Podcast appearances and mentions of rebecca giblin

There are a lot of similarities between the 2016 and 2024 elections, but the media ecosystem we have today is fundamentally different from the ecosystem we had in 2015-2016, during the first stage of Donald Trump's political rise and the MAGA-morphosis of the Republican party. The Twitter and Facebook of that time are long gone, as are many of the methods of digital resistance that people employed on those platforms during the first Trump administration. The power and visibility dynamics on multiplying digital platforms, from TikTok to Truth Social, have rearranged dramatically since then, the “public sphere” is way more splintered, and our shared digital (and physical) spaces are decreasing. Moreover, the Big Tech oligarchs and private tech companies that profit from surveilling us and siloing us in algorithmically curated echo chambers have thrown their full weight behind Trump, and they will have even more power in a second Trump administration to shape our digital present and future.How are corporate, independent, and social media changing the terrain of politics today? What does digital activism look like in 2024, and can it be an effective means of resistance during a second Trump administration? TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez digs into these questions with world-renowned science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow.Cory Doctorow is the author of many books, including recent non-fiction titles like Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, which he coauthored with Rebecca Giblin, and The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. His latest work of fiction, The Bezzle, was published earlier this year by Tor Books. In 2020, Doctorow was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron GranadinoPost-Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Sign up for our newsletterLike us on FacebookFollow us on TwitterDonate to support this podcast

