How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid
Cory Doctorow, Rebecca Giblin: Chokepoint Capitalism (AudiobookFormat, 2022, Beacon Press)
audio cd
Publié 19 septembre 2022 par Beacon Press.
This is the kind of topic that deserves the prestige of a book but where the ideas can fit in a blog post without losing anything important. Here, the length and examples are worthwhile. The show the scope of the problem in a way that is both interesting and enraging.
Using a broad set of examples from the creative fields (incl. publishing, news, music & screenwriting) this book goes into how corporations go about creating monopolies to lock in both their users and suppliers and why this is terrible for all of us.
In the first half of the book, Doctorow & Giblin do an amazing job of depressing their readers by bringing together the different strategies that are leading to such dire outcomes. Luckily, the second half goes into some of the strategies that we collectively can take to fight back against.
And of course, this wouldn't be a book that involves Doctorow if existing the DMCA and DRM wouldn't get all the hate they deserve. :D
Only a little preachy, this is a great primer on how monopolies have eaten much of our culture, and some ways we might be able to claw it back into the public domain.
Mit ihrem Buch "Chokepoint Capitalism" weisen Rebecca Giblin und Cory Doctorow auf eine Eigenheit des Plattformkapitalismus à la Amazon oder Google hin, die bisher meiner Wahrnehmung nach nicht so klar angesprochen wurde: Plattformen sind bewusst darauf hinentwickelt, nicht nur Monopolist (also einziger Anbieter für ihre Kunden) zu sein, sondern gleichzeitig Monopsonist (also einziger Nachfrager für die Anbieter z. B. der Buchbranche). Auf diese Weise können sie in ihren Märkten sowohl aus den Anbietern von Produkten als auch aus den Kunden das meiste Geld herauspressen und sämtliche Renditen abschöpfen. Ein wichtiges Buch, das mal einen neue Dysfunktionalität unseres (digitalen) Wirtschaftssystems aufschlüsselt.
If you are concerned about the way in which culture is being shaped by technology (and you should be), this book goes deep into the causes and explains how big tech is corrupting open culture in order to make a few billion bucks.
Very good state-of-the-world in a variety of fields. Timely. Funny. Amusing marketing (only releasing the chapter outlining the sins of Spotify as an audiobook on Spotify; only the chapter on Amazon via Kindle).
