Cory Doctorow's next book: Chokepoint Capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Cory Doctorow's next book: Chokepoint Capitalism

twitter.com

100 pointsatakan_gurkan61 comments

I have feelings about Cory Doctorow's writing style For context, my first book of his was also my first book in english, which is great because i was 12 and he hapens to write relatively simple english. The book was Little Brother. The story or the specific book isn't really important here, because from i can tel from reading his other available work now that i am fluent in english, in my opinion Cory isn't that great of an author. He just happens to write checkout-line pocket-format quality books that happen to be tangentially related to IT.

Specififcally, he writes about common fears (often grounded in reality) sysadmins have about the future, but turned up to 11 and always somehow involving the US gov and agents from three letter agencies. My point isn't that he's wrong, that's a matter of opinion and truth be told, the events he describes are good fiction even if they had 0 chance of happening. My problem is that Cory is, at best, just a mid author that has good ideas but doesn't know how to write well enough to articulate them in a manner that is entertaining to read. He also happens to be one of the only authors that writes for the sysadmin crowd, which is i guess what has given him his popularity.

Personally, i enjoyed reading him when i was a teenager who thought i was a Hacker for downloading kali and who was bad at english, but i fail to see the appeal for anyone who is an adult.

Maybe he's justv not for me. I don't know.

A lot of best selling authors are very mediocre writers. Look at James Patterson.

Writing "approachably," in your case so approachable that the book can serve as a sort of introduction to English, is an underrated and under-appreciated skill.

I am not a fan of writers like Dan Brown or James Patterson, who seem to write badly, but I think Doctorow is making a choice to write approachably, not badly. His non-fiction writing on his blog seems to demonstrate mastery of the language, and his books work very well as audiobooks, which is a mark (in my opinion) of a stylistic choice.

In my opinion, his zealotry sometimes overpowers the stories he tells, but usually I find the stories engaging and the writing good.

Depends on what you're looking for.

Do you want standard English syntax, grammar, punctuation and capitalization, with simple words, short sentences and coherent paragraphs? Cory does this well.

Or do you appreciate an eccentric, experimental style where structural idiosyncrasies complement the text?

Do you want a straightforward, linear transcript of the plot? Cory does this well.

Or do you want a meandering exposition of the inner lives of the characters, where the plot emerges from a faceted exploration of multiple perspectives, not all of which are accurate or reliable?

I read Cory's stuff for the ideas more than language or technique.

For example, his book "Walk Away" applies concepts from open-source software development and extends them to the physical world.

If you don't like the features or direction of a project, fork it and make it what you want. If you don't like your town or neighborhood, walk away and build a new community the way you want it. No need for stress or conflict or violence, no need for coercion, just walk away.

Or you could read for free the meticulously documented House report on antitrust, available today:

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-117HPRT47832/pdf/CP...

The list of big tech acquisitions at the end is frightening.

Someone list them here for those who don't want to run the PDF?

Far too long to list in a comment. Starts on page 344 if you're interested. Lists acquisitions by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Goes back as far as the first acquisition of each company (I think - Apple's first listed acquisition is 1988).

I don't know how I offended Cory, but all I see is a wall of

  You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets. Learn more

He's broken the web, all by himself.

I hardly think breaking twitter is breaking "the web," especially when the content is also available on the actual web: https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/17/chokepoint-capitalism/#au...

You're only blocked if Twitter knows who you are, so just open the link incognito.

That was very helpful, thanks!

> a broken link and weird marketing language that's clearly not coming from Doctorow, it's like that Metal Gear 2 ending when the Colonel starts to speak in gibberish

This was the alt text for one of the images, which I accidentally pasted into the tweet. It's not "marketing language" - it's a blurb. I try to include alt text for all my images, but the thread composing tool I was using (chirr) had a glitch and I didn't see that in the preview.

>Under laws like the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, giving someone a tool to remove DRM is a felony, punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500k fine.

>This means that when you sell your audiobooks on Audible, you lock them to Audible's platform...forever. 9/

This seems to be untrue. You selling elsewhere does not give anyone the ability to bypass DRM does it?!

Literally the next sentence:

> If another company offers you a better deal for your creative work and you switch, your audience can't follow you to the new company without giving up all the audiobooks they've bought to date. That's a lot to ask of listeners!

