What you’ll get from this Substack

I’m the founder of OCC Research. I build governance memory infrastructure.

I operate under a philosophy I call Sovereign Adaptation: most of what we accept as fixed rules are just agreements waiting to be challenged. Systems, power structures, and institutions are built by people, which means they can be understood, maneuvered through, and redesigned. But autonomy without responsibility is just ego. Once you gain leverage, the job is to build systems that give others the same clarity and agency.

Sovereign Adaptation rests on five pillars: mental autonomy (own your thoughts, resist manipulation), financial and economic sovereignty (reduce dependence on centralized institutions), physical resilience and self-sufficiency (prevention over treatment), governance and strategic systems awareness (learn how rules are made and who controls them), and spiritual and ethical alignment (ground your actions in something deeper than yourself).

The Governance Memory System(GMS) came out of the fourth pillar, but the work touches all five. I spent five years embedded in blockchain governance across 15+ ecosystems: giving feedback and co-authoring founding documents for different blockchains, leading governance operations for a validator infrastructure provider, and serving as one of six elected stewards on Jito’s Cryptoeconomic SubDAO. I kept being the person who remembered what went wrong last time, and it never mattered because there was no system to hold it. So I built one.

GMS is institutional memory as a service. It captures why decisions were made, what happened after, and which patterns keep recurring across leadership cycles. It is deployed across four contexts right now: a national parliament, a blockchain governance body, a local school board budget, and a distributed research community with chapters across multiple countries. The same five-layer framework transfers between all of them. The institutional memory problem is structural, not domain specific. The solution should be too.

I am an active contributor to the Metagov research lab and a member of the Open Research Institute. Here you’ll learn about life through the lens of Sovereign Adaptation and the lessons learned from the different deployments of the Governance Memory System. Incentive structures and decision making, influence all industries and different levels of society, governance memory is the middleware that wires everything together.

If you’d like to support my efforts you can help on Open Collective!