♩♪ A long, long time ago, I can still rememberHow the music used to pay my billsI knew that if I got my breakThat I could be as big as DrakeAnd then I could stop shopping at No Frills ♩♪♩♪ But Spotify, it's nearly killed usTicketmaster's ground us to dustThe companies got too largeNow monopolies are in charge ♩♪♩♪ And the record labels I fear the mostHave all just merged and so now we're toastDon't you think it's just so gross?The way, the music, died ♩♪Featured in this episode: Simon Outhit, Cory DoctorowTo learn moreChokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow“'A public relations nightmare': Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program” in CBC News by Dave Seglins, Rachel Houlihan & Laura Clementson “We went undercover as ticket scalpers — and Ticketmaster offered to help us do business” in Toronto Star by Robert Cribb & Marco Chown Oved“Is Live Music Broken? It's Not Just Ticketmaster, It's Everything” in The Ringer by Nate RogersA Statement From Live Nation EntertainmentCredits: Arshy Mann (Host and Producer), Jordan Cornish (Producer), Noor Azrieh (Associate Producer), André Proulx (Production Coordinator)Additional music from Audio NetworkSponsors: Douglas,For a limited time, get 6 months of exclusive supporter benefits for just $2/month. Go to canadaland.com/join to become a supporter today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The American Dialect Society's 2023 word of the year? Enshittification. And our guest on this edition of Chicago Public Square Podcasts, Cory Doctorow, is the guy who coined it.Hear him define it—and his harrowing explanation of how he, one of the world's most tech-savvy authors and journalists, got scammed out of $8,000 before he could figure out what was going on. Also: The one “ironclad” rule you should follow to avoid a similar fate.And then, in this—our first conversation since this podcast from 2019—you'll learn, among many other things, why he thinks Amazon embodies enshittification and why so many major publishers refused to consider one of his books.Listen here, or on Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Amazon's Alexa-powered speakers or Apple Podcasts. Or if you prefer to read your podcasts, check out the transcript below.And if you're a completist, here's the original, mostly unedited, behind-the-scenes raw audio and video from the recording of this podcast via Zoom on YouTube.■ Enjoying these podcasts? Help keep them coming by joining The Legion of Chicago Public Squarians.■ And consider subscribing—free—to the daily Chicago Public Square email newsletter.Now, here's a roughly edited transcript of the interview, recorded March 7, 2024:[00:00:00] Charlie Meyerson: The American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year? Enshittification. And our guest is the guy who coined it:[00:00:10] Cory Doctorow: What I think is going on is that this bad idea, right?—“Let's make things worse for our customers and our suppliers and better for ourselves”—is omnipresent in every firm.[00:00:21] CM: Cory Doctorow's a science fiction author, activist, and oh, I'd say a very active journalist with an email newsletter he publishes daily. His new book is The Bezzle, a high-tech thriller whose protagonist is … an accountant. More on that to come. I'm Charlie Meyerson with ChicagoPublicSquare.com, which, yes, is also an email newsletter. And this is a Chicago Public Square Podcast. Cory, it's great to see you again. What's new since the last time you and I recorded a podcast—almost exactly five years ago this month, back in 2019?[00:00:55] CD: Well, there was a pandemic, and you know, lucky for me the way that I cope with anxiety and stress is by writing. And so I wrote nine books, which are all coming out in a string, which has left me pretty busy—but in a good way. My friend Joey Dilla says, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. So that's definitely where I'm at now.[00:01:18] CM: You have a daily email newsletter, you have a podcast, and you're on this nationwide book tour now, although you're home now in California. When do you rest, huh?[00:01:27] CD: Well, when I rest, I think about how terrible everything is, and so I try to do as little of that as possible. I mean, my family and I go off and do things from time to time. But, yeah, I have always written as a way of processing the world, and the world needs a lot of processing, so I'm doing a lot of writing.[00:01:48] CM: Did your, uh, restlessness contribute to an unfortunate happening that I think shocked a lot of readers on February 5, 2024, when it was the most-tapped item in Chicago Public Square? And I'm gonna quote you here, “I was robbed $8,000-plus worth of fraud before I figured out what happened, and then he tried to do it again a week later.” What happened?[00:02:11] CD: Yeah, that was while I was taking a rest as it happened. So for Christmas break, my wife and I, and then my daughter and my parents joined us, went to one of my favorite places in the world, New Orleans. So, we landed and needed cash. So I went to an ATM in the French Quarter, was like a, a chase ATM, and the whole transaction ran and then it threw an error and said, we can't give you your money. I was like, Ugh, what a pain. And later on, we were walking through town and we passed a credit union's ATM branch.I bank with a one-branch credit union. And most credit unions don't charge fees to each other. So I was like, oh, we'll just use this one. So I got some money up. A couple of days go by, it's time to leave, my folks have already gone, my wife and daughter are at the hotel, and I've gone out to get my very favorite sandwich just before we go. And my phone rings and it's the caller ID for my bank.And they say, “Mr. Doctorow, this is your bank calling. Uh, did you just try and spend a thousand dollars, uh, at an Apple store in New York?” And I was like, Ugh. One of those ATMs turned out to be dodgy. Either was the one that threw that error. And the reason was that it had, like, a skimmer mounted on it and they captured my card number.Or maybe it was that cheap Chinese ATM that the one-branch credit union I went to was using one or the other. I was definitely skimmed. So, you know, I make my peace with it and I start talking with this guy and you know, when you bank with a little one-branch credit union, they don't have their own after-hours fraud unit. They just contract out. And so these guys, you know, they're a little clumsy. They're a little amateurish. They ask you a bunch of questions your bank should know the answer to because they're not really your bank, they're their fraud center partner.I'm just going through this whole thing and it's going on and on, and I can see the store that sells my sandwich, and I can see the time ticking down.And finally, I said like, “Look, fella, you've already frozen the card, you've gotten most of the recent transaction data. I'm gonna go. When I get to the airport after I clear security, I'll call the bank's after-hours number,” and he got really surety and I was like, you're just gonna have to suck it up.This is how it goes. You know, whatever losses you're experiencing have nothing compared to the losses of me missing my flight with my wife and daughter. So go back and go to the, go to the airport and on the way I look at my phone and I find out that DC-737 Max Boeing Aircraft has just lost its door plug and all the 737 Maxes in the U.S., they've just been grounded. And we get to the airport and it's a zoo. Everyone's trying to rebook. By the time we get to the gate, we've got five minutes. 'Cause there's just the lines, you know. Massive.So I call the bank's after-hours number and they say, “Sorry, sir, you pressed the wrong button. This is lost cards. Fraud's a different number, but it sounds like you told the guy to freeze your cards. So it should be fine. Just come in on Monday and get your new card.”So, uh, Monday morning I print out the list of all the fraudulent transactions, about $8,000 worth, and I go into the bank. And the cool thing about the one-branch credit union is that the person who helped me out was a vice president there and she was pissed about this $8,000 fraud. 'Cause if Visa wouldn't cover it, then we'd have to eat it. You know—not me, but the credit union and, and so she's pissed. I'm pissed. And I say, “Look, you know, some of this has to do with that crummy after-hours fraud center you guys use. 'Cause I told them to freeze my card on Saturday and all this fraud took place on Sunday.”And she said, “Ugh, that's no good. I'm gonna call them up now and find out what's going on.” She comes back five minutes later and says, “They never called you on Saturday. That was the fraudster.”My card hadn't been skimmed at all. So it turns out that guy—I'm like thinking about all the information I gave him: “Well, I gave him my name, but that's in my Wikipedia entry. Gave him my date of birth; that's in my Wikipedia entry. I gave him where I live; that's in my Wikipedia entry. I gave him the last four digits of my credit card, and that's not an—and then I was like, “Wait a second. He didn't ask for the last four digits. He asked for the last seven digits”And I said to the vice president of the bank, “You guys only have a single VISA prefix, right? The first nine digits are the same for every card you issue?”She's like, yep.And I'm like, “OK. So I gave him the last seven digits and that was enough. Then he had the whole card number. And that's how they robbed me.”And he did it again the following Friday just before MLK weekend. And he called at 5:30 just before the bank's closed for a three-day weekend or just after the bank's closed for a three-day weekend, which is like the fraud golden hour.And, you know, I recognized who it was and, and he said, “You know, your car's been compromised. It's so and so.” And I'm like, “No, it hasn't. Card's still in my wallet. Hasn't left my wallet since I picked it up on Monday. Why don't you tell me what the after-hours number on my card is? 'Cause I'm looking at it now. You tell me what number I call back to speak to you.” And he is like, “Mr. Doctorow, this is not a game. I have told you that there is active fraud on your card. If you don't complete the anti-fraud protocol with me right now, then any losses will be yours to bear. The bank will not identify you.”I'm like, “That's adorable.” So I hang up on him and he calls me back and I'm like, oh, this guy is like definitely a fraud, right? Any doubt I had is immediately dispelled. So I just hung up with him and blocked his number. And then I called the risk management person at the bank when they reopened on Tuesday—'cause again, small bank, you get to talk to the person, and it turns out that there's some a leak somewhere in America's credit union supply chain. And somehow fraudsters are calling people knowing what bank they bank at, and knowing their phone number, neither of which is a matter of public record for me.And that was the convincer for me. So even though I go to Defcon, the big hacker conference every year, and I go to those social engineering competitions where people get in a little soundproof booth in front of an audience and try to trick store clerks into giving them sensitive information, usually the store management has given them permission to try this out.And I'm an expert on this stuff and I've written multiple novels about it. I got fooled. I got fooled using Swiss cheese security, which is where you have all these different layers of security. They've all got their little holes in them, like slices of Swiss cheese. Most of the time the holes don't overlap and there's no way to go all the way through the defenses.But I was on vacation on the day the DC-737 Max, you know, had its door plug fall outta the sky. An hour before I was leaving, right after I used not one but two dodgy ATMs in one of the property crime centers of the world. You know, as all of these things all lined up, all the holes of the Swiss cheese lined up, I got fooled.You know, there are lots of lessons here, but one of them is if you think you can't get fooled, that's the guarantee that someday you're gonna get fooled.[00:08:35] CM: Well, you're certainly one of the most tech-savvy humans I'm aware of in this world. Is there any lesson that you gather from this? For the rest of us?[00:08:43] CD: So the ironclad rule should be, and the rule that I normally follow is when your bank calls you, you say “Thank you very much. Do you have an operator number or anything so I can speak to you? 'Cause I'm gonna call back the number on my card.” That is complete proof against the fraud.Now, the banks could do something about this 'cause the reason that I didn't do it that day is 'cause I wanted to get that goddamn sandwich and calling and speaking to someone like a rando in their voicemail tree and trying to tell them, you know, like, give them all my account information, a lot of which I didn't even have 'cause it's just, it's in my laptop back in the hotel—going through all of that with a stranger would've eaten up all the time I had. So I was like, “Oh, I'll just deal with this guy. He knows my number, he knows my name, and he knows where I bank. It's clearly from my bank.”But if they were to call you up and say, “Mr. Doctorow, this is your bank, this is my operator number, or a unique five-digit code, or whatever, write it down. Call the number on your card. And give that number to the interactive voice response system. The bank is gonna pay me to sit here idle for 15 minutes waiting for you so you can find a quiet place to sit down and call, and you will speak directly to me. We won't have to go through a long process where you have to get me up to speed on the thing I'm getting you up to speed on, and we'll just, we'll just make it work.”You know, we haven't found out yet whether or not Visa's gonna honor this claim. But if my bank loses $8,000 this year because of me—and it's a credit union, so I'm a member of it, right? I'm co-owner of this bank, as are all the other customers of it—that's all the money they're gonna make for me this year, including the interest on my mortgage, right?Like they've just zeroed out one of their most valuable customers. Paying the after-hours fraud center or an in-house fraud center to have a little bit more idle time at the margin so that you can have a higher fidelity of anti-fraud is something absolutely worth it. And you know, this is emblematic in some ways of what happens when you squeeze all the slack out of the system—is that you kind of groom people to cut corners because they know the process sucks.So I think that it could be improved, and you know, clearly a lot of the blame here is on me, but not all of it.[00:11:01] CM: You're generous to accept even some of the responsibility.[00:11:04] CD: Well, I should have known to call them back. But I didn't.You know, I spoke with that risk management officer, and I was like, “Let's go through the way your interactive voice response system characterizes each of the options when you call after hours,” because I had missed the anti-fraud. 'Cause it's not called “anti-fraud.” Like “If you suspect fraud on your card, press 2.” It was something else. Right? It was like, “If you have a problem with your account,” and I was like, “That's something else.” I didn't even press it.So we discussed new wording and they're gonna put new wording in. Also, I'm speaking at DEFCON this year again. This year's theme is “Enshittification,” and so they're giving me a keynote slot, and that always comes with a bunch of free speaker's badges. What I usually do when I speak there is I go to the people in line waiting to buy a badge and I just pick five people and give them badges. But I'm saving one for my bank's risk management officer, and she's gonna get in for free and she can go to those social engineering competitions.[00:12:00] CM: Well, I've fallen in love with this word that you coined, enshittification, and I need to note for our listeners that there are two T's in the middle of enshittification.CD: Mm-hmm.CM: How did you decide on two T's?[00:12:13] CD: You know, the first time I used it, I only put in one. CM: Did you? Okay. CD: Two T's is better. CM: You think so?CD: It makes shit an infix and it makes -tification the suffix instead of -ification.CM: OK. CD: So en is the prefix, shit is the infix, -tification is the suffix, and that second T is doing some work there. The American Dialect Society, when they gave the word the honor—and it's not just their word of the year, it's like their digital word of the year, and, I don't know, like their sweary word of the year; it, like, took top honors in a bunch of categories—they are actual cunning linguists, and they went ahead and dissected the word and figured out what all the things meant. I couldn't diagram a sentence if you paid me.[00:13:01] CM: I knew you'd have a reason for the double-T, and thank you for fulfilling my expectations. Yeah. But let's back up for people. I imagine there are a few who do not yet know about enshittification.CD: Sure.CM: What is it? [00:13:15] CD: It's a term I coined to describe a specific pathology of late-stage internet platforms. Platforms are the unlikely endemic form of the internet. You know, for a medium that was supposed to disintermediate everything, the fact that the biggest form of business on the internet is intermediaries is pretty wild. And—if you wanna think of it as, like, a pathology—it describes the natural history, like what happens when a platform unifies and it has a very specific kind of decaying model where first it allocates value to end-users; those end-users flock in and get locked in somehow, so that when the company then starts to take away some of that value to give it to business customers, the users don't leave, can't leave. Then those business customers come in because of the attractive proposition that's being made to them. And then they get locked in because they're there for the end users who are also locked in. And then once everyone's locked in, all the value is drawn out and given to the firm, the platform. And then the whole thing turns into a pile of shit, hence enshittification.Um, but it also describes like the underlying mechanism, like what's going on inside the firm? Why are digital firms so able to enshittify? And it's because digital is very flexible. I had someone email me this morning and say, well, Panera Bread is steaming towards, its IPO and there's this investigative report that says that they've cut back on their ingredients, their ingredients aren't very good anymore.That's enshittification too, and it's not quite. Because enshittification involves this process I call twiddling. It's when the platform can change the business rules from moment to moment. So a really good example is an Uber driver who's the business customer in that two-sided market riders and drivers.So Uber practices this thing called algorithmic wage discrimination, which is a violation of labor law that they say doesn't violate labor law. 'Cause they do it with an app. And what they do is if you are a driver who's selective about which rides you take, if you only take the highest dollar value rides, then each ride that's offered to you comes at a higher dollar value than it would if you were less selective.The less selective you become, the lower the return per mile and minute becomes in small increments that are very hard to notice, and if you become more selective, they toggle back up again. And so the rate is going up and down and up and down in response to your perceived selectivity in a fully automated way.And this is a kind of game of exhaustion because at a certain point, you take your eye off the ball and you start taking rides that are worse and then the rides get worse and worse and worse. Meanwhile, you're jettisoning those things that you used to do as side hustles that let you be more selective.That's what it means when you're taking worse rides as you're taking more rides. And at a certain point, you're just like fully locked in. You have a car lease to meet because you've bought a car just to drive for Uber. You've got some other overheads that you're trying to meet, and your wages sunk to the very bottom that algorithmic wage discrimination is a term vena dubo coined is a thing that Panera Bread would love to do.It's a thing that like. You know, the black-hearted coal bosses of Tennessee Ernie Ford songs would love to do. But you know, like doing that manually with an army of guys in green eyeshades is not practical. And digital firms can alter the business logic from second to second in ways that offline firms or firms that have some physical component struggle to do.And so that's the underlying mechanism. And then the next question is, why is it happening to everyone all at once? Why are all these platforms enshittifying now? That's kind of the epidemiological question, right? Where's the contagion coming from? Because when a lot of firms start doing something all at once.In the same way, it's unlikely to be related to something endogenous to the firm. It's not just that like a bunch of people had the same bad idea at the same time in all these companies, right? What I think is going on is that this bad idea, right? “Let's make things worse for our customers and our suppliers and better for ourselves” is omnipresent—in every firm, right? Every firm is trying to find the equilibrium between apportioning value to say employees or suppliers and to customers and to themselves. And there are some constraints, right? One is competition. If you know, if you offer a substandard product and there's somewhere else your customers can go, they'll go there.If you pay substandard wages and there's somewhere else your employees can go, they'll go there. You know, all of this stuff about “Nobody wants to work” is hilarious because I guarantee you they'll work if you offer double the wage, right? “Nobody wants to work at the wage you're offering” is like, “Nobody wants to sell me a plane ticket at what I think it's worth.”That sounds like a me problem, not like an American Airlines problem. Right. So, you know, the competition acts as this check on firms, but competition has been in free fall for 40 years. And I think that across the threshold, right? We allow companies to buy their major rivals. We allow them to engage in predatory pricing, to exclude new market entrants.We allow them to buy nascent competitors before they can grow to be threats and then extinguish them. We allow them to do all the above, right? You have Amazon, which tried to buy Diapers.com—Diapers.com, which, you know, as is implied by the name, was an e-commerce platform that sold diapers. They were doing a really good business and they didn't wanna sell to Amazon.So Amazon first tried to do an anti-competitive acquisition, right? To take a firm that was its rival in a certain vertical and, and buy it. So the firm wouldn't do that. So then they did predatory pricing. And buying the nascent rival and predatory pricing would've been illegal until the Carter administration. Carter removed some Jenga blocks from the antitrust tower. Reagan started pulling them out by the fistful, and every administration since has lowered the amount of antitrust enforcement we do—to the point where now companies can just get away with murder. And so Amazon said, all right, we're gonna start selling diapers below cost. They sold diapers below cost to the tune of a hundred million dollars in losses—which, put Diapers.com outta business. Right? So that's predatory pricing. Then they acquired Diapers.com at pennies in the dollar. So that's the anti-competitive acquisition, and then they shut them down. That's, a catch and kill, right? All of this was, is illegal under the black letter of competition law.None of it was enforced against. Amazon also derived a secondary benefit from this. And that secondary benefit was informing every other source of capital that if you invest in a company that competes with Amazon, the best you can hope for is an acquisition. But what's probably gonna happen is you're just gonna get driven outta business.It's what venture capitalists called the kill Zone, and it's why people don't compete with Amazon. And so we lost the constraint of competition and we lost the constraint of regulation. Because when a sector dwindles to a handful of firms, they find it very easy to agree on a single lobbying position, and they can make their will felt in Congress, in the expert agencies and in court, and they can get away with whatever they want.