It's not the original copies of your content that are locked forever: it's the copies that Audible has sold to your readers.

That's not true though, is it? You can just give them copies on the new platform for free can't you? How is doing that illegal?

I'd like to see it as compulsory (if I pay for format X eg audio, I should have a right to it on any platform). But there is no law that says an author etc cannot give away otherwise legal copies...

The author probably wouldn't want to give away free copies to everyone. If somebody came up with a tool that could scan your kindle library and allow the author to license and distribute new copies if you already bought the book on Kindle that would be legal. As a coordination issue between platforms, publishers an authors, this might be impossible to do at scale.

The key word is, "them". How do you figure out who has bought your book?

There are a few methods, and none of them are great:

1. You include an access key in the content of your audiobook. This means your listeners hear an ad for the thing they already own. It also means providing a single global access key to your book (accessible by everyone), unless you convince Audible/Amazon to give every customer a different audio file (with a unique product key).

2. You coordinate with Audible/Amazon to have them send their customers an email with special access to your DRM-free copy (read: competition). Good luck.

3. You get Audible/Amazon to send their customers' email address to you, so you can send them a link to your DRM-free copy. Same as #2, but with a privacy violation.

I have to say there is something slightly uncanny about a tweet chain that starts with a criticism of 'chokepoint capitalism' in the first person seamlessly transitioning into an ad for the book itself, stickers and pins with a broken link and weird marketing language that's clearly not coming from Doctorow, it's like that Metal Gear 2 ending when the Colonel starts to speak in gibberish

I remember Baudrillard being angry about his books being featured in the Matrix, because he thought the Matrix was the exact kind of movie that the Matrix itself would make. This is the kind of energy that Doctorow, Naomi Klein (No Logo) etc. have

The guy has turned into a composer of polemics. [1]

[1]: e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/14664570728711249...

This is completely unrelated to what is under discussion and an extreme-right dogwhistle besides. Surely you can do better?

I'm suggesting his new book is also probably full of polemics.

I used to like him when I was younger, and have fond memories of reading one of his novels (Little Brother [1]) as a teenager.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_nov...

The (bias) issues with crime statistics are well-documented and well-understood (even within actual police and secret service agencies). This is not polemic - what is polemic is how to fix that (and whether or not we should, given that the police is generally of the opinion that "it works acceptably so we should not fix it further"), which this chain doesn't really touch upon.

The polemic part is that he's says driving as a non-white person is a de facto crime in the US, which is of course utterly untrue. As a non-white person, I'm sure I would've known if that was the case.

(Also, I had linked to the wrong tweet in the thread. I've corrected it now.)

I don't see anything controversial with that statement. I think that you are mixing de jure and de facto.

No, I'm not. It's clearly not a de facto crime. How many non-white Americans get sentenced merely because of driving?

De Facto describes situations that exist in reality (in fact), even if they are not legally recognised. Sundown towns exist in reality regardless of the law, and non-whites driving through them can face harassment and even arrest or prosecution for no other reason than being non-white while driving. The reason given for the arrest or prosecution will be a book crime, but that's not the actual factual (de facto) reason for it happening.

> driving through them can face

As De Facto as getting hit by lightning. Let's leave the polemics out.

> How many non-white Americans get sentenced merely because of driving?

Arresting non-white Americans merely for driving isn't de jure but your question presuppose that it is or that someone her is claiming that it is(nobody is). Can't get any more obvious that you are mixing de jure and de facto.

I like Cory, he isn't just a leftist but what I would call sjw light so I usually take everything coming from him with a big chunk of salt

> and an extreme-right dogwhistle besides

What do you mean? Why extreme right, and what, exactly, is a dogwhistle (i.e. the code word/phrase) in the parent comment?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

The tweet chain clearly explains what the book is about, and it is not a criticism of capitalism as a whole (as valid as that may be). It is a criticism of large publishers exploiting people who actually make things.

>It is a criticism of large publishers exploiting people who actually make things.

if that is what it was you wouldn't be able to order the thing on Amazon. So potent is his criticism of Audible, Amazon is actually willing to deliver it straight to your door.

No, what it really is is more perverse, resistance repackaged as consumption itself, keeping up the illusion that you're doing something meaningful by buying that book. This is of course the dominant mode now in the #resistance genre (of all political or ideological colors)

He clearly explains the difference between Amazon-the-internet-book-shop and Audible, i.e. the first doesn't force DRM on its ebooks, the second does.

