Chokepoint Capitalism Explained | Cory Doctorow | TMR

In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow argue that the current trend of corporate concentration results in exploitation and capture of value that belongs to others. This is referred to as "chokepoint capitalism." The book examines various industries, including book publishing and news, live music, and music streaming, to show how corporations use anti-competitive methods to lock in users and suppliers, making markets hostile to new entrants and forcing workers to accept low prices. In the second half of the book, Giblin and Doctorow propose solutions to break through these chokepoints, such as transparency rights, collective action, and minimum wages for creative work. The book is a call to all workers to unite and take back the power and profit that has been taken from them.

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Joining us by phone is Cory Doctorow author of his latest choke point capitalism. Which he co-wrote with Rebecca Giblin how big Tech and big content captured creative labor markets and how we'll win them back. Corey welcomes you back to the show. Oh, thank you very much. It's lovely to be chatting with you again. Happy New Year. Thank you. Happy New Year to you too. All right, let's just start with this. I mean well let me just start with this if you know I want to go through the various I guess sorts of examples that you guys used in the first half of the book to describe what choke point capitalism is. But I am just the prince thing. I never lived through this. I never liked it. I know it was sort of always in the background like you changed his name. I just assumed oh I just did that because he's trying to be wacky. But that wasn't it at all. we're talking of course about the musician. Let's just start there just because I was like I was I was like oh my God why didn't I ever even contemplate why he'd done this. But walk us through why Prince changed his name as an example of what is now I think much more even wider than it was then. Yeah and I'm going to try and do this without getting into too much eye-watering detail. The book that we wrote took on capitalism. We kind of spent the first half unpicking these very Baroque scams. You know where John Oliver's style dissection of these different kinds of accounting frauds. And the record industry is Rife with them. You know the point of going through all of these is to realize that they're not hard to understand because they're complicated, they're complicated precisely so that they'll be hard to understand. So the record industry has long been a source of very bad Contracting terms for artists. And you know part of our thesis in the book is that it doesn't really matter how much copyright you give to artists if there's only a couple of labels and if they demand that you just turn over all that copyright signs to them. and Prince is a very good example of that. So just as with most other artists Prince had to sign away all of his rights to sign up with the label. and he had to finance the production of his own music. When you sign a deal with the label you get an advance that's supposed to pay for your rent and your groceries while you're recording. and then you also have charged your account all the expenses associated with that recording. so they tell you what studio to use and what engineers and what sidemen and they charge you for all of that often at rates that they get to determine and often rates that are much higher than the market rate.