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Systemic problems can’t be solved with individual actions alone. Your individual purchase decisions, which services you do or don’t create accounts on, whether you recycle, and whether you drive or take the bus make almost no difference to our social outcomes. If we want to change the world, we have to fix the system. We need social solutions. Political solutions. The most important individual action you can take is to join a movement. And what we need right now is a movement against chokepoint capitalism—one that finds new tools to cut through the roots of monopolistic and monopsonistic power.
hell yeah
These limitations are why even antitrust specialists look toward other forms of regulation, especially for reining in abusive buyer power. We should absolutely be using antitrust and its remedies to their full capacity, but we shouldn’t rely on them to do all the heavy lifting. And we don’t need to! As historian Gabriel Winant points out, antitrust was far from the only factor that helped labor improve its share in the early twentieth century: “Whether or not you rate antitrust as important, it still beggars belief to see it as a more significant force in the remaking of American society in the 1930s than the insurgency of millions of industrial workers and the wave of reforms they won: the National Labor Relations Act, which established union rights; the Social Security Act, which created the eponymous program as well as family assistance and unemployment insurance; the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage and banned child labor; and, indirectly, legislation touching on housing and urban development, veterans’ policy, and more.” Considered through this more expansive lens, we have plenty of tools to help brake those anticompetitive flywheels and start taking back the value of culture.
sick
The point of radical interoperability isn’t merely to provide “choice” or “competition” or “innovation,” or any other empty Silicon Valley buzzword: it’s to let people decide for themselves how to live their lives. It’s to clear the way for the exercise of self-determination. You, the user of a product or service, know more about your needs than its designers ever will. A farmer with a hailstorm on the horizon knows whether she wants to trust her own tractor repair to bring in the crops to a degree John Deere will never be able to match. A person with a physical or cognitive disability knows more about how they need to adapt their tools than even the most empathetic design team. A person who is poor, or facing an emergency, or in physical danger, knows more about whether it’s appropriate to change the operation of a product than the company that made it. Good products and services—like good art—routinely outlive their makers. You know more about how you want to use a computer program to recover your old working files than the company that made it ten years before.
The case for interoperability isn’t about creating competitive markets in which the best products win. It’s about creating a world of tools, devices, and services that are under the control of the people who depend on them.
While news has perhaps the most immediate potential to co-operatize against the giants, co-ops in other culture industries are also managing to carve out niches in the gaps left by Big Business in ways that hint at a different kind of future. Scholar-activist Trebor Scholz argues that platform cooperativism’s importance comes less from destroying “the dark overlords” and more from “writing over them in people’s minds, incorporating different ownership models, and then inserting them back into the mainstream.”20 Liz Pelly has a similar view. In the context of music, she calls alternative distribution means “protest platforms,” arguing that “the means through which music is created and distributed carries as much political weight as the content of the songs—by subverting the status quo, making their own platforms, and creating alternative worlds.”21
There’s potential for grander-scale initiatives too—like entertainment lawyer Henderson Cole’s radical proposal for an American Music Library. He envisages this as a government-financed digital public music library, which, like a public library for books, could be accessed by any American for free. Artists and composers would opt in by uploading their music and their labels and publishers would be barred from stopping them. As Pelly points out, “we don’t currently conceptualize universal access to music as a public good, to be managed in the public interest with public funding. We should.”
In Cole’s vision, a music library could also have a preservation role, keeping copies of uploaded music for future generations. But what he is perhaps most excited about is the possibility of a new royalty system that bypasses the insane complexity and wastefulness of the one we have now.
sweet
I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.
just a nice snapshot of an era
down between open knees. Guys would talk loudly to one another about whatever they were thinking about or things that they did. I remember a guy talking about a girl he’d gotten pregnant. He’d told her to get on the ground and eat dirt first, and she did. “And then I fertilized it!” he said. The guys laughed, and the girls watched with intent, quiet eyes. I went out on the fire escape with Lilet and we sat with our legs dangling down, somebody’s lilac bushes between our feet.
I saw music, too, in the people I got stoned with in the park or saw dancing at parties or bars. I remember this boy and girl I saw dancing at a crash pad once. They didn’t touch or act sexy, but they looked at each other the whole time, like they were connected through their eyes. They didn’t pay any attention to the rhythm of the music. They danced to its secret personality—clownish and gross, like something big and dumb stuck in a tar pit and trying to walk its way out with brute force. Like being stuck and gross was something great.
A long time ago, John loved me. I never loved him, but I used his friendship, and the using became so comfortable for both of us that we started really being friends. When I lost my looks and had to go on disability, John pitied me and then looked down on me, but that just got fit into the friendship, too. What can’t get fit in is that sometimes even now John looks at me and sees a beautiful girl in a ruined face. It’s broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks, but it’s there, and it pisses him off. It pisses me off, too. When we have these fights and he hears crying and hurt in my voice, it’s a different version of that ruined beauty, except it’s not something he can see, so he can’t think ruined or beauty. He just feels it, like sex when it’s disgusting but you want it anyway. Like his baby plays with the flabby arms, not knowing they’re ugly. I can’t have a baby and we’re not going to fuck, but it’s still in my voice—sex and warm arms mixed with hurt and ugliness, so he can’t separate them. When that happens, it doesn’t matter that I’m not beautiful or even pretty, and he is confused and unhappy.
I always had that, but I didn’t know it until now. It’s the reason somebody once thought I could be a model, the thing they kept trying to photograph and never did. When I was young, my beauty held it in a case that wouldn’t open. Then it broke open. Now that I’m almost fifty, it’s there, so much so that even John feels it without knowing what it is. It’s disgusting to whore it out in a fight over cigarettes, but that’s life.
The air smells of gasoline, dirt, and trees; cars farting out of hot iron stomachs; and the fresh BO of nature. Down the street, there’s still a picket line out in front of the Nissan dealership, people standing in mud-colored rain slickers, their faces looking like crude sketches under their dripping hoods: brows, nose, lips, jowls. Clear plastic bags are tied over their signs, which read don’t buy from nissan. don’t buy from scabs. Most of them trudge in a circle, like they are trudging through a ritual they no longer remember the meaning of but which they dimly believe is their only hope. Two others stand outside the circle, their plastic hoods thrown back, talking and laughing furious, face-crushing laughter as the rain pours down on their heads. They’ve been there a month. I try to catch somebody’s eye to wish them luck, like I usually do. But nobody looks up in the rain.