This is called recuperation, and it's fairly common. Rather than censoring ideas, capitalism just turns them into another commodity and dilutes their potency.

The Black Mirror episode Fifteen Million Merits shows exactly how it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

Subscribe to Netflix to find out more about it. You really can't get away from it.

I mean, you can always sail the seven seas, amirite?

So disappointing from a writer who I used to admire.

There's always room for renegotiating the allocation of profits, especially when new technologies unsettle established norms. But Doctorow's arguments depends on an idiosyncratic view of monopoly power and a romanticized vision of the struggle between artists and publishers/distributors, whose contributions to creative economies are often illegible to most observers. Tweet twenty-six reads:

> These monopolies have captured every sector of the economy - from beer and pro-wrestling to health insurance and finance:

> https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-n...

Beer? There's no way to conceive of monopoly power that means anything and also includes beer, at least in the USA. I started to do some research, but the idea that beer is imperiled by consolidation is so contrary to my every day experience that I feel trolled.

Nonetheless, I decided to check the link to the "Anti-Monopoly Basics" page at the "Open Markets Institute" website, which immediately moves from anti-monopoly rhetoric to a more defensible "industries are getting more consolidated" position: "There are many indicators that economic concentration is increasing", "Nearly every marketplace in America is vastly more consolidated than a generation ago", before pivoting back to the original idea with their list of "monopolies", which is mostly a list of industries with dominant but not seriously monopolistic players. Worse, their list zooms in and out of the map, sometimes considering international competitors and other times ignoring them to make dominant American firms seem more threatening than they are. Some examples:

- Defense Contractors: "Since 1993, consolidation has reduced the number of large defense firms from 107 to five." Five large firms sounds like a reasonably competitive market. Obviously collusion is possible, but that's not alleged here, merely that five competing firms amounts to a monopoly.

- Food Service: "In 2015, the FTC and Justice Department successfully blocked a proposed merger of Sysco and U.S. Foods, the two biggest companies in the food services industry. Since then, the two companies have continued to consolidate nonetheless, as Sysco acquired North Star Seafood and U.S. foods acquired Cara Donna Provision Co." Hard to know what threat this poses when there's no denominator, no sense of scale.

- Cowboy Boots: "Four of the biggest brands – Justin Boots, Tony Lama, Nocona, and Chippewa – are all owned by Berkshire Hathaway." No denominator. Four brands out of how many? What percentage of the market do they take up? WAIT A MINUTE, don't cowboy boots compete against other types of footwear? Are "mystery novel monopolists" a thing too?

- Appliances: "Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators. Maytag also controls the Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, and KitchenAid brands and holds a dominant position over supply of Sears Kenmore products." First of all, look at those error bars ("50 to 80 percent"!). But more importantly, here they are zooming in on the USA market, when this is simply a global market.

- Internet Searches: "Google controls 64 percent of all desktop searches and 94 percent of all global and mobile tablet searches." Ok, I'll give them this one.

If this organization reflects Doctorow's evidentiary standards, I'm not interested.

Having a friend who ran a bar opened my eyes to market consolidation in the beer industry, but a quick web search turns up information on market consolidation[0] too.

You write as if the concept of the dangers of market consolidation is new to you, although I'm skeptical. For readers seeking to know more about the ways monopoly power can be corrosive, try reading Matt Stoller[1]. His book Goliath was eye-opening for me.

0. https://theweek.com/articles/736059/what-beer-reveals-about-...

1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/about

I didn't mean to give off a faux-naif vibe. I'm aware that people are concerned about market consolidation as such, but I'm not impressed. Anti-monopolists like Stoller lack rigor. They often zoom in and out of geographical focus to make their points, carve industries and products up in bizarre ways to do the same, and typically make their case on short time horizons.

I promise, I hate, e.g., the local cable internet monopoly as much as anyone, but Starlink and our municipal fiber initiative are going to crush them. That's not to say there's never a role for government intervention, but I think we're all much better off approaching the exercise of that power with caution, and more likely to make headway against the purported social ills if we stop shadowboxing against consolidation.

