Rebecca Giblin - Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How Well Win Them Back

Are you a writer, a musician, an artist? Is Big Tech eating your brain and sucking your financial blood? Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorows Chokepoint Capitalism tells us how the vampires crashed the party and provides protective garlic. Your brain must remain your own concern, however.

MARGARET ATWOOD , author of The Handmaids Tale

The story of how a few giant corporations are strangling the life out of our media ecosystem is one of the most important of the decade, and Giblin and Doctorow tell it better than anyone. Searing, essential, and incredibly readable.

ADAM CONOVER , comedian and host of The G Word

This book is an absolute must-read for anyone who senses that the predominant economic mythology is a lie, who wants to know whats really happening in this economyand who is ready to finally start fixing the problem.

DAVID SIROTA , writer of Dont Look Up and founder of The Lever

Rather than simply lamenting the problem, or falling back on clichs about starving artists, what Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow do in Chokepoint Capitalism is make clear the overall pattern that drives exploitation of artists . Every creator will find inspiration here.

ANIL DASH , CEO of Glitch

Capitalism doesnt work without competition. Giblin and Doctorow impressively show the extent to which thats been lost throughout the creative industries and how this pattern threatens every other worker.

CRAIG NEWMARK , founder of Craigslist

Instead of just complaining about the corporate stranglehold over production and exchange, Giblin and Doctorow show us why this happened, how it works, and what we can do about it . An infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF , author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Survival of the Richest

Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow lay out their case in plain and powerful prose, offering a grand tour of the blighted cultural landscape and how our arts and artists have been chickenized, choked, and cheated.

KAISER KUO , host and cofounder of The Sinica Podcast

Creators are being ground up by the modern culture industries, with little choice but to participate in markets that weaken their power and economic return. In this brilliant and wide-ranging work, Giblin and Doctorow show why and offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back.

LAWRENCE LESSIG , Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School

Chokepoint Capitalism is more than a clarion call for a new, necessary form of trustbusting. Its a grand unified theory of a decades-long, corporate-led hollowing out of creative culture. It will make you angry, and it should.

ANDY GREENBERG , author of Tracers in the Dark

Not just a fascinating tour of the hidden mechanics of the platform era, from Spotify playlists to Princes name change, but a compelling agenda to break Big Techs hold.

ELI PARISER , author of The Filter Bubble and cofounder of Avaaz

A tome for the times The revolution will not be spotified!

CHRISTOPHER COE , artist and cofounder of Awesome Soundwave

A masterwork This is also a useful handbook to take on that power structure . Both frightening and uplifting.

DAVID A. GOODMAN , former president of the WGA West

If you have ever wondered why the web feels increasingly stale, Chokepoint Capitalism outlines in great detail how it is being denied fresh air . Im grateful it exists!

MAT DRYHURST , artist and researcher, NYUs Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music

This compellingly readable indictment shows how consumer welfare regulatory theory has allowed Big Tech to choke creators and diminish choice . Chokepoint Capitalism couples its legal-economic critique with provocative, sometimes utopian, prescriptions for fairly remunerating authors and performers.

JANE C. GINSBURG , Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia University School of Law

For Joan Robinson, who understood and explained monopsony first.

If only wed listened to her.

C ulture has been captured. Three massive conglomerates own the three record labels and three music publishers that control most of the worlds music. They designed the streaming industry, dominated by Spotify, which itself is (or was) partly owned by those same three labels. When Disney swallowed 21st Century Fox, a single company assumed control of 35 percent of the US box office. Google and Facebook have a lock on the digital ads that are wrapped around music, videos, and news online. Google, along with Apple, is the gatekeeper of everything mobile, giving it a massive cut on games, books, music, and movies. Via YouTube, it controls video streaming. Live Nation has sewn up ticketing and concerts. In the US, one company dominates terrestrial radio, and another satellite. Amazon has an iron grip on book, ebook, and audiobook sales, and dominates ebook and audiobook production. The only publisher that might be able to hold its own is Penguin Random House, and then only by gulping down as many other big publishers as it possibly can. The Big Six trade book publishers had become the Big Five by the time we started writing this book, and are making moves to become the Big Four by the time its published.

Between them, these corporations are generating enormous wealth. Some of the creators they distribute are too, but headlines about Jay-Zs billion-dollar fortune or the juicy advance paid to the debut author of a hot new thriller disguise the reality: precious little of the vast wealth generated by art and culture is shared with the people who actually make it.

Culture markets are winner-takes-all: a handful of people take almost all the rewards. This has long been the case, but now theres less and less to share between everyone else. For book authors, advances have been cut by more than half since the Great Financial Crisis of 20078. News publishers once got almost all the money from ads on their content, but thats fallen to as little as thirty cents on the dollar. Songwriters report royalty statements have become four times as thick for a quarter of the money.

The reason creative workers are receiving a declining share of the wealth generated by their work is the same reason all workers are receiving a smaller sharewe have structured society to make rich people richer at everyone elses expense. The playing field has been tilted so far that a growing number of people are falling off the edge, beset by precarious employment, stagnating wages, high costs for education, housing and healthcare, and economic policies that prize shareholders over people and communities.

This great tilting of the playing field, away from workers and toward owners, has a variety of causes, but the biggest is a radical theory of antitrust, driven by jurist and far-right cult-of-personality darling Robert Bork and exported by his disciples at the Chicago school of economics.

During the glory years of antitrustafter the New Deal, before Borkgovernments set themselves the task of shrinking monopolies on the grounds that they were bad. Very large companies were able to exert undue influence on governments, bribing or coercing them into enacting policies that were good for those companies shareholders and harmful to their workers, customers, and the rest of society. These unelected titans were able to crush competitors, hold back entire industries, and reorder the economy and civilization according to their whims. Monopoly was viewed as a threat to the very idea of democratic citizenship. After all, firms making huge profits thanks to a lack of competition can launder that money into policy, with the result that policymakers make decisions based on the needs of the few, not the many.