iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

drew mca @drewmca.net · 27/09/2026

This is maybe one of the spaces where i feel forced interoperability could make decent progress. one method of anti-trust is to say “hey you’re the big player, you have a responsibility to open up your api / a protocol / etc. what happens if Epic is required to open its equivalent to atproto?

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 24/09/2026

Really cool piece from the @subvert.fm coop annual general meeting (at 1:35:20): They went for an optional contribution at checkout, rather than taking a percentage of artist's revenue. They saw an average contribution of 27% per transaction, almost twice as much as bandcamp's mandatory 15%.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 20/09/2026

it’s also farmer-owned, which is literally socialism

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 18/09/2026

this is obviously a direct result of Angie Nixon telling Kalshi to stfu over on threads

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 13/09/2026

I had a similar thought about earthquakes, we could even trigger small scale ones to relieve the pressure that cause big ones as a preventative measure

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 22/08/2026

MA-6 (with six candidates in the Dem primary) makes me even sadder that RCV didn't pass back in 2020 🥲 #mapoli

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 20/08/2026

@votewithsway.bsky.social just found Sway, essentially a platform for making ballot recommendations. neat platform, lots of cool possibilities here!

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 17/05/2026

i’m trying to be better at thinking out loud / writing more of my thoughts down, so i put this up in response to a recent piece out of New Consensus on AI and the economy that’ll result from it. @zackexley.bsky.social would love your thoughts 😄 notes.drewmca.net/Thoughts-on-...

notes.drewmca.net

Thoughts on

I recently read this four-part blog post on New Consensus titled Why Capitalism Can’t Survive AI.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 07/05/2026

I was just thinking this as I was scrolling arXiv recently, how cool it would be to have those papers published as at://records and to be able to see all the links between them.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 06/05/2026

Okay so I have an obsidian vault that publishes its notes to my PDS as @standard.site documents, and builds the notes as a static site with quartz.jzhao.xyz. I've hacked it a little bit to also fetch backlinks from the atmosphere via @microcosm.blue, so if you look at this note, you'll see a link!

notes.drewmca.net

Digital Gardening

Gardening is an exercise in habit and attention. Digital gardening is a practice of curation.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 02/05/2026

The MA senate is putting forward the PROTECT Act, as a response to ICE. Part of that is introducing liability of federal officers for violating civil rights like the 4th amendment. Here’s state senator Brownsberger on “so-called qualified immunity.” willbrownsberger.com/protecting-t...

willbrownsberger.com

Protecting the civil rights of persons – Will Brownsberger

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 26/04/2026

automation is good, the problem is capitalism. reduce the working week, jobs guarantee, a livable minimum wage (or better yet, UBI) all to constrain the labor market and raise wages so that automation targets jobs nobody wants to do.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 16/03/2026

bro has never heard of the buddha apparently

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 01/01/2026

For anyone who may have missed it, NYC passed COPA, a Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, allowing orgs like community land trusts a right of first refusal when multifamily buildings are sold. Neat! nyccli.org/copa/

nyccli.org

Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA)

Please direct media and communications inquiries to will@neweconomynyc.org. After a multi-year campaign waged by NYCCLI and 200+ community and affordable housing groups, the City Council passe…

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 30/11/2025

What if unions bargained for ownership of their employers, became ESOPs, and slowly turned their companies into cooperatives?

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 23/11/2025

Extremely cool recent happenings out of Fort Collins, CO! To figure out how to rezone an old stadium, they convened a civic assembly, with some great results! www.newamerica.org/political-re...

newamerica.org

The People’s Plan for Hughes

This week, Fort Collins voters endorsed deliberative democracy at the ballot box.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 05/11/2025

“The sun may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

youtu.be

‘Hope Is Alive’: Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech After Toppling a NYC Dynasty

YouTube video by Zeteo

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 14/09/2025

Closed source / corporate controlled algorithms are a large source of societal ills, ban them

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 13/09/2025

Currently cramming the protocol reader ahead of @protocolized.bsky.social’s symposium this week, feels like I’m back in grad school 😄

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 04/09/2025

Fun fact, there is way less regulation on these things, so their efficiency and carbon output tends to be massively worse. One study found that running a gas leaf blower for an hour is like driving an F150 from Texas to Alaska and back!

