Cory Doctorow Wants You to Fight Big Tech
▻https://jacobin.com/2022/11/cory-doctorow-chokepoint-capitalism-monopoly-tech
We talked to author and activist Cory Doctorow about his new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, copyright scams, surveillance capitalism, the lies of Big Tech, and the fight for the freedom to create.
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Cory Doctorow:
We tell this story in the book about Uber drivers, and it’s interesting because Uber drivers are also in a chokepoint capitalist market. There are riders who want rides, and there are drivers who want to give rides. And then, in the middle, there’s this rent seeker, and there’s no way for drivers to reach riders without passing through the chokepoint that Uber has erected for itself. And they are the most atomized and vulnerable workers imaginable. They’re not even supposed to have any way to meet each other, let alone talk to each other or coordinate holistic action.
In California, these workers who are so atomized and so divided were forced by their contracts to sign off on something called binding arbitration. That means that if Uber steals from you, you’re not allowed to sue them. You can only go to an arbitrator, who’s a fake, corporate judge — someone who’s paid by Uber to decide whether Uber is guilty of screwing you over. Even if you convince them that Uber is screwing over workers — and statistically, it’s far more likely with these arbitrations that they find in favor of their paymasters than they do in in favor of the people their paymasters are said to have wronged — it’s administrative. It has no evidentiary value. There’s no precedent. The next person who comes along can’t cite your case in order to win theirs. This is all of great advantage to Uber, who immediately set about stealing wages from their drivers.
The drivers came together with technologists and a law firm and figured out how to automate arbitration claims. Now, for each arbitration claim the rewards that can be awarded to damaged parties are much smaller than you would get out of any courtroom. You’re not going to get punitive damages and so on. But they’re actually pretty expensive administratively. It costs a couple thousand dollars to pay the arbitrator to hear the case.
Thousands and thousands of Uber drivers all filed arbitration claims at once. In aggregate, the cost of paying the arbitrators, even if Uber won every one of those cases, would exceed the amount that they would have to pay if the drivers could just bring a straightforward class-action suit. And Uber, in an amazing turn, had to go to court and say, “Your honor, what kind of idiot would think that these binding arbitration clauses could possibly be enforceable? This is clearly unreasonable. It had no business being in his contract.”
They ended up paying the Uber drivers $150 million. This is the power of solidarity, even among these atomized workers. Solidarity combined with technology, combined with ingenuity, combined with coordination.
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Whether it’s pharma, finance, beer, athletic shoes, eyeglasses — every one of these is controlled by a cartel or an oligopoly or an oligopsony. In every circumstance, they’re hurting workers and customers and eroding our ability to make good policy. Because when there’s only three or four companies in a sector and it’s time to regulate them, it’s pretty easy for them to come together and come up with a common position and say, “Look, anything except this would mean the death of our industry.”
We need to figure out how to turn anger about all of these seemingly different issues into one movement. If we can figure out how to get people to recognize that they’re not angry about running shoes or cheerleading or professional wrestling or beer or eyeglasses — what they’re actually angry about is capitalist monopoly, and what they actually want is pluralism — then we have the basis for a mass movement that really can make political change.