[00:20:25] CM: What is your cure for enshittification?[00:20:27] CD: So if you take each of these constraints, right—the first one being competition—restoring that constraint will reduce the power of firms to enshittify, right? If they have to worry about you quitting or leaving as a customer, then they have to treat you better. And if they don't get the message, then you can go somewhere that treats you better.So we are in a historic moment for antitrust enforcement. As we record this today, the European Union has just started enforcing the Digital Markets Act. Here in the United States, we have generationally significant leaders at the Department of Justice Antitrust Division—with Jonathan Kanter at the Federal Trade Commission with Chair Lina Khan, and at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau with Rohit Chopra.No coincidence that there is a bipartisan effort to slash all of their budgets working their way through the mini budget right now. Right? But reinvigorating antitrust is a way to restore the disciplinary power of competition. It also restores the power of regulators because it's not just antitrust that regulators do—it's everything.And if you want a company not to rip you off, say the way Amazon does. So if you go to Amazon, you click the first link on an Amazon search, on average, you pay a 29% premium relative to the best item. 'Cause Amazon makes $38 billion a year selling payola the right to make the top search result.If you walked into a Corner store or Target and said, “Sell me your cheapest batteries,” and they sold you batteries that were 30% more expensive than their cheapest batteries, That would be fraud. Amazon's regulatory capture allows it to say, “It's not fraud when we do it with an app,” just like Uber says, “It's not a labor violation when we do it with an app” or Google says “It's not a privacy violation when we do it with an app.” Make those companies more fragmented and you starve them of the capital they need to suborn their regulators, and you also introduce a collective action problem where they just become too many companies to agree on what it is they're gonna tell their regulators.CM: Are you available for federal office?CD: Uh, no. I wrote nine books during lockdown and I just agreed to write a 10th one about unification. I'm busy till 2027.[00:22:35] CM: Cory and I have something else in common—decades apart from one another. We've both been contributors to the Venerable Journal of Science Fiction Locusts, although my main contribution consisted of a series of cartoons I drew as a teenager. What do you make of the state of science fiction these days? Text, TV, motion pictures.[00:22:53] CD: Well, it's certainly at an interesting moment. I mean, there's one way in which the most salient fact is that it's dominated by five companies—five major publishers that sell to one national brick-and-mortar chain owned by a private equity fund, Barnes and Noble; and one rapacious monopolist e-commerce platform, Amazon.Ninety percent of the audiobooks are controlled by Amazon subsidiary Audible. There's a single national distributor, which is Ingram. All the other distributors are owned by the Big Five publishers. So I published a book in 2020 with my colleague Rebecca Giblin about how monopolists rip off creative workers.None of the Big Five publishers wanted to publish it 'cause it was really critical of them. So we published with a wonderful independent press called Beacon that's 150 years old, owned by the Unitarian Universalists. Albert Einstein once very famously said, “If there is hope in this world, it the Unitarian-Universalists and Beacon Press” (Editor's note: Not quite, but not far off in spirit.) Beacon is distributed by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the world who got a dollar every time we sold a book explaining why they were an evil monopolist.Right? So. That's one way in which science fiction is just on the ropes, right? You have four major studios, thankfully, uh, thanks to our friends in the federal government, Paramount did not just sell to Disney, but they're looking for another suitor. And so, you know, in every way we are struggling.You have HBO Warner, which is cutting shows they have—and not because no one wants to see them, but because David Zaslav—the villain from central casting who runs that business—has figured out that he can get more in a tax credit for writing off a show than he can for releasing it—taking stuff that people, like, miss their parents' funeral to work on and just flushing it down the toilet. So in those ways it's very bad. In terms of the work being produced, it's never been better. I mean, we're in an amazing moment for the field. People are writing incredible things—notwithstanding the massive scandal at the Hugo Awards last year, which is a whole different story about the difficulties of hosting the Hugos in China and the mistakes that the non-Chinese Hugo administrators made.[00:25:07] CM: I missed that. Give us the short version of that.[00:25:09] CD: Oh my gosh. So after the Hugo Awards are awarded as you leave, they're handing out sheets of photocopied paper with all the vote tallies and nomination tallies—that didn't happen at the WorldCon China, which was the first ever held in China, which has more science fiction fans than all the rest of the world combined, and, you know, more than deserves a world con. Instead, the committee that oversaw the Hugos waited until the very last minute permitted by the bylaws to release the numbers, whereupon everyone realized that something was up. And it turns out that they had unilaterally disqualified innumerable works both Chinese and also a number of works by American and European Chinese writers of Chinese descent. And they had done this—it transpired after lots of memos leaked and so on 'cause they stonewalled when people asked about this—they'd done this not because anyone in China had asked them to, but because they thought that the Chinese government would get upset if they didn't.And they went so far as to assemble dossiers on people nominated for awards and disqualify them if they thought they had been to Tibet. It turns out the person that they disqualified for having traveled to Tibet, had traveled to Nepal, which is not Tibet …CM: Easy mistake to make.CD: These were Americans and Canadians, not Chinese fans. And they disgrace themselves. They disgrace the award. The people who won the award now have an asterisk next to their name. When they were fighting for their reputations and stonewalling, they were gratuitously insulting to these writers, most of them of Chinese descent. You know, Chinese Americans primarily when they question this and they are fans of very longstanding people who have volunteered to run this award for decades.And this is the way they're going to end their careers in fandom. It's quite sad.[00:27:05] CM: One of the things Cory told me, back when we talked in a previous podcast in 2019, was that one way to spot terrible technology in our future would be to take a look at what the powers that be are foisting on prisoners. And now five years later, his new book The Bezzle offers a look at just that. But why did you set it to open in 2006?[00:27:28] CD: Well, for that you need to understand these nine books I wrote during lockdown. So one of them was a book called Red Team Blues, and the conceit behind Red Team Blues is, it's like a detective thriller about a hard-charging, two-fisted but lovable forensic accountant—67 years old, spent 40 years in Silicon Valley undoing every bit of mischief that a tech bro ever thought to do, finding all the money that people use spreadsheets to hide. And the conceit was, it's like the last volume of a beloved detective series you have read for 25 years and grown up with.Except I'm not gonna bother writing the other books; it's just the last one. And it was pretty successful. I sent it to my editor who I love dearly. I met him on a bulletin board system when I was 17 years old. He's edited all my novels, and he will not think that I am being overly critical of him when I tell you that he's not the world's most reliable email correspondent.And so when I sent him the manuscript after finishing the first draft, I finished it in six weeks from the first word to the last. In that first draft, I sent it to him and I expected months to go by. And instead the next morning there was an email waiting for me that was just, that was a fucking ride.Whoa. And he bought three of them. And there's a problem because this is the last adventure of Martin Hench forensic accountant. There is some precedent for bringing a detective out of retirement. Very famously, Conan Doyle brings Sherlock Holmes back over Rickenbacker Falls because Queen Victoria offered him a knighthood.My editor is a very powerful man in New York publishing. He is a vice president in the McMillan company, but he cannot knight me, so I was not gonna bring poor old Marty out of retirement. And so I had to come up with something else. And it occurred to me that I could write these books out of order. I could write them in any sequence.He's like the Zelig of high-tech finance fraud. He's been at every place where someone ripped someone else off with a computer. If I wrote them out of order, I wouldn't have any continuity problems 'cause when the series goes backwards, you're not foreshadowing—you're backshadowing. And the more detail you throw in, the more of like a, you know, absolutely premeditated motherfucker you appear to be—even if you're just winging it.So this is the second book. The first one is set in the 2020s. It's a cryptocurrency heist novel. This one is about the era where Yahoo is buying and destroying every successful Web 2.0 company. It's a time I know very well. I was there. I founded a startup that, you know, Microsoft tried to buy—that our investors then stole from the founders and then the deal fell through and the chaos that ensued.And so I've lived through it. And so it was a moment I really wanted to write about in particular because. It's the moment that represents the time between the dot-com bubble bursting and the subprime bubble bursting, and it's this period that you can think of as the bezzle. The bezzle, B-E-Z-Z-L-E, not B-E-Z-E-L.Not the rectangle around your phone screen, but this term that was coined by John Kenneth Galbraith to describe what he calls the magic interval. After the con artist has your money, but before you know it's a con. And in that moment, Galbraith says everybody feels richer, everybody is happier. The national stock of happiness goes up for so long as the bezzle is going.The longer the bezzle goes, the more unhappiness debt you accumulate because the more money gets pumped into the fraud. Right? And so the irony of the bezzle is that the people who are in it don't want you to rupture it, even if that will save them from losing everything, because it's when the unhappiness starts. It's like continuing to drink so that you don't get hungover.The more you do that, the worse the hangover becomes, and that moment, those charmed and difficult years from 2002 to 2006, are really an ideal time to tell a story that I think of as Panama Papers fanfic.[00:31:49] CM: The Bezzle has a few Chicago connections. One is a name well known to people in Chicago: Wrigley. Give our listeners a taste of how that comes into play.[00:31:59] CD: Yeah, so that same editor of mine, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who I love dearly but is not the world's most reliable email correspondent—when he edited my first novel, now almost 25 years ago, he gave me this piece of advice with his editorial note that I've never forgotten: He said a science fiction novel has the world and the character, and they're like a big gear and a little gear. And the point is to turn the world all the way around so the reader can see what's going on in the world.And the way you do that is by having the little gear, the character, turn around as many times as it takes to spin the world one complete revolution. And the teeth have to match for that to happen. The world has to be a macrocosm of the character. And the character has to be a microcosm of the world. And when the books don't work, check your micro-macro correspondences, see if they're, if the one is the miniature of the other.So one of the things that I do in these novels about scams is I try to start with a small scam that's a kind of microcosm of the big scams. So the big scam in this book is about prison tech, but the small scam in this book is a Ponzi scheme and it's set on Catalina Island, and Catalina is a place I've fallen in love with since I moved to Southern California.And it's for people who don't know, it's this kind of storybook island across the channel from Long Beach. It's the deepest channel in the world. And this island was owned by the Wrigley family. It's where the Cubs used to have their spring training.It's where Marilyn Monroe was a child bride. It's where the CIA was founded. It was home of the largest ballroom in America and every week the most popular dance music program in the world used to broadcast live from high atop Avalon on beautiful Catalina Island. It's home to—originally—13 male bison that got loose after shooting a Zane Gray movie. But then old man Wrigley decided it would be un-Christian to have 13 bachelors. So he imported 13 cows for them—not understanding that, uh, bison form harems. And they have ever since struggled with an out-of-control bison population.It's a remarkable place and one of its peccadillos leftover from Old Man Wrigley is that when he gave the island to a land trust, he decreed that there would never be a fast-food chain on the island, which, you know, whatever. In terms of folly pursued by billionaires, it barely registers. I'm not a big fast-food eater myself, but for the people on the island, fast food has become a kind of forbidden fruit.And if you go to the little K to 12 school and you go for an away game with your football team, everyone expects you to bring back a sack of sliders because everyone wants to try, you know, the fast food they can't get on the island. And so I made up a little Ponzi scheme involving hamburgers brought over from the mainland and flash-frozen … to be traded as futures in the same way that housing and luxury tower blocks—only incidentally, a place where someone might live—is primarily a source of leverage and a safe deposit box in the sky, which, you know, in the runup to the 2008 crisis was, you know, often bought and sold several times before it was built, had multiple, uh, collateralized debt obligations and synthetic collateralized debt obligations hanging off of it and could be inflated into paper worth 10 or 20 times its value, which is exactly what happens to these deep-frozen hamburgers on the island.Thanks to a wicked real estate baron, who it turns out is doing the same thing with real estate as he is with hamburgers and who becomes so enamored of his own cleverness that he begins to relish the moment when the whole thing bursts and the island's economy tanks. And that's where Marty Hench and his friend come in and they decide to do a controlled demolition of this Ponzi before it can take down the island.[00:36:16] CM: You know, as I read The Bezzle, I thought. Boy, there's a lot of food in this book. How important is food and cooking in your life? Or was that just you writing about people for whom it is a big deal?[00:36:28] CD: I mean, I love to cook, but Marty Hench is a better cook than I am. I love books that have delicious food in them. And I love books that have delicious food that's well appreciated. You know, the Hemingway hamburger of, you know beef, salt, pepper, turn it once, don't touch it again, is actually pretty goddamn good advice for making a hamburger. I put a little butter in the pan depending on the fat content in your ground beef, but it's not bad.I find these books to be a really fun way to kind of do the adult version of what I did in the Little Brother books. So in the Little Brother books, it's kind of like that cool uncle or your friend's older brother puts an arm around your shoulder and says, “Lemme tell you how the world really works, kid.”And just opens your eyes. And these books are more like, let me tell you how the worst things in the world are done. And counter sinking that with the great pleasures of life, I think makes these books more balanced.[00:37:41] CM: Your books were some of the first that I read on mobile devices—a Blackberry in my case—and I know you've continued to champion that technology. Digital rights management—DRM, the fences around the use of people's electronic content—has been a longstanding concern of Cory's. How're we doing?[00:38:01] CD: Well, again, back to that, you know, generational moment for tech and antitrust. There is, for the first time in the whole time that I've been working on this, some real energy to do something about it—some sense that it is iniquitous.So, to give you a sense of how screwed up this whole system is: In 1998, Bill Clinton signed this law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 1201 of that makes it a felony to traffic in, quote, a circumvention device for effective means of access controls to copyrighted work.So if there's a thing that stops you from accessing a copyrighted work and someone makes a tool that allows you to access it. That tool is illegal and the person who who gives it to you as a felon can go to prison for five years and pay a $500,000 fine for a first offense. So what that means, very practically speaking, is if I want my audiobook sold on Audible, which requires digital rights management—a lock on every book that ensures that it can only be played on a device that Amazon has approved of—then I can't leave Amazon and take you with me. If I decide that Amazon is abusing me, and they really do abuse their suppliers, especially in the audiobook world.There was a ghastly scandal last year called Audiblegate, which involved at least $100 million in wage theft from independent audiobook authors that Amazon did with a scummy accounting trick. So if I go, look, I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna take my readers with me, and I'm gonna give them a tool so they can unlock their books, take them to whatever app the next store I decide to sell on uses, I commit a felony. Not only do I commit that felony, but the felony carries a harsher penalty than you would pay if you were to go to a pirate website and download the book. But it's also like a higher penalty than you would pay if you were to go into a truck stop and shoplift the CD of the book, and it's probably a higher penalty than you would pay if you stuck up the truck that delivered the CDs and stole the truck.Right. So for me to allow you to access the book that I wrote maybe that I financed the audiobook for, that I read the audiobook for is a crime that exceeds the penalties then that you would pay for even really serious property crimes involving other people's property. And this just gives Amazon enormous leverage.People are getting sick of this in Oregon. They've just passed a right-to-repair bill. That prohibits companies from using this technology to lock parts to their devices. So if you take a screen outta one iPhone and put it in another iPhone, right? If you're an independent repair shop, and Apple won't sell you parts, but you're buying broken phones and harvesting dead parts out of them, you have to do something called parts pairing, where you enter an unlock key, and the same law—this law that prevents you from unlocking your audiobooks—also prevents someone from giving you a tool to do the parts pairing. And so the screen won't work on the phone. Oregon's just banned using that technology, so they can't overturn this law. It's a federal law, but they can ban you from using technology that implicates it.Um, I think that. You know, we are in a moment where enough is enough. People are getting really pissed off about it. They're no longer getting duped by the story that this stuff is anti-piracy technology that stops people from stealing from you. And they're realizing that the thing that you have to worry about is not that your readers might.Read or listen to your book the wrong way, but rather that the companies that distribute your books might rip you and your readers off that you are class allies in the fight against monopolies.[00:41:55] CM: Back to your daily newsletter, in which you deal with issues like this every day. It reads typographically like an email newsletter circa the turn of the century. You run full web addresses …CD: Mm-hmm.CM: … URLs. You don't hyperlink words or phrases. Why is that?[00:42:15] CD: So I want it to be future-proof. So I want you to take something out of your inbox from 20 years ago that I wrote and copy and paste it into some other format that doesn't exist yet. I. And for you to be able to know what all those links were.So there's no tracking redirect, you know, like the t.co redirect that Twitter uses or I think it's HREF that Tumblr uses, and so on. They all have their own little redirects. I want the link to be live. I want you to be able to see the semantics of the link before you copy it or before you click on it.I want you to be able to see whose link you're going to without having to sort of glance around somewhere on the screen for a link preview. And I want you to be able to copy and paste it between programs—even programs that don't carry over the style information or the link information—and have it all carry over.And so that's why putting it all in that plain text format is, is so important to me. I do every now and again, shorten a URL if it's very, very long. So sometimes I'll, I'll link a gift link from the New York Times, from my subscription to the New York Times in the thing. And those NYT gift links are obnoxiously long, like hundreds of characters.So I have my own URL shortener, and so I'll sometimes do a little URL shortener in there, but for the most part, I don't shorten URLs.CM: Closing thoughts, Cory?CD: We're emerging from a 40-year neoliberal period incubated at the University of Chicago—thank you very much— …CM: Yeah, sorry about that.CD: … Where we only talked about economics and never about power. I got an email from someone yesterday saying that it's not price gouging. If profits go up when gas price inputs go up at the pump, right? If the cost of oil goes up, then the cost of gas goes up because the investors, I.Want the same margin. So if gas is a dollar a gallon coming into the gas station and they're getting a 50% margin, then it'll be a dollar 50. If it's $2 a gallon, then they'll get $3 and so on. And that's not price gouging, that's just maintaining a constant a constant margin. The thing is no

