Cory Doctorow has been doing important work as a technology critic and activist for decades now. His recent nonfiction book Chokepoint Capitalism (2022), co-authored with Rebecca Giblin, crystallizes many of the key insights and arguments he has espoused in his blog Pluralistic — a must-read resource for understanding the entrenched injustices and dysfunctions of late-stage capitalism, particularly as it relates to concentrated technology markets.
Organized into two sections, Chokepoint Capitalism documents first the way that creative labor markets — especially in music and writing — have been captured by Big Tech “middlemen,” then lays out a potential roadmap of suggestions for recapturing those markets and instituting systemic reform. Readers of Pluralistic will find many of the arguments familiar, but the book usefully structures them into an eye-opening history, detailing how corporate villains — such as Amazon, Audible, and Spotify — systematically disempowered creatives by concentrating markets, capturing regulators, and seizing the profit-making potential of art for themselves, at everyone else’s expense. More interesting, and slightly more hopeful, is the second half of the book, wherein ideas for much-needed reform are discussed. In 2026, some of these suggestions feel over-optimistic — influenced perhaps by the short-lived antitrust fervor of the Biden interregnum — but they are still convincing arguments for change that one can only hope will start to take root when the pitchforks finally come out and the political pendulum finally, finally swings in back in a fairer direction.
