The age of extraction : how tech platforms conquered the economy and threaten our future prosperity / Tim Wu.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 * Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu ( The Attention Merchants ) explains how we can reclaim control and create a balanced economy that works for everyone.

"The magic of Tim Wu's The Age of Extraction is its simplicity. Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age--the unaccountable power of tech platforms--into such digestible pieces that the solutions for what to do become dead obvious. Essential reading."--Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

"It's not just in your head--your online life is draining your wallet.... [ The Age of Extraction is] a sharp and eye-opening introduction to how we arrived at platform capitalism--where no good click goes unmonetized."-- Kirkus Reviews

Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?

Tim Wu--the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an Internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead. Wu frames our current moment with lessons from recent history--from generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movements--and envisions a future where technological advances can serve the greatest possible good. Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for taking back control in order to achieve a better economic balance and prosperity for all.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Wu (Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology, Columbia Law Sch.; The Curse of Bigness) argues that tech platforms are helping build unbalanced economies that favor elites over the lower and middle classes. Technology brings people together, but the platforms and companies behind it are not neutral, as their benefits often reflect status-quo economic power structures. Wu takes an expansive view of tech platforms for housing and healthcare, plus mega-companies such as AT&T and IBM. He describes simple tech platform economics and then moves to the advantages and disadvantages of platform growth as they've evolved to hold users' attention and monetize their data. Under current models, platforms can grow into monopolies that stagnate because they have no incentive to innovate. This consolidation can lead to economic resentment, which fosters disillusionment with democracy and the rise of authoritarianism. In this context, Wu also examines AI and postulates future scenarios. Ultimately, Wu argues that government can redistribute tech platforms' power in a way that benefits the middle class and workers and abolish tech monopolies without fully redistributing wealth. VERDICT An engaging argument for anti-monopolization. Recommended for readers interested in the economics of technology.--Rebekah Kati

Publishers Weekly Review

Big tech is rapidly consolidating its economic power, according to this unsettling study from legal scholar Wu (The Attention Merchants). Unlike the internet's first prominent platforms, which brought together buyers and sellers, sparking innovation and reducing costs, today's dominant tech firms, Wu contends, have turned to extraction--data mining and selling, and building systems designed to maximize data-assisted targeting of users. Along the way, they've relied on time-tested monopolistic schemes like buying up competitors. The result, Wu explains, is a system that's hard for upstarts to crack even as services degrade and prices rise. While much of this has been covered by others, Wu takes an alarming extra step, showing how the monopolistic, extractive logic of the internet economy is invading the economy at large as more industries adopt (or are targeted by) new technologies. Examples include the housing market and, most startlingly, the medical industry, which is undergoing a wave of concentration under private equity firms that have implemented onerous new "practice platforms" for doctors. Wu asserts that these industries' capitulations to tech are canaries in the coal mine, signaling an emergent "platform capitalism" that threatens to create a two-tiered economy with extractive platforms on top and everyone else below. Wu (the original coiner of "net neutrality") outlines some canny legal means to avoid this bleak future. It's an urgent wake-up call. (Nov.)

Booklist Review

Columbia University law professor Wu, a longtime advocate of net neutrality, argues that today's massively influential platforms, once seen as forces for good--for example, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, but even, say, large medical and real-estate companies--have become exquisitely fine-tuned to extract data, attention, and profit margins from their users. No news there really, but Wu further postulates that, without attentive public governance, these platforms can foster conditions conducive to societal breakdown and the emergence of authoritarian strongmen through a five-step process: monopolization, extraction, emergence of mass resentment, democratic failure, and the rise of the strongman. The most effective response, writes Wu, would be to reframe these platforms as, "for better or worse, the utilities of public life," and thus to supervise them as governments already do with established utility companies--for instance, imposing rules of conduct and capping earnings. Wu's clarion call, which might be nearly impossible to hear above Big Tech's deafening stampede into AI, is no less consequential.

Kirkus Book Review

It's not just in your head--your online life is draining your wallet. Have you noticed yourself spending more time immersed in social media, web searches, and purchasing? Wu, an award-winning author, professor at Columbia University, and policy advocate, knows that is no accident. Technology has transformed our marketplaces into ubiquitous, addicting platforms, designed to capture our attention and extract wealth. "Wealth extraction" means taking money from everyone, on all sides of a transaction, raking in maximum profits for platform owners. Descended from the ancient city square, platforms including Amazon, Google, Meta, and corporations serving medical and housing needs are engineered to be both essential and unavoidable, extracting hidden fees. Wu takes a hard look at the intertwined political, economic, and technological histories that led to the rise of dominant platforms and their techniques to ensnare us and keep us engaged and buying. Platform owners understand that resisting convenience is very difficult and leverage this to keep us online. Early internet developers aimed to empower everyone, but large computer companies became monopolies, requiring the creation of anti-monopolistic policies to modulate their power. Another alarming theme is the rise of ChatGPT and large language models. To evolve, they require large quantities of data generated by human interactions with platforms--another form of extraction. Though he points to the dangers and unfairness of economic inequality, Wu doesn't paint an entirely gloomy picture but does encourage us to recognize and take control back from platforms practicing excessive wealth extraction. Wu covers a lot of territory in this brisk, 30,000-foot view of platforms entwined with our economic lives. The message is to look up from our screens and be cognizant of the extractive environment that surrounds us. Plentiful endnotes and an index will guide those wishing to dig deeper. A sharp and eye-opening introduction to how we arrived at platform capitalism--where no good click goes unmonetized. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.