Original Air Date 12/3/2022 Today, we take a look at the mega-companies that touch all of our lives and the monopolistic practices that have been developed to keep power and wealth concentrated with the few while the rest of us get screwed. Be part of the show! Leave us a message or text at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Get AD FREE Shows and Bonus Content) Join our Discord community! SHOW NOTES Ch. 1: Tech Monopolies - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - Air Date 6-13-22 John Oliver discusses tech monopolies, and how to address the hidden harm they can do. Ch. 2: How Ticketmaster Is Destroying Live Music - More Perfect Union - Air Date 10-19-22 Ticketmaster is destroying live music. Their scam fees now cost as much as 78% of a ticket. They control the events, the venues, and even the artists. There's a movement pushing the Justice Department to take on its monopoly. Cory Doctorow breaks it down. Ch. 3: Corporate Greed Is Causing Inflation But The Rich Blame Workers - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 11-16-22 Not since the Great Depression have corporate profits soared so high. But it is not enough to satisfy them. More than 54% of the inflation America is experiencing is caused by record-setting corporate profits. Ch. 4: Why Food Prices Could Skyrocket Thanks to This Grocery Merger - More Perfect Union - Air Date 11-14-22 Safeway, Ralphs, Smiths, Harris Teeters, Shaws, Kings, Randalls, and about 25 other brands, will all be owned by a single company if the Kroger-Albertsons merger goes through. And that's really bad news for the prices you pay. Ch. 5: Chokepoint Capitalism (with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 11-1-22 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. Ch. 6: Making The Case For Abolishing Billionaires - MSNBC - Air Date 11-21-22 "One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class," Anand Giridharadas writes in a recent New York Times column. Ch. 7: Elon Musk Is An Idiot (and so are Zuck and SBF) - Adam Conover - Air Date 11-23-22 Tech CEOs aren't geniuses, and here's the proof. MEMBERS-ONLY BONUS CLIP(S) Ch. 8: Chokepoint Capitalism (with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin) Part 2 - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 11-1-22 FINAL COMMENTS Ch. 9: Final comments on how regulation helps stop financial scams MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions)   Produced by Jay! Tomlinson Visit us at BestOfTheLeft.com Listen Anywhere! BestOfTheLeft.com/Listen Listen Anywhere! Follow at Twitter.com/BestOfTheLeft Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

