Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back
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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.
From the Publisher
Creative labor markets are borked
Chokepoint Capitalism is about the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use to capture creative labor markets, and what we need to do to take them back.
We deconstruct their playbooks (and those for news, screenwriting, games, live music, radio and more) to show how Big Tech and Big Content erect chokepoints between creators and audiences, allowing them to lock in artists and producers, eliminate competition, and extract far more than their fair share of revenues from creative labor.
A Big Tech/Big Content disassembly manual
While the book starts by dissecting the ways monopolists from the tech and entertainment sectors have cornered their markets, explaining the historical and structural factors that gave rise to this distinctly terrible form of extractive capitalism, we don’t stop there.
The main focus is action.
Chokepoint Capitalism is built around shovel-ready ideas for shattering the chokepoints that squeeze creators and audiences – technical, commercial and legal blueprints for artists, fans, arts organizations, technologists, and governments to fundamentally restructure the broken markets for creative labor.
Praise for Chokepoint Capitalism
Publisher : Beacon Press
Publication date : September 27, 2022
Language : English
Print length : 312 pages
ISBN-10 : 0807007064
ISBN-13 : 978-0807007068
Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
Dimensions : 6.23 x 1.12 x 9.42 inches
