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A review by gilroi
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
4.0
This is an excellent book with one fatal flaw deep at its heart, but I do think it's a necessary read. While the ideas the book relays shouldn't be new to anyone who pays attention to the current corporate landscape, the exact details of corporate intrusion into our lives are definitely worth knowing, and they're related in a simple and easily understood fashion. The book is at no point overcomplex, except perhaps when reporting on subjects that are themselves purposefully obfuscated, like when they go into the twisted morass of music listening law.
The thing that keeps this from being a truly 5 star experience, a real 'everyone needs to read this!' knee slapping call to arms, is the way the book focuses only on artists. Artists are unimaginably abused by our current megacorp dystopia, and I think they should get their due for their labor. I think the book should mention them, and it does. But it focuses on them to the exclusion of people whose experiences with corporate abuse are far more devastating in consequence and scope. It's <i>easy</i> to take advantage of artists, and so Giblin and Doctorow call them the canary in the coalmine of these antics, but I think what artists really are in this situation are the most <i>easily visible</i> people being taken advantage of.
The book talks at length about breaking corporate chokeholds-- monopolies-- but it talks about doing it through legislation. It mentions the COVID pandemic but not the riots. The book points to artists and how they've been abused, then blithely mentions production line workers wearing diapers and Amazon striking. The book's use of artists as its focal point is meant to show how corporate abuse could spread from just artists and eventually abuse you, but in using artists, the implicit <i>you</i> is presumed middle class. Purposefully or otherwise, the book excludes the people who were alienated from their labor far, far before any musician: the people who staff Amazon warehouses, automobile factory workers, the lower middle class and working poor. The book's diligent focus on legislative fixes to the problems of corporation totally ignores the importance of riots and radical action, and the book only briefly mentions strikes and labor unions.
The final passages of the book talk about how it's a big task to take down corporate greed (it is) but how we should take heart, because their control is so self-entangled that any strike against them weakens the whole. But the book forgets that the people, workers, the disadvantaged, everyone who is preyed on by corporate capital, are also a whole. We have to protect our own, even if it scares white upper middle class economists.
This is not an incitements of Giblin or Doctorow's priorities or an attempt to guess at their class status; I am not casting aspersions on their motives in writing this book, nor saying the book is useless. I think their best intentions are in this book, and it's truly an informative and important read. But it is blinkered in its scope, and that, again, weakens the whole.
The thing that keeps this from being a truly 5 star experience, a real 'everyone needs to read this!' knee slapping call to arms, is the way the book focuses only on artists. Artists are unimaginably abused by our current megacorp dystopia, and I think they should get their due for their labor. I think the book should mention them, and it does. But it focuses on them to the exclusion of people whose experiences with corporate abuse are far more devastating in consequence and scope. It's <i>easy</i> to take advantage of artists, and so Giblin and Doctorow call them the canary in the coalmine of these antics, but I think what artists really are in this situation are the most <i>easily visible</i> people being taken advantage of.
The book talks at length about breaking corporate chokeholds-- monopolies-- but it talks about doing it through legislation. It mentions the COVID pandemic but not the riots. The book points to artists and how they've been abused, then blithely mentions production line workers wearing diapers and Amazon striking. The book's use of artists as its focal point is meant to show how corporate abuse could spread from just artists and eventually abuse you, but in using artists, the implicit <i>you</i> is presumed middle class. Purposefully or otherwise, the book excludes the people who were alienated from their labor far, far before any musician: the people who staff Amazon warehouses, automobile factory workers, the lower middle class and working poor. The book's diligent focus on legislative fixes to the problems of corporation totally ignores the importance of riots and radical action, and the book only briefly mentions strikes and labor unions.
The final passages of the book talk about how it's a big task to take down corporate greed (it is) but how we should take heart, because their control is so self-entangled that any strike against them weakens the whole. But the book forgets that the people, workers, the disadvantaged, everyone who is preyed on by corporate capital, are also a whole. We have to protect our own, even if it scares white upper middle class economists.
This is not an incitements of Giblin or Doctorow's priorities or an attempt to guess at their class status; I am not casting aspersions on their motives in writing this book, nor saying the book is useless. I think their best intentions are in this book, and it's truly an informative and important read. But it is blinkered in its scope, and that, again, weakens the whole.