Tohatoha invites you to join us for a conversation with renowned technology scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer Cory Doctorow about their new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, led by esteemed New Zealand academic, Dr Lindsey MacDonald.

Competition is supposed to be fundamental to capitalism. Over the last four decades though, greedy robber barons have worked out how to lock in customers and suppliers, eliminate competitors, and shake down everyone for more than their fair share. Chokepoint Capitalism is about why creative labour markets are rigged – and how to unrig them.

Māori academic Dr Lindsey MacDonald will lead this conversation with Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow to understand how the issues raised in this book are affecting and impacting Aotearoa New Zealand and provide an indigenous perspective in the discussion on how to break through these chokepoints in our local context.

WHEN: 1.00 - 2.00pm, Monday, 13 February

SPEAKERS
• Rebecca Giblin (@rgibli) is an ARC Future Fellow and professor at Melbourne Law School, where she leads interdisciplinary teams researching issues around creators’ rights, access to knowledge, and the regulation of technology and culture. She is director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) and heads up the Author’s Interest and eLending projects (https://authorsinterest.org; https://elendingproject.org), as well as Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project (https://untapped.org.au). Chokepoint Capitalism is her latest book. She also wrote Code Wars and co-edited What if we could reimagine copyright?

• Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) is a bestselling science fiction writer and activist. He is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with whom he has worked for 20 years. He is also a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University (UK) and of library science at the University of North Carolina. He is also a MIT Media Lab research affiliate. He co-founded the UK Open Rights Group and co-owns the website Boing Boing. He is the author of more than 20 books, including novels for adults and young adults, graphic novels for middle-grade readers, picture books, nonfiction books on technology and politics, and collections of essays.

• Dr Lindsey Te Ata o Tū MacDonald, Ngāi Tahu, is a senior lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Canterbury and a research associate of Kā Waimaero | Ngāi Tahu Centre. His research examines how to increase agency and dignity by paying attention to people’s diverse attitudes to politics in theory and practice. He tends to focus on research with Indigenous Peoples. In 2010, he became the Māori member of the University of Canterbury Human Ethics Committee and served as Chair between 2012 and 2016, and from 2022 is the Māori co-chair. In 2021 he was appointed to the National Ethics Advisory Committee for health and disability research and services.