Tessera

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-...

Thoughts on

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

notes.drewmca.net

Ronen Tamari@ronentk.me · 4mo ago

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.

"The properties that make AT Protocol compelling for social networking are the same properties the research community has been asking for" Exciting vision for the future of science publishing on ATProto @row1.ca @opensci.dev @nokome.bsky.social #ATScience

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!

Digital Gardening

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

notes.drewmca.net

On Community Gardening

This post is testing backlinks from external publications

writing.drewmca.net

letsbuyspiritair.com coop airline? 👀

Spirit 2.0 — The Airline Owned by the People, for the People

Spirit Airlines collapsed. Before private equity locks it up, the people can own it. Join the Spirit 2.0 founding coalition. One member, one vote. Profits shared by all.

letsbuyspiritair.com

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...

Protecting the civil rights of persons – Will Brownsberger

willbrownsberger.com

The Verge@theverge.com · 3mo ago

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.

THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION

drew mca @drewmca.net · 5mo ago

bro has never heard of the buddha apparently

Dave Lee@davelee.me · 5mo ago

Where to begin with this

drew mca @drewmca.net · 7mo ago

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/

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…

nyccli.org

drew mca @drewmca.net · 8mo ago

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

drew mca @drewmca.net · 9mo ago

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...

The People’s Plan for Hughes

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

newamerica.org

drew mca @drewmca.net · 9mo ago

“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.”

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

YouTube video by Zeteo

youtu.be

Money on the Left @moneyontheleft.bsky.social · 10mo ago

"[Trump's] agenda only works if there’s nothing else on offer. Blue Bonds are the counter-offer."

Blue Bonds Can Stop Trump’s Fiscal Authoritarianism

By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective Less than a year into his second term, Donald Trump has launched an illegal and (as now) unfeasible mass deportation campaign—one that is tearing apart…

moneyontheleft.org

drew mca @drewmca.net · 10mo ago

It’s #bandcampfriday! Go checkout subvert.fm 😄

Subvert — The Collectively Owned Music Marketplace

A music platform owned by us all. Join Subvert to sell your work, support artists, and shape our shared future. Sincerely Ours.

subvert.fm

Boris@bmann.ca · 10mo ago

It’s #bandcampfriday Go buy some music!

ML@mlpoole.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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

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

K.H.I.@sheridesabike.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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!

Ban gas-powered leaf blowers and gardening tools. I am in the 40th minute of listening to this shit for a property that isn't even that big. Even with noise-canceling headphones, it's crap. Ban ICE and ICE (internal combustion engines).

drew mca@drewmca.net · 12mo ago

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…”

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

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.

Bates' Gedanken on Property Rights

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

leaflet.drewmca.net

Public Citizen@publiccitizen.bsky.social · 11mo ago

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?

Starbucks CEO pay: $96 MILLION Starbucks worker pay: $15,000 Coca-Cola CEO pay: $28 MILLION Coca-Cola worker pay: $14,000 CEOs used to make like 20x the average worker. In 2024, the average CEO earned 632x more. The system is rigged.

Alex Newhouse@alexbnewhouse.bsky.social · 11mo ago

I am a Newhousian on this issue

as a reminder of the newhousian approach to this, I strongly support doubling the size of the House of Reps and making every additional seat proportionally allocated (thus resulting in a mixed-member legislature) also abolish the senate

drew mca @drewmca.net · 12mo ago

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

drew mca @drewmca.net · 12mo ago

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

derek guy@dieworkwear.bsky.social · 12mo ago

really feels like housing affordability is one of the most important political issues of our time, affecting nearly every aspect of our lives, and everyday our mainstream political discourse is about whether sour cream is woke or not

drew mca @drewmca.net · 12mo ago

"Technology is politics by other means." Great conversation from @robin.berjon.com facilitated by @ntnsndr.in on web standards!

Robin Berjon: Web standards

The standards that govern the World Wide Web develop at the intersection of profit-seeking companies, nonprofit organizations, and small groups of people with …

protocol.ecologies.info

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.

Precursor Ramblings to PMsky

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

leaflet.drewmca.net

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.

Platforms, Protocols, and Permissibility

A comparison of communication technologies across permission types

leaflet.drewmca.net

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