Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money

"Break ‘Em Up is a law professor’s history of anti-monopoly law: how we came to stop enforcing it, why we should continue to enforce it, and what we should do about it. Zephyr does a lot of MEGO unraveling. For example, she introduces an idea out of labor economics called ‘chickenization.’ In America, there are three poultry processors who have bought out all the poultry processors that competed with them. These three poultry processors have colluded to divide up the country, like the pope dividing the New World. If you’re a poultry farmer, there’s only one poultry processor that will buy your birds, so that poultry processor has you over a barrel. When you enter a deal with the poultry processor, they say: “You have to buy your chicks from us. These are the vets you’re allowed to use and the medicines the vets are allowed to give them. This is the food you’re allowed to give them and how often you’re allowed to feed them. Here is the coop that you have to build. This is how often the lights go on, and this is when the lights go off.” They control everything about your raising of those birds except for the price. The price is determined the day you bring the birds to market. The poultry processor uses their overview of the entire market to pay you just enough money to roll over your loans and do it again next year. It’s never enough to get ahead. Anyone who speaks out against the poultry processors is struck off and blacklisted, and this is comprehensive. When someone who spoke at a state hearing on these processes was struck off and became a coop repairman, the processor said “anyone who hires this guy to fix their coop will also be struck off.” “You’re not going to shop your way out of a monopoly” The term chickenization describes what is formally called a monopsony: when there’s a powerful buyer instead of a powerful seller. No one knows this word because there isn’t a family-destroying board game with this name. This monopsonistic market appears in many different sectors. It’s the motif of the tech sector. Think of Uber, where you have to supply the car; you have to drive it the way they tell you; and everything you do is scripted, down to the finest details. But you don’t know how much you’re going to get paid until you pick up your fare. Amazon drivers have machines watching their faces and their eyeballs. The company can dock their pay if they fail to comport themselves facially in the way they’re supposed to. Their payment is determined post facto, unilaterally, by the employer. This is a very powerful employer that wields a lot of political influence. This is the kind of thing Zephyr unravels. It resembles the creative labor market on the platform. If you work for YouTube or TikTok as a performer, your boss is an algorithm that docks your weekly pay packet according to which of its rules you’ve broken. It will not tell you what the rules are, so that you are more likely to keep breaking them. You invest your own money and spend weeks producing a video, and the algorithm doesn’t show it to anyone—not even the people who follow you—because it violated a rule. This looks a lot like Uber, the poultry market, and many labor markets. Zephyr Teachout is her real name, by the way. It’s an old Quaker name. She’s a hard-fighting lawyer who started out in copyright law and is now a law professor. I know her through the Netroots, which was the insurgency within the Democratic Party of Gen Xers around the time of the Kerry v. Bush elections in 2004. A bunch of people who understood the internet said, “Let’s get the Democratic Party to use the internet well.” The Dean campaign, especially, was a test case for this. I’ve known Zephyr for a very long time. Zephyr concludes this book with an important note about individual choices. She says that you’re not going to shop your way out of a monopoly any more than you’re going to recycle your way out of a climate emergency. If you allow the dogma of individual responsibility to override your common sense intuition that these are systemic societal problems, then you will be paralyzed. If you’re on your way to protest the labor conditions in your local Amazon factory, but you never make it because you drive around for hours looking for artisanal magic markers with which to make your protest sign because you don’t want to buy them on Amazon—Amazon wins. It’s the difference between being a vegan and having orthorexia. Being a vegan is about making some choices to make your little corner of the world a little better. Having orthorexia is being so maniacally concerned with making sure you eat in a specific way that sometimes you don’t even eat. Instead of taking systemic action to improve animal welfare or agriculture and the climate, you sit there worrying endlessly about the composition of your macronutrients and the names and labor conditions of the people who picked your soybeans. We should care about that stuff. But if you care about that at the micro level to the exclusion of macro change, then the other side wins and you lose."