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You Really Can't Breathe: A Review of the Excellent Chokepoint Capitalism [1]

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Date: 2023-04-17  

This is a difficult book to review, not because it is bad, but because it is so good. I honestly wasn't expecting this to be as good as it was, to be as thorough and thoughtful as it was. While I generally enjoy Doctorow's fiction, I have found his non-fiction activism to be a little too libertarian focused for my liking. His history with the EFF has left him a little too reflexively anti-copyright, a little too focused on the dangers of big government, a little too friendly to the idea that the government is not here to help, a little too blind to the power of business. He recently said on an episode of Adam Conover's podcast that his generation could be forgiven for that myopia because they were working under the last gasp of the anti-trust gold age. Yeah, no -- plenty of us were telling people like him at the time that they were wrong and doing harm with their mistakes.

And this book does have some of those blind spots. DRM is still an overly large boogeyman -- the reason, for example, that Amazon has dominated the ebook market, despite the fact that DRM did not allow Apple to do the same in the digital music space, an interesting contradiction that is never followed up upon. Privacy regulations like the GDPR are castigated for their friendliness to incumbents in one chapter while being given as the reason for an incumbency damaging move away from personalized ads and toward context-based ads with nary a conversation about the apparent disconnect.

But those are nits. Doctorow and his coauthor Rebecca Giblin do an outstanding job describing how large companies have used their outsized power to steal from employees and consumers alike. By using combinations of monopolies, regulatory capture, poor enforcement of existing laws, corporation place themselves in positions to strangle other economic actors and grab the lion's share of rewards for themselves. The book focuses on the creative economy, but its lessons apply to almost everywhere in the economy. They use chicken growers as non-creative example -- the chicken processors have split the market in such a way that growers have no competition for their products, so they must agree to contracts that force them to use certain feed, treat the birds in certain ways, and sell at certain times and places to certain processors. They are effectively indentured to the processors as a result. The book details dozens of these kinds of arrangements, showing how vast swaths of the economy is structured in similar fashions and how existing laws and regulatory failures put much of the rest of it in danger of the same collapse.

Fortunately, the back half of the book is focused on solutions. Doctorow and Gibln do not pretend that anyone solution is a panacea, and they do not shy away from dealing with the pitfalls of each solution. But they do not shy away from radical re-imagings of the economy either. Collective ownership fits neatly alongside trust-busting in their toolbox. Refreshingly, they give examples of the effectiveness of the former as well as the latter. They obviously recognize the gravity of the situation and do not shy away from serious solutions. Timid, they are not. Nor should they, or we, be.

This is an excellent book. It clearly explains the economic trap we reside in and just as clearly gives us multiple possible ways out of it. I strongly recommend reading it and trying to find politicians and organizations willing to put its solutions into action.

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