And, of course, if all that isn’t enough and a new player is somehow able to enter their kill zone, these behemoths know exactly what to do. Venture capitalists know that too, making them cautious about where they invest, and thus making it even more difficult for nascent competitors to get a toehold. All this explains why supracompetitive profits (like Google’s with YouTube) aren’t enough to attract new entrants like the Chicago School still insists they will.

This shows that simply blaming Big Tech for bankrupting culture workers is too blinkered a view. All large firms with excessive power use it to divert maximum value to shareholders and executives: it’s the chokepoints that are the problem. If we really want to make a difference to what ends up in creators’ pockets, that’s what we have to target.

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.

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.