Chokepoint

Last year, I spoke with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism. It’s a book about artists and technology and platforms and how different kinds of distribution and creation tools create chokepoints for different companies to capture value that might otherwise go to artists and creators. In other words, it’s a lot of Decoder stuff.As we were prepping this episode, the Decoder team realized it previews a lot of things we’re going to talk about in 2023: antitrust law; Ticketmaster;…

Major marine chokepoints analyzed in this study: (A) Panama Canal, (B) Gibraltar Strait, (C) English Channel, (D) Danish Straits, (E) Bosporus Strait, (F) Suez Canal, (G) Bab el Mandeb Strait, (H) Strait of Hormuz, (I) Malacca Strait, (J) Lombok-Makassar Strait, (K) Ombai Strait, (L) South China Sea, and (M) East China Sea. Light gray lines are ORNL (2000) international shipping lanes dataset used to calculate shortest routes between principal ports for…

In the early 1990s, Prince started appearing in public with the word “slave” scrawled across his cheek. The facepaint was a protest against Warner Music, who had signed Prince when he was just 18, and had the power to dictate the pace of his creative output as well as owning the rights to it. Prince managed to escape his original contract – partly by changing his recording name to an unpronounceable squiggle – but remained distrustful of the industry that had “enslaved” him until his death, hiding the master recordings of…