so that’s why we’re much different,” Cook-Kendrick told UrbanGeekz in an exclusive interview. This belief propelled her into her work as a liberation technologist. 

Defining the Problem 

One main problem drives Cook-Kendrick’s work: the lack of ethics and consent in the age of synthetic media. She sees a clear parallel between the historic exploitation of Black labor in America and today’s extraction of data, stories, and intellectual property from marginalized creators. 

Big tech, she argues, has scraped generations of individuals’ information to train large language models, without asking. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook profit from the content and IP that their creators post, often without fair credit or compensation. 

“We weren’t asked permission, not outwardly anyway, for our intellectual property to be used to create models that are now being turned and sold back to us,” Cook-Kendrick says. “I am not anti-AI at all, but I’m so much more pro-consent.”  

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Founding the Sisterhood Sit-in LLC 

Before the Voice Registry and BUUK world, Cook-Kendrick helped her sister, Jeannine Cook, launch Harriet’s Bookshop, a bookshop celebrating women authors, artists, and activists in honor of Harriet Tubman. It has since grown into three bookshops with Harriet’s in Philadelphia, Ida’s in New Jersey, and Josephine’s in Paris. 

When the shop first opened in 2020, the sisters received threatening emails aimed at Black-owned businesses. They responded with a sit-in. What began as a socially distanced protest in Philadelphia became a trolley tour, then an LLC. 

Sisterhood Sit-in LLC is now the umbrella under which all of Cook-Kendrick’s work sits. The sisters draw on the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist, socialist framework built on one core idea. Black women face overlapping oppressions, namely, racism, sexism, and classism all at once. When you build solutions with Black women at the center, the collective argues, then everyone benefits. 

Reclaiming your Voice Print 

Once content is posted online, it’s easy for it to be scraped and used to train AI models without consent. Cook-Kendrick built the Voice Registry on Much Different World to fight this exploitation. 

“Each person has a voice print that can be measured into a mathematical formula. Once you lock that into you, everything you create can be traced back to you,” Cook-Kendrick explains. 

The Voice Registry is a database where creators can register their “voice print.” That is their style, expression, image, likeness, personality, and body of work. Registering creates a voice print that is cryptographically tied to a creator’s unique sound. This is timestamped and anchored to the blockchain for third-party verification. Creators receive an SVT number for their work through a formal registration ceremony based on informed consent. 

Over time, this registration builds provenance for legal or reparative frameworks, both now and in the future. While the registration does not necessarily protect your voice print from misuse, it allows you to claim your voice and acknowledges you as the source. 

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Entering BUUK World 

The Voice Registry is one part of her work, whereas BUUK World is the front door. BUUK World is a home for storytellers, writers, podcasters, filmmakers, and other narrative creators whose stories are often extracted without consent. 

Rather than creating another “platform,” Cook-Kendrick was determined to design a digital home. A place for “people that create worlds with words to be able to sell their work, learn and be part of a community that cares about that, that was designed with them in mind,” Cook-Kendrick expanded. 

Instead of being users of the platform, people who join BUUK World are called residents. When joining, they receive an address on BUUK Boulevard, a literary neighborhood built for creators. Instead of likes, they give each other flowers. Instead of a feed, they get a crate that holds the books they’ve bought and the events they’ve attended. Every resident gets a front door, and entering requires a knock, small deliberate friction that is coded into the user interface to enhance mindfulness and presence. 

The economics work differently, too. When residents sell their work, 15% goes into a collective fund, modeled on the West African Susu savings tradition. The goal is for residents to grow, earn, and learn together rather than compete alone. 

Voice registration underpins the whole system. Unregistered visitors can browse, but full access to receipts, commerce, and community requires a claimed voice print. 

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Building Personalized Digital Doubles 

Big tech platforms are slowly building online versions of you. This is called a digital twin, a virtual replica built from every data point you (un)willingly handed over through your online habits. Its purpose is simple: to predict what you’ll buy, then advertise it to you before you even realize you want it. 

On BUUK World, Cook-Kendrick flips that model on its head. Here, residents build their own digital doubles, on their own terms. It’s a consent-driven, AI-powered version of yourself that learns your language, your values, and your patterns over time. The process is called the DIG, short for digital identity gathering, a 12-point system mapping parts of your personality. 

The double continuously learns, but only with your permission. It checks in as it goes to ensure it’s accurately reflecting your personality. The result is a protected interface. An algorithm that interacts with other algorithms to tailor your digital experience based on your personal values and goals. 

BUUK World is launching at the end of this month, but Cook-Kendrick is intentionally resisting the urge to grow too fast. The opening will be done in stages. First, with the inspectors and initial residents, a housewarming will be followed by a block party, which will be open to the public. 

BUUK World is the answer to the question: what happens when Black Women build infrastructure and tech designed to protect rather than extract their stories? Cook-Kendrick is the genius behind it all. 

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