iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

drew mca @drewmca.net · 25/09/2026

screencap of a helpful graphic from 1:35:14 of the linked video!

screenshot of a slide from the AGM presentation. shows austin robey speaking, title “state of subvert, voluntary contributions model”
from left to right, a histogram of contributions from the first four thousand transactions. 12.6% gave 0, 17.6% contributed a 10% tip, 43.1% contributed 15%, 19% contributed 20% and 7.7% of transactions contributed 20%+
one custom contribution was $1000, and users contributed an average of $0.28 on free downloads.
last shows two bars, one where the platform takes a 15% cut, and artists receive 85%, and subverts model wehere the artist keeps 100% and subvert gets voluntary contributions averaging 28%

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 31/08/2025

Too lazy to repost but here’s the highlights

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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 · 19/07/2025

Loved this opening 😄

Article title: “Financing shared ownership” subtitle: “How policymakers can support the financing of shared ownership across the economy”
Contributors: Júlia Martins Rodrigues & Nathan Schneider

Opening paragraph of the article:

A truly democratic society should be capable of extending democracy into the workplace and everyday economic life.
Shared ownership is a fundamental stepping stone toward such economic democracy. In
this context, shared ownership refers to broad-based structures that make company ownership available and reasonably accessible to all members of a stakeholder class-such as its workers, consumers,
neighbors, or other groups of direct participants. This way, the owners of a business are people whose lives its operations affect, not just outside investors seeking profits. Through broad-based shared ownership, access to the responsibilities and rewards of ownership can be distributed throughout society rather than concentrated in the hands of a financial
elite, resulting in more democratic governance and shared prosperity.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 27/04/2025

I’m a little late on posting this, but some excerpts from @hcrichardson.bsky.social on Apr 24, alongside a snippet from a favorite essay by @mutual-a.bsky.social, with some of my highlights added.

Trump won the presidency by assuring his base that he was a strong leader who could impose his will on the country and the world.
Now he is bleating weakly at Putin.
Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community.
He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.

according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.
Leaders who pushed this ideology knew it attracted voters. Once they were in power, they could slash government programs and cut taxes and regulations that kept wealth and opportunity accessible to poorer Americans. They argued that a society works best if wealth and power are concentrated among a few elites, who can direct capital more efficiently than government bureaucrats can. Their rhetoric worked: from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But those same people talking about individualism to secure votes also knew that the world has never worked this way. In the twenty-first century, U.S. security and the economy depended more than ever on coalitions and government investment.

today, Musk and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent got into a yelling match in the West Wing of the White House.
And Musk's vow of $2 trillion in cuts has dwindled down to $150 billion, although that number is not yet verifiable. Elizabeth
Williamson of the New York Times reported today that the cost of firing workers will be more than $135 billion this year, while cuts to the IRS will cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone. And then there is the cost of lawsuits over DOGE's actions.
Rather than working with those government officials already in place to save government money, Musk appears to be trying to display his power over government employees. At the same time, he is scooping up data from various government agencies about individuals in the U.S., a treasure trove that he could use for shaping society, garnering government contracts, or raising money either by selling it or by blackmailing people with it. After today's news that Tesla's

Now I do think that Marx is right about the drive towards simplicity. But it doesn't neatly result in efficiency. Marx's assertion that you can just rationally create productive processes is not just historically questionable (see David Noble on how American manufacturers promoted inefficient automation technologies that enabled more control over workers, for example) but also is theoretically at odds with the aforementioned problems of perfect algorithms.
Certainly, such rigidity can be efficient for particular ends. But it comes at the expense of potentially reconfiguring the process in ways as well as denying tools that would allow for a broader scope of possible ways of working.
But this is kinda the point. Because what the broader capitalist system is optimizing for is control and then efficiency.
States and large, hierarchical firms have a symbiotic relationship with each other wherein both provide something of value that the other cannot when it comes to navigating an uncertain world.
Capitalists naturally pursue technology in a manner that reinforces power because it's how they make workers easier to direct and control which does unlock certain economies of scale and also allows them to drive down wages.
From the perspective of society broadly this is both inefficient and costly in the form of various negative externalities. But from the perspective of the state, this arrangement is preferable because economic centralization enables the state to better achieve its ends precisely because a smaller number of large firms can be more easily mobilized.
And so the state tips the scale in favor of large capitalists in a variety of ways. From the enforcement of property claims acquired through expropriation or conquest, to making forms of self-employment or cooperative enterprises more costly if not outright illegal, to subsidies for transportation infrastructure to name but a few, the state has constantly

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 29/03/2025

oop here's the same image with a background

screenshot from the pmsky.social landing page of the same drawing of bricks. a header above the image says "Composable Moderation", and below the text says "Bluesky has taken a stackable approach to moderation..."

