Chokepoint Capitalism (with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Corporate concentration has strained the labor market for virtually all workers, but the resulting lack of competition has caused unique harm to the creative economy. Increasingly exploitative monopolies have rendered artists, authors, musicians, and other creative workers all but powerless. Novelist Cory Doctorow and intellectual property expert Rebecca Giblin discuss their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, which documents the increasing tensions between extractive corporations and creative laborers, and offers solutions to help fight back against the devaluation of creativity. Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer and activist, as well as a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University and of library science at the University of North Carolina, and an MIT Media Lab research affiliate. Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor at Melbourne Law School. She is Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia and heads up the Author’s Interest and eLending projects. Twitter: @doctorow, @rgibli Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We call power the dark matter of economics. It's the most important thing.
0:06.0	The failing of not factoring in power is that it doesn't address the way that monopolies are much harder to stop than they are to prevent.
0:16.0	It shouldn't be that everybody's forced to choose big tech or big content because no matter which giant you choose,
0:21.0	you're going to be settling for the crumbs from their table.
0:24.0	Is there a lesson to be learned here? Yeah, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
0:31.0	From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics, with Nick Hanauer,
0:39.0	the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
0:49.0	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:52.0	I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
1:01.0	A lot of our listeners are familiar with your origin story, Nick.
1:07.0	But I want to take a few minutes to talk about mine. If that's okay with you, it is Honky Dory Goldstein.
1:14.0	Okay, so folks here in Washington state may know me a bit as a valid initiative crackpot,
1:23.0	who became a Falmouth political blogger, which got him a talk radio show,
1:30.0	which eventually got me a job at the stranger, where I was eventually fired for writing to honestly
1:38.0	about Uber and the $15 minimum wage, which brought me to you.
1:43.0	But actually, Nick, we have something in common in that earlier on in my life, I was an entrepreneur.
1:51.0	That's right.
1:52.0	I was the creator, the developer, the editor of the programmer of the world's first rhyming dictionary software,
2:01.0	which I originally created for my own use, but I decided to have it published.
2:06.0	It was such a useful tool.
2:09.0	After about a year and a half, a failing to find a publisher who was interested in something that may only sell,
2:16.0	you know, a few tens of thousands of units a month at most, which wasn't good enough for them.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Civic Ventures, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Civic Ventures and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.