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 31/08/2025

And it still hasn’t stopped, 65 pages in

Page 65 of “Owning the Future” by Buller and Lawrence:
“significant swathes of the economy and set to take more.
Unifying ownership and control, the explosive growth of the sector presages a further concentration of economic power. However, contrary to the industry's claims of investing in a productive post-pandemic future, extensive research details the extractive practices favoured by many private equity firms, including loading companies with debt (thereby reducing tax burdens) and asset stripping (such as selling company assets only to lease them back, with the private equity firm rather than the company retaining the cash from the sale).* The corporate form risks being ransacked further through the historic shifts in ownership underway.
On David and Goliath: a Democratising Agenda for the Corporation
We do not, then, live in the world envisioned by the advocates of shareholder primacy, nor in the socialised corporation imagined by Marx or Keynes. Instead, what has come to pass is a deep and ongoing monopolisation of ownership and control rights in the economy, epitomised by the systemic power of the asset management giants, with corporations increasingly reduced to vehicles for extracting income for passive rentier investors. How then can we reimagine the corporation as a vehicle for democratic production, resuscitating the emancipatory potential many have identified in the corporate form?
There is no way that, on the current institutional foun-dations, we can build a world where production is organised democratically to meet society's fundamental needs. Today, property is privileged over the security and dignity of the vast majority, who are subjected to exploitation, coercive…”

Page 67 of “Owning the Future” by Buller and Lawrence
“The task ahead is to replace private authority over production with a truly democratic and social institution that organises investment to meet needs based on work undertaken under conditions of substantive freedom within and beyond the firm. That means ensuring the question of the purpose of production is subject to democratic nego-tiation. The corporation is not in any meaningful sense a
'private institution; to the contrary, it's a thoroughly public space, and one of the few that we have been content to maintain as fundamentally undemocratic. Why submit to the prerogatives of the rentier shareholder, managerial elites, and asset management titans, when economic coordination rights within and beyond the corporation could just as easily be organised to serve the many?* Reimagining the corporate form is no small feat, but in fundamental terms, the democratic economy begins where the primacy of property ends.
Reclaiming the Common Wealth: First Principles
The rights enjoyed by owners of capital are not natural, they have been constructed over time through sustained political effort and cemented beneath layers of legal precedent and codes written to construct and protect wealth generating assets.* In contrast to the idea that societal development has travelled along some inevitable path towards the 'end of history', the rights of different classes and peoples have ebbed and flowed, reflecting historically specific distributions of bargaining power within societies.
We need only look to European or Chinese models of corporate ownership to see the range of possibilities, even within the parameters of the present. The dominance of…”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 31/08/2025

I really liked this thought experiment, so I annotated it and posted it here, mostly for my own future reference. It's pulled from the introduction to Robert Bates' "Beyond the Miracle of the Market," book on midcentury economic development in Kenya after gaining their independence from Britain.

leaflet.drewmca.net

Bates' Gedanken on Property Rights

A thought experiment that shows the primacy of property rights in economic systems

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 29/08/2025

How about a thought experiment? Obviously this trend needs to be reversed, but a mandated max ratio is only one option. CEO pay ballooned largely because 1) pay is public and 2) smaller group of people, so less of a collective action problem. Anything else I’m missing?

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 28/08/2025

I am a Newhousian on this issue

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 16/08/2025

@adriennebuller.bsky.social and @mathewlawrence.bsky.social’s Owning the Future goes incredibly hard in just the first few pages

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 09/08/2025

Inevitable result of home equity driving the majority of Americans’ net worth

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 05/08/2025

This piece was originally a homework assignment, months before I had even started outlining the details for PMsky. I dug this up recently, and I think it's fun to see the ideas percolating that led to the project.

leaflet.drewmca.net

Precursor Ramblings to PMsky

Train-of-thought response to Tufekci's Twitter & Teargas on collaborative truth-finding.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 05/08/2025

Here's some more rambling - a paper I wrote last year for a sociology class, looking at platforms and protocols through a lens of firms, markets, and networks.

leaflet.drewmca.net

Platforms, Protocols, and Permissibility

A comparison of communication technologies across permission types

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 03/08/2025

when running `goat record update`, am I correct to assume that the response: "error: XRPC ERROR 400: InvalidRequest: Lexicon not found: lex:pub.leaflet.document" comes from there not being a published lexicon on the @leaflet.pub PDS? #atdev

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 02/08/2025

Slowly going to start publishing some of the pieces I'd written for grad school the last couple of years - this was written in the fall of 2023, so go easy on me 😄