In this episode Justin and I talk about the book Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow and as an extension we discuss some of the ways that capitalism and the drive for profit limits artists and can actually harm the creative process. We also spend some time thinking about Michael Brooks and the impact he had and how his absence has impacted the left over the last 3 years.Some links to go with the videohttps://www.justinclark.org/blog/michael-brooks-against-the-web https://www.youtube.com/@TheMichaelBrooksShow https://oceanofpdf.com/authors/cory-doctorow/pdf-epub-information-doesnt-want-to-be-free-laws-for-the-internet-age-download/?id=000039228275 https://www.stereogum.com/2230667/anti-flag-announce-break-up-following-possible-rape-accusations-against-frontman/news/ https://exclaim.ca/music/article/the_casualties_frontman_jorge_herrera_quits_band Justin's linkshttps://www.justinclark.org/ https://www.instagram.com/justinclarkph/ https://www.tiktok.com/@justinclarkph  You can check out the full shownotes with pictures on my website - www.skepticalleftist.com and you can find all my social links on my linktree https://linktr.ee/skepticalcory You can rate and review the show here - https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-mind-of-a-skeptical-leftis-1779751 You can support the show here - - https://www.patreon.com/skepticalleftist - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/skepticallefty --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/skepticalleftist/message

Marty and Holly sit down with Cory Doctorow, an author known not only for his near-future social and political science fiction, but also for his real-world journalism and activism.  We talk about society, politics and economics, discussing 3 of Doctorow's most recent books.  'Red Team Blues' is his most recently published book, an anti-finance cryptocurrency and cybersecurity thriller; we discuss the difference between defense and attack dynamics in cybersecurity, and their parallels in modern politics.  'The Lost Cause' is due to be published in two weeks, on Nov 14th, a solarpunk novel about a world threatened by anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and their white nationalist shock-troops; we talk about what to do with the losers of a just revolution, and learn about the monetary policy that could provide a universal jobs guarantee in a Green New Deal.  Finally, 'Chokepoint Capitalism' (which he wrote with Rebecca Giblin) is a non-fiction book about creative labor markets, monopolies, and the sorry state of modern capitalism; we discuss the failed strategy of more copyright ownership for writers and musicians, the success of the Hollywood writer's strike, and reasons for hope in the future.  This episode is a single special package deal, where we got both the science and the science fiction from one of the Sci-Fi's most intelligent, radical and humane thinkers, whose journalism, activism and science fiction aims to promote social, political and economic justice.  You can find Cory's blog, podcast and books on his webpage:https://craphound.com/Buzzsprout (podcast host):https://thescienceinthefiction.buzzsprout.comEmail: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/Twitter:https://twitter.com/MartyK5463

Marty and Holly finish up their discussion of 'Neverness' by David Zindell from the last two episodes, and then have a conversation about the books we'll be talking about over the course of the next few episodes.  Our next topic will be 'intelligent plants', so we discuss Sue Burke's 'Semiosis' and 'Interference' duology, ahead of our upcoming interviews with her and Paco Calvo.  Then we move on to consider a range of Cory Doctorow's fiction, discussing his latest book 'Red Team Blues' (2023) and his upcoming novel 'The Lost Cause', (November 2023), in addition to a favorite of ours, called 'Walkaway' (2017).  Coupling these to a scientific topic, we talk about economics in his non-fiction book with Rebecca Giblin, 'Chokepoint Capitalism', which ties together many of the themes in Cory Doctorow's work.David Zindell | Author - https://www.davidzindell.com/Sue Burke - https://sueburke.site/Cory Doctorow's craphound.com | Cory Doctorow's Literary Works - https://craphound.com/Buzzsprout (podcast host):https://thescienceinthefiction.buzzsprout.comEmail: thescienceinthefiction@gmail.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/743522660965257/Twitter:https://twitter.com/MartyK5463

This episode of TWiT explores the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on creative industries like writing, the monopolistic practices of Big Tech, and the concepts of open-washing and chokepoint capitalism. Cory Doctorow discusses his upcoming appearance in a Futurama episode inspired by his book Chokepoint Capitalism The downsides of Twitter under Elon Musk as an example of chokepoint capitalism unwinding Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive's copyright disputes over digitized books in its Emergency Library Canada's law requiring Big Tech to pay news publishers, and Meta's ban on news sharing in response The CFPB cracking down on predatory data brokers Google's "topics" proposal for interest-based ads on Chrome and privacy concerns The threats AI poses to creative professions like writing, and the implications of copyright The misleading hype around AI and job loss statistics from companies like IBM The importance of interoperability for technology platforms and digital rights How copyright law views AI-generated art and content The issues around copyrighted content being used to train AI systems by companies like OpenAI The concept of "open washing" and whether companies like OpenAI really embody openness The America COMPETES Act, proposed antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech's ad market power The role of users and tool creators in establishing boundaries on things like advertising Rebecca Giblin's experience publishing out-of-print Australian books as the non-profit publisher Untapped The podcast IP Provocations and its discussions relating to AI and intellectual property Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: expressvpn.com/twit NetSuite.com/TWIT mintmobile.com/twit

This episode of TWiT explores the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on creative industries like writing, the monopolistic practices of Big Tech, and the concepts of open-washing and chokepoint capitalism. Cory Doctorow discusses his upcoming appearance in a Futurama episode inspired by his book Chokepoint Capitalism The downsides of Twitter under Elon Musk as an example of chokepoint capitalism unwinding Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive's copyright disputes over digitized books in its Emergency Library Canada's law requiring Big Tech to pay news publishers, and Meta's ban on news sharing in response The CFPB cracking down on predatory data brokers Google's "topics" proposal for interest-based ads on Chrome and privacy concerns The threats AI poses to creative professions like writing, and the implications of copyright The misleading hype around AI and job loss statistics from companies like IBM The importance of interoperability for technology platforms and digital rights How copyright law views AI-generated art and content The issues around copyrighted content being used to train AI systems by companies like OpenAI The concept of "open washing" and whether companies like OpenAI really embody openness The America COMPETES Act, proposed antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech's ad market power The role of users and tool creators in establishing boundaries on things like advertising Rebecca Giblin's experience publishing out-of-print Australian books as the non-profit publisher Untapped The podcast IP Provocations and its discussions relating to AI and intellectual property Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: expressvpn.com/twit NetSuite.com/TWIT mintmobile.com/twit

This episode of TWiT explores the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on creative industries like writing, the monopolistic practices of Big Tech, and the concepts of open-washing and chokepoint capitalism. Cory Doctorow discusses his upcoming appearance in a Futurama episode inspired by his book Chokepoint Capitalism The downsides of Twitter under Elon Musk as an example of chokepoint capitalism unwinding Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive's copyright disputes over digitized books in its Emergency Library Canada's law requiring Big Tech to pay news publishers, and Meta's ban on news sharing in response The CFPB cracking down on predatory data brokers Google's "topics" proposal for interest-based ads on Chrome and privacy concerns The threats AI poses to creative professions like writing, and the implications of copyright The misleading hype around AI and job loss statistics from companies like IBM The importance of interoperability for technology platforms and digital rights How copyright law views AI-generated art and content The issues around copyrighted content being used to train AI systems by companies like OpenAI The concept of "open washing" and whether companies like OpenAI really embody openness The America COMPETES Act, proposed antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech's ad market power The role of users and tool creators in establishing boundaries on things like advertising Rebecca Giblin's experience publishing out-of-print Australian books as the non-profit publisher Untapped The podcast IP Provocations and its discussions relating to AI and intellectual property Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: expressvpn.com/twit NetSuite.com/TWIT mintmobile.com/twit

This episode of TWiT explores the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on creative industries like writing, the monopolistic practices of Big Tech, and the concepts of open-washing and chokepoint capitalism. Cory Doctorow discusses his upcoming appearance in a Futurama episode inspired by his book Chokepoint Capitalism The downsides of Twitter under Elon Musk as an example of chokepoint capitalism unwinding Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive's copyright disputes over digitized books in its Emergency Library Canada's law requiring Big Tech to pay news publishers, and Meta's ban on news sharing in response The CFPB cracking down on predatory data brokers Google's "topics" proposal for interest-based ads on Chrome and privacy concerns The threats AI poses to creative professions like writing, and the implications of copyright The misleading hype around AI and job loss statistics from companies like IBM The importance of interoperability for technology platforms and digital rights How copyright law views AI-generated art and content The issues around copyrighted content being used to train AI systems by companies like OpenAI The concept of "open washing" and whether companies like OpenAI really embody openness The America COMPETES Act, proposed antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech's ad market power The role of users and tool creators in establishing boundaries on things like advertising Rebecca Giblin's experience publishing out-of-print Australian books as the non-profit publisher Untapped The podcast IP Provocations and its discussions relating to AI and intellectual property Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: expressvpn.com/twit NetSuite.com/TWIT mintmobile.com/twit

On This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte, Cory Doctorow, and Rebecca Giblin talk about how IBM predicts 40% of workers will need new job training in the next 3 years due to AI displacing roles. Full episode at http://twit.tv/twit941 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/ Sponsor: GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT

This episode of TWiT explores the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on creative industries like writing, the monopolistic practices of Big Tech, and the concepts of open-washing and chokepoint capitalism. Cory Doctorow discusses his upcoming appearance in a Futurama episode inspired by his book Chokepoint Capitalism The downsides of Twitter under Elon Musk as an example of chokepoint capitalism unwinding Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive's copyright disputes over digitized books in its Emergency Library Canada's law requiring Big Tech to pay news publishers, and Meta's ban on news sharing in response The CFPB cracking down on predatory data brokers Google's "topics" proposal for interest-based ads on Chrome and privacy concerns The threats AI poses to creative professions like writing, and the implications of copyright The misleading hype around AI and job loss statistics from companies like IBM The importance of interoperability for technology platforms and digital rights How copyright law views AI-generated art and content The issues around copyrighted content being used to train AI systems by companies like OpenAI The concept of "open washing" and whether companies like OpenAI really embody openness The America COMPETES Act, proposed antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech's ad market power The role of users and tool creators in establishing boundaries on things like advertising Rebecca Giblin's experience publishing out-of-print Australian books as the non-profit publisher Untapped The podcast IP Provocations and its discussions relating to AI and intellectual property Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: expressvpn.com/twit NetSuite.com/TWIT mintmobile.com/twit

