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Working for Xoth would make me rich. Rich as hell, in fact. Of course, I’d be getting rich because I’d be helping people much richer than me hang on to their money and figure out who to arrest before the guillotines could be erected outside their walled estates.
I hadn’t created this situation. Even with all I had done, I was still just a bit player on this huge board, and the game had been in motion long before I was born. Vast historic forces had brought this world into being, and I had to live in it with everyone else. If I took vows of poverty or swore myself to revolution, it wouldn’t overturn the order. In a world of winners and losers, choosing the losing side wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all myself. At least my comfortable couch in the outer halls of power afforded me enough slack to reach out and help a little, retail-style, one person at a time. And after all, that’s the only way people came, one at a time, even in a big crowd. We were born as individuals, and we died on our own, and even the tightest, best-coordinated group was just a bunch of singular individuals choosing to work together for a while.
All of this was self-serving, sure—it wasn’t just ethical cover for an expedient way of keeping my skin intact, but also oiled with the most expensive lotions the world’s luxury duty-free stores had to offer. But self-serving wasn’t the same as wrong.
“The way we stay free and safe and un-shot and all of that? Politics. Democracy. Holding them to account. It wasn’t so many years ago that Oakland was the first major city to pass a law forcing the city to put every new piece of surveillance, every new database, up for public debate. You saw how hard the surveillance tech companies fought that, how much money they poured into getting it killed. They were scared. Because you know what’s more powerful than all the crypto in the world? An accountable process. Politicians who answer to us, not the billion-dollar companies that hire them when they get out of office.
“Technology has its place. We can organize, securely, to a degree that the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, the Yippies, the Wobblies, the Pink Panthers, the American Indian Movement, all those organizers and activists from this area, they couldn’t have even dreamed of. We’d be idiots not to use those tools. But we’d be bigger idiots to just use those tools. The most important tool we have for curbing official abuses of power is consensual, legitimate, democratic government. That’s what we have to use the tools for.
“I’ve known Masha here for a decade, and I’ve never doubted that she was a brilliant technologist. I mean, she was definitely worth every penny Xoth and Zyz paid her. But Masha”—and she turned to me, a gentle smile on her face—“you’ve never been very smart about politics. You’ve got tunnel vision, you think that if the tech doesn’t solve the problem, it can’t be solved.
“We can solve these problems, Masha. With your help, we can tool up to resist. When we resist we can organize. When we organize, we can win.”
cheesy but not wrong
“Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.” She swung our hands to match her words, like we were playing ring-around-the-rosy.
The others all knew chants that I didn’t know: “If we don’t get it/Shut it down” “Whose streets? Our streets!” and one I’d heard in half a dozen languages: “The people! United! Will never be defeated!”
Everyone I’d ever heard chanting that had been defeated. They’d had hope. They’d kept chanting. I chanted it. Hope fluttered like a banner.
ok this is nice
She looked both younger (her haircut, her clothes) and older (her eyes) than she had in Slovstakia. She was so young. That was something I’d conveniently not thought much about when I’d been in Slovstakia. It wasn’t just the hair that made her look younger, though: in Slovstakia, she’d always had the brooding air of someone embroiled in a life-or-death struggle (duh) whereas now she looked like your basic Kreuzberg hipster, the kind of person you’d find discussing blockchain and Know Your Customer rules in a speakeasy while chain-smoking Turkish cigarettes.
why is this so funny lol
Culture has been captured. Three massive conglomerates own the three record labels and three music publishers that control most of the world’s music. They designed the streaming industry, dominated by Spotify, which itself is (or was) partly owned by those same three labels. When Disney swallowed 21st Century Fox, a single company assumed control of 35 percent of the US box office. Google and Facebook have a lock on the digital ads that are wrapped around music, videos, and news online. Google, along with Apple, is the gatekeeper of everything mobile, giving it a massive cut on games, books, music, and movies. Via YouTube, it controls video streaming. Live Nation has sewn up ticketing and concerts. In the US, one company dominates terrestrial radio, and another satellite. Amazon has an iron grip on book, ebook, and audiobook sales, and dominates ebook and audiobook production. The only publisher that might be able to hold its own is Penguin Random House, and then only by gulping down as many other big publishers as it possibly can. The Big Six trade book publishers had become the Big Five by the time we started writing this book, and are making moves to become the Big Four by the time it’s published.
rough. good summary
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. The playing field has been tilted so far that a growing number of people are falling off the edge, beset by precarious employment, stagnating wages, high costs for education, housing and healthcare, and economic policies that prize shareholders over people and communities.
Then the Chicago School pulled off a brilliant coup. They promoted an antitrust theory that dispensed with the idea of citizenship altogether; instead, they insisted anti-monopoly regulators should limit themselves to thinking about “consumer welfare,” forgetting all that high-minded stuff about “democracy” and “citizenship.” Bork’s version of antitrust concerned itself primarily with maximizing short-term consumer welfare—mostly in the form of lower prices—rather than promoting competition as an end in and of itself. (We emphasize “short-term” because it turns out that once fields are cleared of competitors, consumer benefits like lower prices evaporate fast.)
Putting the focus on consumer welfare changed the calculus completely. So long as prices went down (or at least, didn’t go up), companies more or less stopped having to worry about antitrust enforcers showing up with subpoenas. That meant they could use predatory pricing to squeeze smaller rivals out of markets. It also meant they could dangle the promise of new efficiencies and lower prices to persuade regulators to let them buy up competitors that were previously out of bounds.
While competition is supposed to be central to capitalism, the wealthiest people alive today have gotten rich by suppressing it. They’re brazen about it too. Peter Thiel famously announced in 2014 that “competition is for losers” and counseled companies to monopolize their domains. Business schools teach baby MBAs the same lessons: to avoid industries with high competition, to do what it takes to keep potential competitors out, and, if all else fails, to buy them up. Warren Buffett explains that, in business, he looks “for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,” because “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”
That language disguises what’s really going on here. When Buffett talks about moats, he means the kind of barriers that lock in customers and suppliers and make markets inhospitable to new entrants. These corporations are not protecting castles from marauders. They are creating chokepoints that separate producers from consumers so they can capture a disproportionate share of the value from other people’s work.
We agree there is an urgent need to reform antitrust law and enforcement and certainly criticize existing approaches in the pages that follow. But antitrust should not be relied upon to do all the heavy lifting. In this book, we explore how the chokepoints enabling corporations to extract more than their fair share of value are formed in the first place. Very often, as we will show, legal structures outside of antitrust contribute substantially to the accumulation of vast corporate power. For example, Amazon chokes publishers by chaining audiobook and ebook titles with digital locks that are illegal to remove. (This might sound like it’s to the benefit of authors and publishers, but as we show in the next chapter, it has been crucial to stripping away their power.) Spotify does it to recording artists and labels through playlistification, which trains us to let it decide what we listen to, and by relying on fiendishly complex music licensing arrangements to keep competitors out of the market. Apple and Google get the power to squeeze game developers from their ability to control where we get our mobile phone software. Facebook and Google captured the market for news advertising by controlling all sides of the market for ads.