Regarding the beer industry, the article you linked from TheWeek[0] is mostly hand-waving. Put aside the fact that I can (and do) buy %90 of my beer now from one of the dozen local to local-ish New England breweries near my small town. Put aside the fact that I have more options than ever, at competitive inflation-adjusted prices [1]. It makes the case that several giants dominate the mass-market beer business, fine. But what are the harms of that consolidation? It alleges:

- "a long decline in beer prices reversed over the last few years" (see my footnote 1)

- "AB InBev [one of the beer giants] is even buying up beer reviewing websites and delivery operations now." and "if a massive brewer can own a stake in a major beer rating site, it could well influence what beers that outfit recommends to customers in the first place." (emphasis mine)

And that's it. The stake in the review website is kind of gross, I agree, but I find that hard to lay at the feet of market consolidation.

0. https://theweek.com/articles/736059/what-beer-reveals-about-...

1. The 2017 NYT article linked by TheWeek is evidence against this, but only weak evidence. I didn't have time to dig deeply into it, but noticed that it raises the alarm based on a small price increase over a very short timescale. Moreover, it merely assumes that consolidation is driving that price increase.

So your argument is what, that we don't have extreme enough monopolies in every sector?

At what point do corporate consolidation and vertical integration become enough of a problem that we need to do something?

I think you have a misplaced focus on the (unfortunately popular) word, "monopoly". A true monopoly is the problem we are facing brought to its absolute extreme. We may not be seeing many instances of literal monopoly, but we are still experiencing anti-competitive behavior that has the same structure and effect that monopoly has. We shouldn't wait until literal "monopoly" happens to stop anti-competitive practices.

My argument is that:

1) Consolidation as such is not intrinsically dangerous, especially when "consolidation" refers to "five large firms."

2) The Open Markets Institute website doesn't provide actual evidence of anti-competitive behavior. Instead, they use "monopoly" as an inaccurate scare word to muster a factually defective narrative about the source of social ills.

Their website enumerates actual anti-competitive practices for 2/36 industry headings (pharmaceuticals and automobile components). The rest just promote a simple idea, "big is bad," using an extremely flexible definition of what constitutes a market (where cowboy boots is only the most comical example).

Monopolies are qualitatively different than duopolies, to say nothing of quintopolies. It's not a smooth gradient of danger. Highly consolidated industries deserve more scrutiny, but they are not obviously and inevitably dangerous, especially in a globally competitive market.

I am against anti-competitive practices, and absolutely happy to discuss specific instances of those. But the lack of rigor here means I can't take Doctorow or the OMI seriously.

Feels a bit odd to rail against tech companies extracting dollars from artists, and then use Amazon, Kickstarter and PayPal as a sales mechanism. Could be worse I guess.

Edit: included Amazon as he is also selling his product through it.

https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...

Oh the tiresome "you can't use what you're fighting against" trope. Yawn.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon. It’s like a PETA selling furs to support their anti-fur campaign.

In martial arts, it would be called using your opponents weight against them.

If your opponent is also gaining some revenue in your theoretical situation, sure.

The ultimate point of the book is to gather support for legislation that would give teeth to antitrust. It needs to reach sufficiently many people for that, and only the likes of Amazon can provide that kind of outreach. If it succeeds, the meager profits off the book that Amazon will skim in the process won't matter. Of course, whether it succeeds or not is a gamble, but it's a reasonable one.

In what sense is Doctorow himself causing the same sort of suffering against which he's inveighing? The parallel makes no sense.

Doctorow does not sell only on Amazon[0]. He also has a history of giving his books away for free[1], and insists on every release of his books in any format being DRM-free. Since those are the issues he is passionate about, that doesn't seem hypocritical to me.

It's more like PETA protesting in front of shops that sell furs, rather than only in places where people are already 100% anti-fur. Which... they probably do. Obviously.

0. https://craphound.com/shop/

1. https://craphound.com/makers/download/

Honestly comments like this really depress me. Maybe consider why you immediately have knee jerk thoughts about why this is bad or hypocritical and negative and reflect on that

As I said in another comment:

> You can pre-order the book on Amazon. It’s like a PETA selling furs to support their anti-fur campaign.

It's really not.

Fur doesn't have a near-monopoly on "raising funds for charity".

Like it or not, Amazon is the place most people in the US, and much of the West, go to when they're looking for books.

It's much more like paying for a newspaper ad in the early 1900s to promote your anti-newspaper radio station.