On This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte, Cory Doctorow, and Rebecca Giblin talk about how IBM predicts 40% of workers will need new job training in the next 3 years due to AI displacing roles. Full episode at http://twit.tv/twit941 Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin You can find more about TWiT and subscribe to our podcasts at https://podcasts.twit.tv/ Sponsor: GO.ACILEARNING.COM/TWIT

First released: 13 June 2023 | To join New Models, find us via patreon.com/newmodels & newmodels.substack.com Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, journalist, and technology activist who's been thinking publicly about the industrial capture of creative labor markets since the ‘90s. In Berlin last week touring his newest book, the NYTimes bestselling, anti-finance finance thriller Red Team Blues (Tor Books, 2023) and to present at the re:publica conference with his Chokepoint Capitalism (Beacon, 2022) co-author Rebecca Giblin, Doctorow generously made time to speak with New Models about the entrenched, corrosive models driving what we'll shorthand here as corporate cannibalism. For more: Tw: @doctorow Blog/newsletter: https://pluralistic.net Site & pod: https://craphound.com Recent books: Red Team Blues (Tor Books, 2023) https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/redteamblues Chokepoint Capitalism (Beacon, 2022) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/

In this episode, we feature insights from writer and activist Cory Doctorow, who along with Rebecca Giblin, a professor at Melbourne Law School, co-authored the book ‘Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back.' It's a story about the stranglehold megacorporations have on their respective industries. For artists and creators, it means they're receiving fewer and fewer percentages of overall profits, despite their work enriching our corporate overlords.  “The reason creative workers are receiving a declining share of the wealth generated by their work is the same reason all workers are receiving a smaller share—we have structured society to make rich people richer at everyone else's expense,” Doctorow and his co-author Rebecca Giblin write. News Beat is a Morey Creative Studios production, in association with Manny Faces Media. Sign up for our free newsletter at newsbeat.substack.com Producer/Audio Editor: Michael "Manny Faces" ConfortiEditor-In-Chief: Chris TwarowskiManaging Editor: Rashed MianEpisode Art: Jeff MainExecutive Producer: Jed Morey  Support the show: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=EYkdQRkbZ6vNTGfNSGWZjx7_15orqqDl8vkmrAg3TkxLprft1OguFwxlheC3tAkNd-KVPG&country.x=US&locale.x=USSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we're talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that's climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We're all fighting the same fight.”

In the last season we sat down with Cory Doctorow, co-author of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, to find out how the music industry has become dominated by monopoly power. In this bonus episode, we're bringing you Arshy's full interview with Cory, complete with all the nitty gritty details around how and why musicians continue to get screwed by Spotify, music labels, ticketmaster and more.To learn more: Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by ​​Rebecca Giblin and Cory DoctorowSponsors: Canva, Douglas, Truth TellingIf you value this podcast, support us! You'll get premium access to all our shows ad free, including early releases and bonus content. You'll also get our exclusive newsletter, discounts on merch, tickets to our live and virtual events, and more than anything, you'll be a part of the solution to Canada's journalism crisis, you'll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody.You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music—included with Prime. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Novelist and Internet activist Cory Doctorow discusses "enshittification," the term he coined for how online platforms start out great but gradually become nightmarish for users. How can we fight back against the forces of enshittification? Cory suggests some federal policies that would put power back in the hands of regular Americans. Plus: What made Twitter a once-thriving platform, and what will happen to it now?Recorded March 16, 2023Follow Culturally Determined on Twitter @CulturallyDetLINKSCory's piece, "The ‘Enshittification' of TikTok"https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guysCory's book, with Rebecca Giblin, "Chokepoint Capitalism"https://chokepointcapitalism.com/Cory's new novel, "Red Team Blues"https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/redteambluesCory's forthcoming book, "The Internet Con"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/721311/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow/Cory's site, pluralistic.nethttps://pluralistic.net/Follow @doctorowFollow @aryehcw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How did tech giants like Spotify and Meta and TikTok get so good at separating us creative workers from the value we generate with our work? According to a fascinating new book by Melbourne Law school professor Rebecca Giblin and journalist, science-fiction author, and activist Cory Doctorow, the answer lies in something called “chokepoint capitalism”: the phenomenon whereby platforms insert themselves between cultural producers and consumers and charge creators money — either explicitly or implicitly — to reach their own fans.In other words, if you're a creator, all your fans are on a platform, you can't leave without losing access to your audiences, their wallets, and critical gates for exposure; most of the time, that means you just have to take the raw deal you're being handed, ethics or the ability for you to eke out a living from your work be damned.Cory, who also wrote a fascinating article earlier this year about the “enshittification” of TikTok, is one of our favorite critics of the contemporary internet. We invited him onto the show to discuss how chokepoints became so acute in the creative industries (hint: it's something that fusty legacy institutions like the major labels, radio companies, and Hollywood talent agencies have also been doing for years), and how companies leverage factors like network effects, switching costs, weak anti-trust enforcement, and even copyright law itself to rig creative labor markets in their favor.While these platforms feel impossible to leave, there's still something we can do about it. Cory also tells us about some of the tactics creative workers can use to dismantle these chokeholds and get paid, and where the current tech downturn (and Silicon Valley Bank) fits in with all this. if there's such a thing as a quintessential Culture Journalist conversation, we think this episode is it.Purchase Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them BackSupport our independent journalism by becoming a paid subscriber at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Paid subscribers receive a free bonus episode every month, along with full essays and culture recommendations.Keep it weird with The Culture Journalist on Instagram. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Rebecca Giblin (author Chokepoint Capitalism, media academic) joins me to explain how the Big Tech squillionaires are choking creatives – musicians, authors, screenwriters etc – and their customers. And in so doing, killing culture. Hmmm….Rebecca is a Melbourne Law School professor specialising in creators' rights and the director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia. Her new book Chokepoint Capitalism (co-written with LA-based bestselling science fiction writer and Boing Boing website owner Cory Doctorow) was awarded a Financial Times' “best books of 2022” gong and is one the most talked about polemics doing the podcast rounds.In this chat, we discuss the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster debacle, “chickenization” (how the lock-in tactics used by Monsanto are now applied to live music), whether Spotify playlists are part of the problem, and what we can all do to win back culture again! A must-listen for creatives, music lovers, concert-goers.Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow is out now.Follow Rebecca on Twitter. She does good twit!If you need to know a bit more about me… head to my "about" pageSubscribe to my Substack newsletter for more such conversationGet your copy of my book, This One Wild and Precious Life Let's connect on Instagram! It's where I interact the most Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Award-winning science fiction writer, blogger and activist Cory Doctorow rallies the creative class against an ever-expanding industry of monopolies and monopsonies. Co-written by Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, Chokepoint Capitalism unveils the tricks Big Tech and Big Content use to lock-in users and suppliers, eliminate competition, and extort creators and producers, and extract value so that artists can't survive and audiences pay through the nose. Doctorow shares his thoughts on how we can recapture creative labor markets to make them fairer and more sustainable.

 An influential group of big technology corporations, commonly referred to as Big Tech has concentrated vast economic power with the collusion of states, which has resulted in expanded surveillance,  spiraling disinformation and weakened workers' rights. TNI's 11th flagship State of Power report exposes the actors, the strategies and the implications of this digital power grab, and shares ideas on how movements might bring technology back under popular control. Our guest on the podcast is Cory Doctorow, a  brilliant science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation,  a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. His most recent book is Chokepoint Capitalism (co-authored with Rebecca Giblin), a powerful expose of how tech monopolies have stifled creative labour markets and how movements might fight back. This interview is part of the 11th State of power report, which focuses on Digital Power. Please be sure to check out all the other essays, as well as the infographics that give a good picture of digital power today. You can also read an edited transcript of the interview. 

In today's episode, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow discussion their new book Chokepoint Capitalism with The Verge Editor in Chief Nilay Patel. It was recorded on September 23, 2022.

Welcome to episode #863 of Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast - Episode #863. It's hard to describe the work that Cory Doctorow does. One part author, one part journalist, one part activist, one part media theorist, one part thought leader... how many parts is that? How about we just settle on the term, "Polymath." Cory is as known for his thought-provoking science fiction novels and he is for doing his best to level the playing field for all consumers and businesses. He works and explores the intersection of technology, society, and politics. He was the co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, and has written numerous books, including the bestselling Little Brother and Homeland. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina's School of Library and Information Science and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. He is also a frequent speaker at technology conferences and events, and is known for his engaging and thought-provoking presentations. His latest book, Chokepoint Capitalism (which he co-authored with Rebecca Giblin), argues that 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. Ultimately, his work will leave you questioning the role of technology in our lives and the future of our economy. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:01:54. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. Check out ThinkersOne. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Cory Doctorow. Chokepoint Capitalism. Rebecca Giblin. Pluralistic.net. Follow Cory on Twitter. Follow Cory on LinkedIn. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