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 29/03/2025

i couldn't find an image i liked so i drew this brick wall for a redesign of the pmsky.social landing page, this is probably the first thing i've drawn since middle school art class, so i'm pretty stoked at how it came out 😄

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 28/03/2025

what do we think, left or right?

screenshot of the new landing page with two columns. left is an image, and right has a header and some copy

another screenshot of the landing page. this time, the header is above the image and right-aligned, rather than constrained in the right column.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 28/03/2025

can confirm, including a screenshot bc i was curious what it looked like

screenshot of the youtube warning page before it redirects to bsky. it says
“Be careful! This site may be harmful.
The site you are trying to visit (bsky.app) may include malware, phishing attempts, or disturbing content.
BACK TO SAFETY”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 24/03/2025

no it's cool i didn't really wanna check into my flight anyways

screenshot of delta.com returning: This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The
document tree is shown below.
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<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
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east-l is not authorized to perform: 53:ListBucket on resource: "arn:aws: s3:::0ci-prd-ui-delta-us-east-1" because no identity-basec policy allows the s3:ListBucket action
</Message>
<RequestId>V5ZG659YKZMW0CW6</RequestId>
T <HostId>
Va3yLwHpwvxZ9gXkXySbEEf/dwBHMI07wskyPRd51zaJFLud/D7xzmvyk9APVaCGHut

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 24/03/2025

first time in seattle and really loved it - i have an offering for the moss feed

a variety of mossy plants that are i assume native to the pacific northwest. some fern looking things, budding shrubs, small lily pad looking clusters & moss and wet leaves. good vibes

a path made of larger flat stones (blanking on the word for them) with mossy grass between and around them. it’s a path on the UW seattle campus

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 23/03/2025

@pius.dog is now enshrined on my laptop

closeup of my laptop lid, which is really just a collage of stickers. centered is the sticker of @pius.dog's head

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 26/02/2025

stay safe out there!

dm from a @pmsky.social user: “ok lmao you can accidentally vote neg on your own meta proposal and get locked out”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 22/02/2025

surrounded by many good and extremely cool people this weekend at #GFELBoulder

page two of the manifesto, quote:

A specter is haunting Ethereum-the specter of public goods. All the powers of the old world— maximalists and mercenaries, rent-seekers and reactionaries-have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this specter.
Where is the faction that has not been decried as "communist" by its adversaries in the network state? Where is the builder who has not been branded as an enemy of private accumulation, simply for advocating for the commons?
It is time for the stewards of coordination to openly publish their aims, to stand before the networked world and declare: public goods are not theft, they are the substrate of civilization.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 26/01/2025

@gahr.io @pmsky.social’s first post!

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 14/11/2024

also these could be consolidated the way other notifications are probably

screenshot of the notifications tab, showing several individual “X followed you back” notifications, when it could be one consolidated “Y users followed you back” like other notification types are

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 08/11/2024

easily verifiable and not true???

screenshot of @kamalaharris on instagram, looking normal and no snake like claimed in the post above

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 04/11/2024

hah i think a lot of people just got this text bc the web server for fixing this is now down & throwing 404s

screenshot of a text from BallotTrax saying i need to cure my ballot, and a link to a tool to do so

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 21/10/2024

here’s the gist they’re (rightfully imo) concerned about fascist organizing on the site. apparently Brazil requested a takedown, and bsky responded by taking down only for Brazil.

Chad Loder @chadloder.bsky.social
This is the biggest weakness of Bluesky in my opinion. The fascists are here already and they will keep coming.

Zecharias Zelalem @zekuzelalem
If they are slow to curb the few fascists mostly communicating in English, all hell will break loose when the fascists from all the non English speaking corners of the world set up a base here. So far, no sign they are serious about preventing What happened with Twitter/Facebook

Chad Loder@chadloder.bsky.social
The German-speaking fascists have a really large cell here already, probably larger than the English-speaking cluster.
But the English cluster's pretty big and growing quickly.

Chad Loder @chadloder.bsky.social • 4d
They don't see this as dropping the ball. The mental model underlying the design philosophy seems to be very laissez-faire, to the point of techno-libertarianism.
The flaw is, as you said, that giving people nuclear blocks and blocklists does not prevent fascists from organizing on here.

Zecharias Zelalem @zekuzelalem.... • 4d
Okay. Well that sounds almost Musk-esque. Here's to hoping they're prepping something they will rollout in the not too distant future.

@recombobulating.bsky.social
When the Brazilian state insisted that Bluesky remove specific far right accounts they developed new functionality so that they would be

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 11/10/2024

Northern lights visible in Lowell, MA!

