Replying to Avatar Cory Doctorow

The DC Willingham bargained with at the turn of the century isn't the DC he bargains with now. Back then, DC was still subject to a modicum of discipline from competition; its corporate owner's shareholders had not yet acquired today's appetite for meteoric returns on investment of the sort that can only be achieved through wage-theft and price-gouging.

In the years since, DC - like so many other corporations - participated in an orgy of mergers as its sector devoured itself.

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Cory Doctorow 2y ago

The collapse of comics into a duopoly owned by studios from an oligopoly had profound implications for the entire sector, from comic shops to comic cons. Monopoly breeds monopoly, and the capture of the entire comics distribution system by a single company - #Diamond.

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Cory Doctorow 2y ago

That coincided with the capture of the entire digital comics market by a single company, #Amazon, who enshittified its #Comixology division, driving creators and publishers into #KindleDirectPublishing, a gig-work platform that replicates the company's notoriously exploitative labor practices for creative workers. Today, Comixology is a ghost-town, its former employees axed in a mass layoff earlier this year:

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-layoffs-comixology-1850007216

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