♩♪ A long, long time ago, I can still rememberHow the music used to pay my billsI knew that if I got my breakThat I could be as big as DrakeAnd then I could stop shopping at No Frills ♩♪♩♪ But Spotify, it's nearly killed usTicketmaster's ground us to dustThe companies got too largeNow monopolies are in charge ♩♪♩♪ And the record labels I fear the mostHave all just merged and so now we're toastDon't you think it's just so gross?The way, the music, died ♩♪Featured in this episode: Simon Outhit, Cory DoctorowTo learn moreChokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow“'A public relations nightmare': Ticketmaster recruits pros for secret scalper program” in CBC News by Dave Seglins, Rachel Houlihan & Laura Clementson “We went undercover as ticket scalpers — and Ticketmaster offered to help us do business” in Toronto Star by Robert Cribb & Marco Chown Oved“Is Live Music Broken? It's Not Just Ticketmaster, It's Everything” in The Ringer by Nate RogersA Statement From Live Nation EntertainmentCredits: Arshy Mann (Host and Producer), Jordan Cornish (Producer), Noor Azrieh (Associate Producer), André Proulx (Production Coordinator)Sponsors: Douglas, Athletic Greens If you value this podcast, Support us! You'll get premium access to all our shows ad free, including early releases and bonus content. You'll also get our exclusive newsletter, discounts on merch, tickets to our live and virtual events, and more than anything, you'll be a part of the solution to Canada's journalism crisis, you'll be keeping our work free and accessible to everybody.You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music—included with Prime. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's challenge: watch This Place Rules.You can hear the after show and support Do By Friday on Patreon!------Edited by Alex Cox------Show LinksGlass frog - WikipediaChicago Museum Campus | Enjoy IllinoisMuseum of Science and IndustryCalifornia Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, CASea of Skulls | Sea Lion Skulls Exhibit at the AcademyUrban Dictionary: mann's assumptionOldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor FoundTusher African Hall | California Academy of SciencesDik-dik - WikipediaAmazon river dolphin - WikipediaSurvivor Christian's Ponderosa - YouTubeCommunity Theme by The 88 - At Least It Was Here (Full song and Lyrics) - YouTubePaddington 2 - WikipediaThe Lobster - WikipediaPodcasting Microphones Mega-Review – Marco.orgNeumann KMS 105 - Live Vocal Condenser MicrophoneEarthworks ETHOS Broadcast Condenser MicrophoneLars von Trier - WikipediaRian Johnson - WikipediaMartin Scorsese Cameo in Taxi Driver - YouTube‎Merlin's Weird Movies for Weirdos, a list of films by Merlin Mann • LetterboxdForrest Gump with Jamelle Bouie by Blank Check PodcastFight Club - WikipediaThe Sixth Sense - WikipediaServant (TV series) - WikipediaUnbundling Tools for ThoughtReadwise Reader | The first read-it-later app built for power readers.The Weakerthans - WikipediaWhy the Creators of "Everything Everywhere All At Once" Treat Their Partnership Like a MarriageAll Gas No Brakes - YouTubeO Block - YouTubeIs 'All Gas No Brakes' Over? - The New York TimesThis Place Rules | Watch the Movie on HBOGavin McInnes - WikipediaEnrique Tarrio - WikipediaRemember When Kamala Harris Compared January 6th to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor? - YouTubeWill Sommer - The Daily BeastThe Sword and the Sandwich | Talia LavinIdeas That Changed My Life · Collab FundHow Greendale Won The Debate! | Community - YouTubeChokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory DoctorowNapoleon Dynamite Top Ten Signs You're Not The Most Popular Guy In High School | Letterman(Recorded Wednesday, January 11, 2023)Next week's challenge: play with omg.lol.

Last year I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It's a book about artists and technology and platforms, and how different kinds of distribution and creations tools create chokepoints for different companies to capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators.. In other words, it's a lot of Decoder stuff. As we were prepping this episode, the Decoder team realized it previews a lot of things we're going to talk about in 2023: antitrust law. Ticketmaster. Spotify and the future of the music industry. Amazon and the book industry. And, of course, being a creator trying to make a living on all these platforms. This episode is longer than normal, but it was a really great conversation and I'm glad we are sharing it with you. Links: What is Mixer, Ninja's new exclusive streaming home? Ninja returns to Twitch This was Sony Music's contract with Spotify Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23311918 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. It was produced by Creighton DeSimone and Jackie McDermott and it was edited by Callie Wright.  The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters and our Executive Director is Eleanor Donovan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sam hosts author Cory Doctorow to discuss his recent book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, co-written with Rebecca Giblin. First, Sam runs through updates on Kevin McCarthy finally overcoming his Freedom Caucus brethren to attain the speakership, the Brazilian coup attempt this weekend as well as the hardline responses to it, NYC's nurses' strike, and the striking down of more gun control measures, before diving into the Mike Rogers v. Matt Gaetz matchup from this weekend. Cory Doctorow then joins as he dives right into his examples of chokepoint capitalism, first looking to the wildly exploitative contracts of the 20th Century music industry, with mass monopolies by studios forcing artists into exploitative and debt-riddled contracts, only for the digital age and rise of Spotify to push the industry towards a monopsony, with Spotify as the primary purchaser of music, allowing them to force similarly exploitative deals on the same debt-riddled artists. They then shift to the monopsonistic scam run by Audible, as Amazon's audiobook offshoot took Spotify's blueprint and added internal lies and scams to bluff authors out of hundreds of millions in earnings, and wrap up that portion of the interview with the advertising monopolies of social media tyrants like Meta and Google. Cory then shifts the conversation to weakening the power of these capitalist chokepoints, where corporations can use the lack of competition to force horrendous contracts and conditions on laborers, focusing on the obvious elements of anti-trust and broader crackdown on anti-competitive practices, as well as pushing big tech interoperability to improve access for consumers and laborers, before concluding the interview with a discussion on the other massive project required: completely overhauling the US system of copyright laws. And in the Fun Half: Sam talks with Jack from New Jersey about the difference between backlash to the “Never Kevvers” of the Freedom Caucus and the theoretical backlash to the Forced-Vote that never was, Marcus the Brazilian dives into the impact of Bolsonaro's ambiguous concession speech and the following (lack of) coverage of it, as well as the vast differences to Biden's response to 1/6 and Lula's response to 1/8. Kowalski from NB gives major weather updates on California and Europe, and Sam dives into Larry Summer's recent broadcast from paradise to tout his influence in cementing austerity as a tool of capitalism. Rachel from SF reflects on some good ol' fasc-ioned racist San-Fran housing discrimination, @Indrid.Cold27 discusses the TikTok scene, and Sam and the crew tackle updates on Matt Schlapp's alleged harassment, plus, your calls and IMs! Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: ExpressVPN: We all take risks every day when we go online, whether we think about it or not. And using the internet without ExpressVPN? That's like driving without car insurance! ExpressVPN acts as online insurance. It creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so hackers can't steal your personal data. It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. And ExpressVPN is simple to use on all your devices! Just fire up the app and click one button to get protected. Secure your online data TODAY by visiting https://www.expressvpn.com/majority That's https://www.expressvpn.com/majority and you can get an extra three months FREE. Ritual: We deserve to know what we're putting in our bodies and why. Ritual's clean, vegan-friendly multivitamin is formulated with high-quality nutrients in bioavailable forms your body can actually use. Get key nutrients without the B.S. Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit https://ritual.com/majority to start your Ritual today. Blinkist: Go to https://Blinkist.com/MAJORITYREPORT to start your 7-day free trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattBinder @MattLech @BF1nn @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Subscribe to Discourse Blog, a newsletter and website for progressive essays and related fun partly run by AM Quickie writer Jack Crosbie. https://discourseblog.com/ Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

“In Chokepoint Capitalism, 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.”https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/

Many of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.' Corporate behemoths -- be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others -- put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up costs. But Cory and Rebecca have solutions to break the stranglehold, and in this episode of Darts and Letters Cory helps Jay explore various chokepoints, from concert tickets to audiobooks, and how we can open up the industries and get workers paid. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we'd really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there's bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/big-tech-has-rigged-the-game-against-artists-heres-how-we-can-fight-backTRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow for the launch of their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. This event was hosted by The Peale Museum in Baltimore.Rebecca Giblin is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor at Melbourne Law School. She is director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) and heads up the Author's Interest and eLending projects, as well as Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project. Chokepoint Capitalism is her latest book.Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books. Chokepoint Capitalism is his most recent non-fiction work. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

Why were so many Taylor Swift fans unable to secure tickets for her upcoming US tour?Possible explanations vary, but many have pointed to market power concentration in creative industries, and how it affects the creative class and consumers. Consider Amazon's influence in book publishing, Google/Facebook's advertising duopoly effect on news media, or in Swift's case, Ticketmaster's control of ticketing and venues for artists. In a new book (co-authored with scholar Rebecca Giblin), Cory Doctorow – a renowned writer and activist – calls this ‘capture' of creative labor markets "Chokepoint Capitalism."Doctorow joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the negative effects of concentration, why the doctrine that gave us these market effects is inadequate, and what could be done to return more power and profits to creative workers and beyond – while also asking the question: what are we trying to accomplish with competition itself?Read an excerpt from the book here: https://www.promarket.org/2022/10/03/why-streaming-doesnt-pay/

Air Date 12/3/2022 Today, we take a look at the mega-companies that touch all of our lives and the monopolistic practices that have been developed to keep power and wealth concentrated with the few while the rest of us get screwed.  Be part of the show! Leave us a message at 202-999-3991 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com  Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Get AD FREE Shows and Bonus Content) Join our Discord community! OUR AFFILIATE LINKS: BestOfTheLeft.com/HOLIDAY (BOTL GIFT GUIDE!) ExpressVPN.com/BestOfTheLeft GET INTERNET PRIVACY WITH EXPRESS VPN! SHOW NOTES Ch. 1: Tech Monopolies - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver - Air Date 6-13-22 John Oliver discusses tech monopolies, and how to address the hidden harm they can do. Ch. 2: How Ticketmaster Is Destroying Live Music - More Perfect Union - Air Date 10-19-22 Ticketmaster is destroying live music. Their scam fees now cost as much as 78% of a ticket. They control the events, the venues, and even the artists. There's a movement pushing the Justice Department to take on its monopoly. Cory Doctorow breaks it down. Ch. 3: Corporate Greed Is Causing Inflation But The Rich Blame Workers - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 11-16-22 Not since the Great Depression have corporate profits soared so high. But it is not enough to satisfy them. More than 54% of the inflation America is experiencing is caused by record-setting corporate profits. Ch. 4: Why Food Prices Could Skyrocket Thanks to This Grocery Merger - More Perfect Union - Air Date 11-14-22 Safeway, Ralphs, Smiths, Harris Teeters, Shaws, Kings, Randalls, and about 25 other brands, will all be owned by a single company if the Kroger-Albertsons merger goes through. And that's really bad news for the prices you pay. Ch. 5: Chokepoint Capitalism (with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin) - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 11-1-22 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. Ch. 6: Making The Case For Abolishing Billionaires - MSNBC - Air Date 11-21-22 "One after another, four of our best-known billionaires laid waste to the image of benevolent saviors carefully cultivated by their class," Anand Giridharadas writes in a recent New York Times column. Ch. 7: Elon Musk Is An Idiot (and so are Zuck and SBF) - Adam Conover - Air Date 11-23-22 Tech CEOs aren't geniuses, and here's the proof. MEMBERS-ONLY BONUS CLIP(S) Ch. 8: Chokepoint Capitalism (with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin) Part 2 - Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer - Air Date 11-1-22 FINAL COMMENTS Ch. 9: Final comments on how regulation helps stop financial scams MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions): Opening Theme: Loving Acoustic Instrumental by John Douglas Orr  Voicemail Music: Low Key Lost Feeling Electro by Alex Stinnent Activism Music: This Fickle World by Theo Bard (https://theobard.bandcamp.com/track/this-fickle-world) Closing Music: Upbeat Laid Back Indie Rock by Alex Stinnent   Produced by Jay! Tomlinson Visit us at BestOfTheLeft.com Listen Anywhere! BestOfTheLeft.com/Listen Listen Anywhere! Follow at Twitter.com/BestOfTheLeft Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

The world's most powerful media and technology companies use their market power to lock their customers into a relationship they can't escape, while immiserating the creative people whose work the customers are paying for. Companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Spotify, Clear Channel, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have generated enormous revenues for their shareholders while slashing the incomes of writers, journalists and musicians.But it doesn't have to be this way, say Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, who argue, as they explain in their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, that it's time to fight back against the power of big tech and big media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Douglas Rushkoff joins Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, authors of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, for a special panel recorded live from Ottawa International Writers Festival on October 24, 2022.