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 05/10/2024

the section i attempted to summarize, in full for anyone curious

A unifying perspective
The book is thus motivated by a concern with economic forces on the one hand and with politics on the other. In clarifying the manner in which it seeks to blend the two, it is useful to dwell on one of the canonical texts in contemporary social science: the Coase Theorem. 23
Coase bases his argument on an example in which a railway runs through a valley populated by farmers. The allocational issue is the number of trains that should operate each day. Transportation is valuable and operating trains produces profits for the railway; but transportation is also costly, for soot and sparks from the passing trains damage the crops of farmers. Acting purely out of a regard for corporate profits, the

railway is likely to run too many trains. The costs inflicted upon the farmers by the last several trains may exceed the profits earned by the railway, and society could be made better off by running fewer trains.
Coase argues that a system of property rights could yield the socially efficient outcome: the number of trains that maximizes the sum of the returns to the railway and to the farmers. He also demonstrates that from the point of view of economic efficiency, the precise form of property rights is irrelevant. Equally important, he stresses that this conclusion holds only if there are no transaction costs. It is this last argument that renders Coase's article a contribution to the political economy. For in a world of positive transaction costs, institutions matter. They determine what bargains can be made, what agreements enforced, and therefore what outcomes are attainable through voluntary exchange. They also determine who pays, and who receives payment, when resources are …

Politics also matter in Coase's argument because they influence the distribution of economic benefits. Under the system of corporate rights, efficiency requires a flow of payments from the multitude of farmers to the owners of the railway. Historically, the ownership of railways has been tightly held, and the result of this system would therefore be the creation of a wealthy minority. Under the system of farmers' rights, efficiency requires the flow of payments from the railway to the farmer.
As assumed in Coase's argument and as commonly seen in the developing areas, farming tends to be a broad-based industry, with a multitude of small-scale practitioners. This system of property rights is therefore likely to yield a more egalitarian income distribution. The distribution of income is therefore significantly shaped by whether it is the railways or the farmers who dominate the political system and who thereby achieve the power legally to privilege their interests.

The two systems of property rights may thus both produce efficient outcomes. But they will yield different distributions of income, and ones that would result in major differences in the structure of demand, the composition of industries, and the kinds of jobs and skills that are socially rewarded.? While equivalent in terms of the degrees of economic effi-ciency, the two institutional bases thus yield radically different developmental outcomes. Which group organizes politically and thereby seizes the power to define the system of property rights thus matters.
This book seeks to bring to the study of development insights generated by the work of Coase, Williamson, Alchian, Demsetz, Klein, Crawford, and others who have explored the significance of institutions. * It explores their political as well as economic features. It thereby attempts to create a way of integrating the political with the economic in the study of development.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 24/09/2024

yes, social ownership can be plenty of things - there are other ways to break down ownership aside from exclusively capital or the state en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

screenshot of the wikipedia page for socialism, with the following quote highlighted: “Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee.”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 22/09/2024

this made me crack up, on their steam page

screenshot of the steam listing for “supermarket simulator”

screenshot further down the page that says, “see our other game: mafia simulator”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 08/09/2024

it totally is an LLM and it’s confused lol

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 08/09/2024

this translation might be LLM-based and therefore have the brain rot required, bc it translated “calabreso” correctly(?) and “calabresa” into “pepperon”??

iOS translation of the grammatically more correct brazilian portuguese “calabresa” into “pepperon” in english

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 08/09/2024

they can be hidden gems sometimes

bsky screenshot translating “calma calabreso” in brazilian portuguese to “calm down pepperoni”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 31/07/2024

From Celestial Seasonings, north of Boulder

scene of a mostly blue sky, with smoke billowing up from the current wildfire near Lyons, CO in the distance.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 15/07/2024

does the canonical PDS implementation handle /xrpc/app.bsky.* requests? actually looking closer, this code lives in `packages/pds`, but it looks like line 15 expects this to be called by an AppView, am I reading that correctly?

screenshot of getProfile.ts in the atproto repo, lines 11 through 18. of note, line 15: if (!bskyAppView) return

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 23/06/2024

found some Unnameable Books in Turners Falls, MA 👀

holding two purchases from unnameable books in Turners Falls, MA: Networked Press Freedom by Mike Ananny and Social Organization, the Science of Man & other writings by Henri de Saint Simon

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 10/03/2024

1. this is extremely cool!! 2. thoughts on making this column a little wider/larger text on mobile?

screenshot of v6acolab.org on mobile. the main text is only about 50% of the width of the screen.

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 19/02/2024

just picked up a new sci-fi read from tridentcafe.com 🤓

the cover of cixin liu’s “the three body problem”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 09/12/2023

just finished ursula k le guin’s the dispossessed; that was a great read. very fun to have a sci-fi format that had so many profound things to say. the setting of a revolutionary inspiring a new society that cleaves itself from its origin lent itself to that well. here’s a page i liked -

cover of the disposed by ursula k le guin

page 267 of the book. sorry i can’t type the entire thing, but the gist i got is that you have a calling, society’s job is to enable you the freedom to pursue that, and your job is to pursue that calling as contribution back to that society, and i like that idea

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 22/10/2023

heh i’ve caused a ruckus

screenshot from nextdoor showing 9 reactions, 7 hearts and 2 agree, plus ones, and 38 comments. it says “neighbors have a lot to say about this post”

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drew mca @drewmca.net · 09/10/2023

i feel as though this is opposite of what should be the case

a google search for “does the usps charge more for commercial mail” showing the top result that spam mail is actually cheaper than retail

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