Chokepoint Capitalism
How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
Ratings20
Average rating4.3
A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media
Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both.
In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.
By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.
In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.
Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.
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As enraging as it is energizing, this should be mandatory reading for anyone creating for or working on today's digital distribution platforms.
This is an excellent book with one fatal flaw deep at its heart, but I do think it's a necessary read. While the ideas the book relays shouldn't be new to anyone who pays attention to the current corporate landscape, the exact details of corporate intrusion into our lives are definitely worth knowing, and they're related in a simple and easily understood fashion. The book is at no point overcomplex, except perhaps when reporting on subjects that are themselves purposefully obfuscated, like when they go into the twisted morass of music listening law.
The thing that keeps this from being a truly 5 star experience, a real ‘everyone needs to read this!' knee slapping call to arms, is the way the book focuses only on artists. Artists are unimaginably abused by our current megacorp dystopia, and I think they should get their due for their labor. I think the book should mention them, and it does. But it focuses on them to the exclusion of people whose experiences with corporate abuse are far more devastating in consequence and scope. It's easy to take advantage of artists, and so Giblin and Doctorow call them the canary in the coalmine of these antics, but I think what artists really are in this situation are the most easily visible people being taken advantage of.
The book talks at length about breaking corporate chokeholds– monopolies– but it talks about doing it through legislation. It mentions the COVID pandemic but not the riots. The book points to artists and how they've been abused, then blithely mentions production line workers wearing diapers and Amazon striking. The book's use of artists as its focal point is meant to show how corporate abuse could spread from just artists and eventually abuse you, but in using artists, the implicit you is presumed middle class. Purposefully or otherwise, the book excludes the people who were alienated from their labor far, far before any musician: the people who staff Amazon warehouses, automobile factory workers, the lower middle class and working poor. The book's diligent focus on legislative fixes to the problems of corporation totally ignores the importance of riots and radical action, and the book only briefly mentions strikes and labor unions.
The final passages of the book talk about how it's a big task to take down corporate greed (it is) but how we should take heart, because their control is so self-entangled that any strike against them weakens the whole. But the book forgets that the people, workers, the disadvantaged, everyone who is preyed on by corporate capital, are also a whole. We have to protect our own, even if it scares white upper middle class economists.
This is not an incitement of Giblin or Doctorow's priorities or an attempt to guess at their class status; I am not casting aspersions on their motives in writing this book, nor saying the book is useless. I think their best intentions are in this book, and it's truly an informative and important read. But it is blinkered in its scope, and that, again, weakens the whole.
