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Cory Doctorow's next book: Chokepoint Capitalism

100 points by atakan_gurkan 4y ago

Barrin92 4y ago
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
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  The guy has turned into a composer of polemics. [1] [1]: e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/1466457072871124992 https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/14664570728711249...
  - krageon 4y ago
    This is completely unrelated to what is under discussion and an extreme-right dogwhistle besides. Surely you can do better?
    - cato_the_elder 4y ago
      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_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_nov...
      - krageon 4y ago
        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.
        cato_the_elder 4y ago
        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.)
        Kbelicius 4y ago
        I don't see anything controversial with that statement. I think that you are mixing de jure and de facto.
        cato_the_elder 4y ago
        No, I'm not. It's clearly not a de facto crime. How many non-white Americans get sentenced merely because of driving?
        simonh 4y ago
        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.
    - azangru 4y ago
      > 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?
  - lproven 4y ago
    You say that like it's a bad thing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- krageon 4y ago
  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.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >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)
    - klez 4y ago
      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.
    - erellsworth 4y ago
      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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
      - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        Subscribe to Netflix to find out more about it. You really can't get away from it.
        erellsworth 4y ago
        I mean, you can always sail the seven seas, amirite?
fmajid 4y ago
Or you could read for free the meticulously documented House report on antitrust, available today: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-117HPRT47832/pdf/CPRT-117HPRT47832.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-117HPRT47832/pdf/CP...
- csomar 4y ago
  The list of big tech acquisitions at the end is frightening.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Someone list them here for those who don't want to run the PDF?
    - vulcan01 4y ago
      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).
randomran01234 4y ago
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-Creative/dp/0807007064 https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...
- jasonvorhe 4y ago
  Oh the tiresome "you can't use what you're fighting against" trope. Yawn.
  - randomran01234 4y ago
    You can pre-order the book on Amazon. It’s like a PETA selling furs to support their anti-fur campaign.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      In martial arts, it would be called using your opponents weight against them.
      - joemazerino 4y ago
        If your opponent is also gaining some revenue in your theoretical situation, sure.
        int_19h 4y ago
        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.
    - 4y ago
themoonisachees 4y ago
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.
- erellsworth 4y ago
  A lot of best selling authors are very mediocre writers. Look at James Patterson.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  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.
- panarky 4y ago
LatteLazy 4y ago
>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?!
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  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.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    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...
    - anotherman554 4y ago
      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.
    - thomastjeffery 4y ago
      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.
deadpannini 4y ago
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-numbers 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.
mikewarot 4y ago
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.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  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/#audiobook https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/17/chokepoint-capitalism/#au...
- panarky 4y ago
  You're only blocked if Twitter knows who you are, so just open the link incognito.
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    That was very helpful, thanks!
cdoctorow 4y ago
> 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.

100 points by atakan_gurkan 4y ago

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

cato_the_elder 4y ago
The guy has turned into a composer of polemics. [1] [1]: e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/1466457072871124992 https://mobile.twitter.com/doctorow/status/14664570728711249...
- krageon 4y ago
  This is completely unrelated to what is under discussion and an extreme-right dogwhistle besides. Surely you can do better?
  - cato_the_elder 4y ago
    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_novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_nov...
    - krageon 4y ago
      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.
      - cato_the_elder 4y ago
        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.)
        Kbelicius 4y ago
        I don't see anything controversial with that statement. I think that you are mixing de jure and de facto.
        cato_the_elder 4y ago
        No, I'm not. It's clearly not a de facto crime. How many non-white Americans get sentenced merely because of driving?
        simonh 4y ago
        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.
  - azangru 4y ago
    > 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?
- lproven 4y ago
  You say that like it's a bad thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
krageon 4y ago
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.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >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)
  - klez 4y ago
    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.
  - erellsworth 4y ago
    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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      Subscribe to Netflix to find out more about it. You really can't get away from it.
      - erellsworth 4y ago
        I mean, you can always sail the seven seas, amirite?

fmajid 4y ago

Or you could read for free the meticulously documented House report on antitrust, available today: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-117HPRT47832/pdf/CPRT-117HPRT47832.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CPRT-117HPRT47832/pdf/CP...

csomar 4y ago
The list of big tech acquisitions at the end is frightening.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  Someone list them here for those who don't want to run the PDF?
  - vulcan01 4y ago
    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).

randomran01234 4y ago

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-Creative/dp/0807007064 https://www.amazon.ca/Chokepoint-Capitalism-Content-Captured...

jasonvorhe 4y ago
Oh the tiresome "you can't use what you're fighting against" trope. Yawn.
- randomran01234 4y ago
  You can pre-order the book on Amazon. It’s like a PETA selling furs to support their anti-fur campaign.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    In martial arts, it would be called using your opponents weight against them.
    - joemazerino 4y ago
      If your opponent is also gaining some revenue in your theoretical situation, sure.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        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.
  - 4y ago

themoonisachees 4y ago

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.

erellsworth 4y ago
A lot of best selling authors are very mediocre writers. Look at James Patterson.
pwinnski 4y ago
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.
panarky 4y ago

LatteLazy 4y ago

>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?!

thomastjeffery 4y ago
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.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  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...
  - anotherman554 4y ago
    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.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    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.

deadpannini 4y ago

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-numbers 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.

mikewarot 4y ago

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.

pwinnski 4y ago
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/#audiobook https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/17/chokepoint-capitalism/#au...
panarky 4y ago
You're only blocked if Twitter knows who you are, so just open the link incognito.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  That was very helpful, thanks!

cdoctorow 4y ago

> 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.