Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin

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 Culture Heist, 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.
Culture Heist 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.

Doctorow, Cory: - Cory Doctorow is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Locus, and many other publications. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an MIT Media Lab Research Associate and a visiting professor of Computer Science at the Open University. His award-winning novel Little Brother and its sequel Homeland were a New York Times bestsellers. His novella collection Radicalized was a CBC Best Fiction of 2019 selection. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in Los Angeles.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807007068
ISBN 10	0807007064
Title	Chokepoint Capitalism
Author	Rebecca Giblin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Beacon Press
Year published	2022-09-27
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.