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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