Review: Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm a big fan of Cory Doctorow and this was now the second Kickstarter of his that I have participated in to help produce an audiobook.  And the money was more than worth it because Giblin and Doctorow bring an analysis of capitalism that is next level.  To me, it goes where Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism doesn't and blends in a good deal of Naomi Klein's work about capitalism.  The initial framing of the book focuses on the fact that while we have some safeguards against monopolies, we do not have real safeguards from oligopolies or monopsonies.  Many industries (particularly creative industries such as books, music, film, television, comics, etc) are held up by oligopolies wherein a few large companies control most of the market and because of that, they can (albeit illegally) collective work to control pricing and services to a degree unprecedented.  Coupled with this nefarious practice is monopsony, wherein companies like Amazon, Google, and LiveNation the like, become the singular buyer in a market (books, ads, ticket selling, etc), which means companies and individual sellers are beholder and cut off from their customers unless they adhere to the practices and prices dictated by the intermediary.  This rent-seeking practice shows up every and does much to hurt a thriving and diverse community of ideas, artistic creations, and experiences.  That's the first half of the book and boy, it's damning but also quite insightful.  In the second half, Giblin and Doctorow explore examples of resistance as well as recommendations for systemic approaches to addressing the problems.  That, like most books, is where it falters a bit in that they all seem pie in the sky and we are not able as an individual to plug into them as well as we might.  It is a structural issue and yet, if folks don't feel they have the capacity or even the fullest understanding of how to do the small things up through the systematic things, I think it feels harder to do anything other than feel frustrated.  Still--one of the best analyses on capitalism that I've read.

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