The Rise of Chokepoint Capitalism and How Workers Can Defeat It
Hardcover, 304 pages
Published Sept. 20, 2022 by Beacon Press.
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 …
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.
This is the kind of topic that deserves the prestige of a book but where the ideas can fit in a blog post without losing anything important. Here, the length and examples are worthwhile. The show the scope of the problem in a way that is both interesting and enraging.
Using a broad set of examples from the creative fields (incl. publishing, news, music & screenwriting) this book goes into how corporations go about creating monopolies to lock in both their users and suppliers and why this is terrible for all of us.
In the first half of the book, Doctorow & Giblin do an amazing job of depressing their readers by bringing together the different strategies that are leading to such dire outcomes. Luckily, the second half goes into some of the strategies that we collectively can take to fight back against.
And of course, this wouldn't be a book that involves Doctorow if existing the DMCA and DRM wouldn't get all the hate they deserve. :D
Only a little preachy, this is a great primer on how monopolies have eaten much of our culture, and some ways we might be able to claw it back into the public domain.
Mit ihrem Buch "Chokepoint Capitalism" weisen Rebecca Giblin und Cory Doctorow auf eine Eigenheit des Plattformkapitalismus à la Amazon oder Google hin, die bisher meiner Wahrnehmung nach nicht so klar angesprochen wurde: Plattformen sind bewusst darauf hinentwickelt, nicht nur Monopolist (also einziger Anbieter für ihre Kunden) zu sein, sondern gleichzeitig Monopsonist (also einziger Nachfrager für die Anbieter z. B. der Buchbranche). Auf diese Weise können sie in ihren Märkten sowohl aus den Anbietern von Produkten als auch aus den Kunden das meiste Geld herauspressen und sämtliche Renditen abschöpfen. Ein wichtiges Buch, das mal einen neue Dysfunktionalität unseres (digitalen) Wirtschaftssystems aufschlüsselt.
Very good state-of-the-world in a variety of fields. Timely. Funny. Amusing marketing (only releasing the chapter outlining the sins of Spotify as an audiobook on Spotify; only the chapter on Amazon via Kindle).