Rebecca Giblin is a professor at the University of Melbourne and the co-author (with Cory Doctorow) of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. The book is about how corporations that act as gatekeepers between the creators of creative work and the public are able to use their power to extract huge amounts of wealth from workers. From YouTube to Amazon to LiveNation concerts to news conglomerates to Spotify, Giblin and Doctorow look at how corporations that own the means of accessing content are able to keep musicians, artists, and writers from reaping the full value of their work. But Chokepoint Capitalism isn't just a critique of how these institutions hoard wealth and keep creative workers poor. It's also filled with clear and workable solutions that can change the situation and give those who produce creative work a fairer share of the value they produce. In this conversation, we discuss:How Amazon locks in its customers and uses its size to dictate extortionate terms to its suppliersWhy Prince was right about the music industryHow even Peter Thiel has admitted that it's monopolists, not innovators, who make moneyWhy copyright law as it exists doesn't actually protect the creators of intellectual propertyWhether monopolies and market concentration are actually the most important issue, or whether the real problem is that for-profit corporations are the ones with the power.Why Rebecca and Cory think they can make the terms "monopsony" and "oligopsony" sexyHow collective action by creative workers can be effective and why corporate power looks imposing but is actually quite fragileThe Peter Thiel lecture is called "Competition is For Losers." Listen to Cory Doctorow's interview with Current Affairs, which also touches on some of the themes in the book, here. The thumbnail for this episode is a nod to Amazon's infamous "Gazelle project" which tried to prey on book publishers the way a cheetah would prey on a "sickly gazelle.""Let's make interventions that directly support more power to creative workers rather than rights-holders." — Rebecca Giblin

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

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, troublemaking and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, troublemaking and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin come on to discuss their new book “Chokepoint Capitalism,” which details how large companies have identified critical bottlenecks in the creative Labour process to suck the value and life out of them like vampires, and what can and has been done about it. Also, a startup! U.K. economic implosion to be discussed in this week's bonus. Buy Rebecca and Cory's book here! https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/710957/chokepoint-capitalism-by-cory-doctorow-and-rebecca-giblin/ If you're looking for a UK strike fund to donate to, here's one we've supported: https://www.rmt.org.uk/about/national-dispute-fund/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Here are links to see Milo's upcoming standup shows: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *AUSTRALIA ALERT* We are going to tour Australia in November, and there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Brisbane https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/trashfuture-live-in-brisbane-additional-show-tickets-396915263237 and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Writer/activist Cory Doctorow and scholar Rebecca Giblin join Leo Laporte to talk about their latest book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. They argue that 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. Get "Chokepoint Capitalism": https://chokepointcapitalism.com Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.

Writer/activist Cory Doctorow and scholar Rebecca Giblin join Leo Laporte to talk about their latest book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. They argue that 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. Get "Chokepoint Capitalism": https://chokepointcapitalism.com Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.

Painters, musicians, writers — artists in virtually every medium — often struggle to make enough revenue to create their art because there are so many layers between them and the people who buy their work. We’re talking gallery commissions, record label contracts, even bookstore overhead costs. Increasingly, tech companies add another layer. And many argue that’s bad for the arts. Activist-journalist Cory Doctorow and law professor Rebecca Giblin addressed these issues in their book, “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back.” It will be out Tuesday. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Doctorow about what chokepoint capitalism entails.

Painters, musicians, writers — artists in virtually every medium — often struggle to make enough revenue to create their art because there are so many layers between them and the people who buy their work. We’re talking gallery commissions, record label contracts, even bookstore overhead costs. Increasingly, tech companies add another layer. And many argue that’s bad for the arts. Activist-journalist Cory Doctorow and law professor Rebecca Giblin addressed these issues in their book, “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back.” It will be out Tuesday. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Doctorow about what chokepoint capitalism entails.

It's one of the banes of my existence! And I'm not living completely on the creative side of the line. But living life as a creative artist in a capitalistic society is akin to constantly swimming upstream during a tidal wave. Well, it often feels that way. Consumers are ingesting content more than ever, but the artists aren't reaping the benefits. A few behemoths who've swallowed up other producers along the way are living quite large, while the struggling artist just struggles harder. For those of us who thought the rise of the internet would give everyone an even chance to be seen and heard, the opposite seems to have triumphed and the giant companies are rolling in the riches. Today I'm joined by activist, author and defender of artists rights Cory Doctorow. He's joined by his co-authoor of the new book, "Checkpoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back," Rebecca Giblin.

We are joined by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin – authors of the excellent new book Chokepoint Capitalism – to discuss how creative labor markets are tightly squeezed on all sides by massive monopolies / monopsonies that create chokepoints to trap suppliers, trap consumers, and trap all the profits in markets for books, music, movies, and every other artistic endeavour. Cory and Rebecca then detail a long list of tactics and solutions for breaking the capitalist stranglehold over cultural production. ••• Follow Cory: https://twitter.com/doctorow ••• Follow Rebecca: https://twitter.com/rgibli ••• Buy the book: http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx ••• Support the kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr.

Cory Doctorow writes when he's anxious. He has eight books coming out soon. Yep, it's been a tough couple of years. The number of upcoming books gives us a sense of the wide range of subjects Doctorow concerns himself with. His upcoming Chokepoint Capitalism, co-authored with Rebecca Giblin, is about monopoly, monopsony, and fairness in the creative arts labor market. Cory and Steve return to several themes throughout this episode, including the crushing effects of concentrated power. The past 40 years have seen an expansion of copyright laws, but the share of income creators receive from their labor has been in free fall and shows no sign of slowing. We know how Amazon treats its employees, so we shouldn't be surprised that it abuses writers. Amazon's audio book platform, Audible, controls about 90% of the market, making it able to steal from artists in multiple ways. (After listening to this podcast, go check out #audiblegate on social media.) Excessive corporate power and monopoly concentration have captured and neutered regulatory bodies and strong-armed the unions. Cory's book focuses on the labor of artists and creators, but workers in every industry are fighting to stay afloat. Monopolies also have a choke hold on us as consumers – and as citizens facing social and environmental catastrophe. Neoliberalism relies upon our isolation – our belief that each of us is facing the world alone and powerless. By effectively starving the machinery of the state, it too is rendered impotent. At the end of the road, there is only capital. Margaret Thatcher said, “there is no alternative.” As a science fiction author, Cory Doctorow has a problem with that. His job is to imagine alternatives. Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and conspiracy; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. His latest book is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER; his next nonfiction book is CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly, monopsony and fairness in the creative arts labor market, (Beacon Press, 2022). In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. @craphound on Twitter

Google launches Android 13, rolling out now to Pixel phones. Android 13 changelog: A deep dive by Mishaal Rahman. Pixel 6 series can't go back to Android 12 after updating to Android 13 due to security vulnerability. Google Pixel 7 and 7 Pro may have just passed through the FCC, ahead of fall launch. Biden admin says about 20 models will still qualify for EV tax credits. Hank Green IRA explainer. Amazon and Nielsen close 'Thursday Night Football' ratings deal. Meta Just Happens to Expand Messenger's End-to-End Encryption. The new USB Rubber Ducky is more dangerous than ever. A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave. Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow. The Unintended Consequences of OTC Hearing Aids. Oracle begins auditing TikTok's algorithms. Signal says 1,900 users' phone numbers exposed by Twilio breach. Adam Neumann Gets a New Backer. Ringtone interpretive dancing. Kindergarten teacher talks to politicians. music street. Google's official Android 13 statue sure looks a bit like a butt. Google Photos renaming 'Archive' to 'Hidden'. Google Chrome can now become your default browser on Windows without even opening settings. How a Third-Party SMS Service Was Used to Take Over Signal Accounts. Google Meet now shows you how noisy your office is. "Existing connections will be shut down" — Google is killing off Google Cloud IoT Core. Picks: Stacey - Hearing Test - Mimi Health. Jeff - BOOX is an electronics brand offering innovative E Ink (ePaper) tablets and devices based on Android. Jeff - Jeff history of media in :45. Ant - I set a Clemson wallpaper to see what color options would show up in #Android13. Sorry, no true orange. Ant - Lisa Carney and Photoshop World. Hosts: Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham, and Ant Pruitt Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google. Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: Secureworks.com/twit nomadgoods.com/TWIG

Pioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his books, is available in full for free), Doctorow has shown what an internet created by the people, unconstrained by intellectual property law, Digital Rights Management, and monopolistic corporate gatekeeping, could be like. In this conversation, Doctorow joins to discuss the importance of a democratic internet, and his recent book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that many people misidentify the main problem with what is called "surveillance capitalism," assuming that the problem is that corporations are amassing to manipulate us the power through intrusive collection of Big Data. In fact, Doctorow argues, the problem is less about a particular thing these corporations can do to us and more about the fact that monopolistic tech companies are in control in the first place. This has important implications, because it means that we cannot just regulate what companies do with our data, we have to fundamentally redistribute power over the internet. In this conversation, we talk about how Wikipedia provides an alternative vision for a participatory internet where the rules are set by users and there is oversight over governance. We do not need better and more benevolent Zuckerbergs. We need what Doctorow calls the pluralistic internet.Cory Doctorow publishes a daily link blog at Pluralistic. His books can be found at his website, Craphound.com, and his archive of posts at Boing Boing is here. His upcoming book Chokepoint Capitalism (co-authored with Rebecca Giblin) can be pre-ordered here. A Current Affairs article about "surveillance capitalism" is here and Nathan's article about the magic of Wikipedia is here.