He does not need to sell his anti-Amazon book on Amazon, it is laughably hypocritical and goes against his entire message in his Twitter announcement:

> it's an action-oriented look at how tech and entertainment monopolies steal creators' incomes, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and pay artists

Let’s just agree to disagree though.

That's not hypocritical. A hypothetical example of him being hypocritical would be if he owned an comparable business to Amazon and enacted the same practices he complained about Amazon doing.

Congratulations on being very intelligent. Well done. Good job, even.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Crikey. That comic is nearly 6 years old now. Heck, it was at least 16 years ago that Tom Morello pointed out:

> When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that's where people buy their books. We're not interested in preaching to just the converted. It's great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it's also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060526032423/http://www.ratm.d...

Doctorow himself has also said that he'd like to be able to sell his anti-Amazon audiobooks on Amazon - if Amazon would agree do so without DRM. Because that's where a lot of his customers are.

It's just that he, the author, doesn't want DRM on his audiobooks, and neither do his customers. He sells his audiobooks without DRM to his customers through other channels. All he wants from Amazon is for it to be a reseller, selling the thing he has to sell, to the people who want to buy it, in the place that people buy and sell things.

You can pre-order his anti-Amazon book on Amazon. You don’t need to sell your book on Amazon just to live in a capitalist society. To me this is hypocrisy, but I guess not everybody agrees.

https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...

> You can pre-order his anti-Amazon book on Amazon.

Um, yes, I know?

What's your point there, exactly?

I was specifically talking about the audiobook version. It's right there, in the comment I wrote.

> You don’t need to sell your book on Amazon just to live in a capitalist society.

He doesn't just sell his books to live. He makes most of them available for free to download on his website. e.g. https://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

He sells a lot of his books to spread a message. If you're spreading a message, the important thing is that it gets to as many people as possible. And it's important that it gets to lots of people who haven't yet heard that message yet. That means lowering the barrier for people who aren't yet invested in the message to be able to hear it. It means spreading the message to people who don't know how terrible Amazon are, to people who do most of their shopping on Amazon and wouldn't even think to look anywhere else to find a copy of the message.

Sure, it's great if the insular group of people who've already boycotted Amazon can get a copy of his anti-Amazon book on not-Amazon, and all clap themselves on the back about how smart they are for having already boycotted Amazon. Yay, us! But that doesn't spread the message to anyone else. It won't change any new minds. It won't change public opinion. It can't be part of a movement.

Sorry but “he has to sell his anti-Amazon book on Amazon” is delusional, cognitive dissonance in action.

OK, to make up some ballpark numbers, assume Amazon make roughly $1/book sold, and 20% of the sales of Chokepoint Capitalism on Amazon will get the anti-Amazon message to someone who hasn't heard it before.

The question then becomes, given how awful Amazon is, is it justifiable to fund Amazon by $5 to get someone new to seriously reconsider their whole future lifetime usage of Amazon, and possibly to join the anti-Amazon crusade? (Basically, it's a trolley problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem )

And there are plenty of reasons that the answer might be "No". I think it's reasonable for someone to say that funding Amazon, by any amount, for any reason, no matter the outcome, is inherently immoral and unjustifiable.

Or, someone could reasonably say that it might be moral in some circumstances, but not at that price. Or that my numbers are wrong, my price is way off, and at the actual price of $X/convert (for whatever value of X they come up with) it's wrong.

Or, I think someone could reasonably say, "Yes", at that price, it's worth it.

I even think someone could reasonably say "I can't decide if it's worth it, and I refuse to choose."

I think reasonable people can disagree about where the line is. Your position appears to be pretty firmly on the "Never" side of that line, and while I don't agree with your conclusion, I don't think that part of your position is unreasonable.

However, I think that labelling anyone who doesn't agree with you as "delusional, cognitive dissonance in action" is unreasonable, and lacks a certain amount of empathy. I think it's also unproductive, in that it's unlikely to make anyone who doesn't agree with you to even listen to your counterargument (did you make one?), let alone consider it seriously.

OTOH, if your goal is not actually to convince anyone to listen to you, but to just bathe smugly in the warm feeling of moral superiority, you're doing fine.

> When you live in a capitalistic society...

Aside: I thought the word for this was capitalistical.

<jk>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com