The title of Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s new book, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, is a bit of a misnomer. While the majority of the book is focused on corporate co-optation of creative industries, the work’s true aim is much broader: to draw attention to the economic issues corrupting American democracy and pushing us toward oligopoly.
These issues include corporate consolidation, worker exploitation, rising inequality, and regulatory capture.
Indeed, Chokepoint Capitalism can be read as a companion piece to Zephyr Teachout’s powerful 2021 work about American monopolies, Break Em’ Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. Together, these two books paint a picture of U.S. capitalism that is anti-competitive, beholden to shareholders at the expense of everyone else, and rigged in favor of wealthy elites.
Beacon Press
If you believe the term “rigged” is hyperbolic, Giblin and Doctorow bolster the point by citing a jaw-dropping Princeton study that reviewed nearly 2,000 U.S. policy outcomes. It found that when average citizens wanted legislation passed, they had “little to no independent influence.” However, when economic elites and groups representing business interests wanted policy changes, they had “substantial independent impacts.” In other words, the wealthy got the laws they wanted; average citizens did not.
The authors’ decision to focus on creative labor markets—such as movies, music, and books—is an inspired one. This is because the “chokepoints” they discuss are particularly prevalent in culture and the arts.
They describe “chokepoints” as the middle of a horizontal hourglass, with customers at one end and suppliers and workers at the other, with a small number of corporations in between siphoning off as much value as they can. For example, a big record label locking an artist into a lengthy contract that forces the artist to pay back the cost of making the record before being awarded meager royalties. The authors highlight Prince’s fight with Warner Brothers (now Warner Records Inc.).
“Corporations have demonstrated particular ingenuity in finding ways of burrowing between audiences and culture producers to capture the value that flows between them,” the authors write. “That makes the culture industries an ideal microcosm to explore this phenomenon.”
Giblin, a professor at Melbourne Law School, and Doctorow, a professor of computer science at Open University, argue their case in a methodical manner. The book is thoroughly researched and logically constructed, with the first half using case studies to illustrate the problems, and the second half offering solutions. While readers may find some sections overly dense, the book is designed to inspire policy change and activism, so the authors are meticulous in analyzing the issues and examining approaches to solving them.
The case studies they highlight are infuriating—including Amazon’s takeover of books, Facebook and Google’s usurpation of news, how “Big Music” exploits recording artists, YouTube’s monopoly of online video, and the “chickenization” of live music. (This last one is a nod to Teachout, as “chickenization” is a term she uses to describe how businesses resemble modern poultry farming.)
The most resounding sections, however, are when the book focuses on a rigged economy. The authors highlight corporate consolidation because it has resulted in massive companies whose size and power allow them to more easily exploit creators. In covering antitrust law, Giblin and Doctorow note that consolidation began in earnest when the Reagan Administration stopped blocking large mergers—as long as the merger would lead to lower prices for consumers. This idea, known as “consumer welfare,” was born in conservative circles and it encouraged consumption at the expense of competition. It has been the rationale for consolidation ever since.
The solutions recommended by Giblin and Doctorow include improving corporate transparency, strengthening unions, time limits on copyrights, and minimum wages for creative work. Like the rest of the book, these chapters are well wrought and detailed. But the strongest chapter is the final one, in which the authors are explicit in explaining how chokepoints in creative industries relate to the broader societal issues at stake.
“We need to recognize that the strip mining of creative workers is part of a broader project in service of an oligarchy,” Giblin and Doctorow assert. ”It’s not just creators and independent producers who are being screwed over but almost everyone, as wealth keeps being inexorably funneled toward the rich.” They conclude: “The death of the middle class creator is part of the death of the middle class.”
There are signs that Americans are waking up to the danger posed by oligopoly and corporate consolidation. Federal regulators have indicated they are finally getting serious about the matter. President Joe Biden issued executive orders demanding that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission enforce antitrust law “vigorously,” and appointed Lina Khan, an antitrust scholar, as head of the Federal Trade Commission.
As a student at Yale Law School, Khan wrote an influential essay titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in which she attacked the “consumer welfare” standard and argued that current antitrust law is ill-prepared to deal with anti-competitive platforms such as Amazon. As FTC commissioner, she has vowed to act with “fierce urgency” against consolidation.
In an interview with the Financial Times in June, Khan discussed industry consolidation in more dire terms. Citing an increase in mortality rates at nursing homes that had been gobbled up by private equity, she said, “There are just very real life and death consequences…that require us to take it very seriously.”
But if the past is any guide and Republicans retake Congress and the presidency, any momentum the Democrats have made toward a new policy of antitrust could be quickly stamped out. That’s why Chokepoint Capitalism is the book we need now. Comprehensive and accessible, stirring and enlightening, it is a roadmap for taking immediate action against the corporate chokepoints that are crushing our creative workers and, increasingly, the rest of the middle class as well.