The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Business, Economics, Politics, Audiobook, Law

224 pages, Hardcover

Published November 4, 2025

About the author

Tim Wu is an author, a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing writer for the New York Times.. He has written about technology in numerous publications, and coined the phrase "net neutrality."

Reviews

[Tim Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I put a lot of how I think we should run a country into the back half of this book.

[David Dayen · Rating 4 out of 5]

We just did a podcast on this. I really enjoyed the attempt to build an intellectual framework for the anti-monopoly movement.

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Wu is an American lawyer specializing in antitrust and professor at Columbia law school; his career highlights including advisory stints at the Federal Trade Commission and the National Economic Council under the Biden administration. He has also written several nonfiction books aimed at popular audiences, most notably 2010's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. The premise of his 2025 book The Age of Extraction appears to fall in line with his prior work and positions - discussing how tech that was meant to democratize and level the playing field has generally done the opposite and in doing so has led to harmful side effects. This isn't exactly a hot or novel take in 2025, though Wu writes concisely and persuasively. I did somewhat roll my eyes when he suggests blockchain as a potential panacea for restoring accountability to the system; this is similar to how I feel when the ultra-rich discover effective altruism as a solution their image problem. To be fair, there aren't really any low-hanging fruit solutions to tech platform inequality, so this book is more about articulating the problem than anything else.

Further reading: tech and inequality
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia
Power And Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agarwal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb

My statistics:
Book 346 for 2025
Book 2272 cumulatively

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

We need Lina Khan back like yesterday!

[Lisa Brandl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gave this five stars because it explains in a very understandable way how the tech sector has transformed to what it is today. I didn’t find it long or boring. It’s succinct. The author used past historical examples to bring the point home which at first I didn’t think was necessary but as I reached the end found it was a great way to tie things together. I think it’s a good primer for those not too enmeshed in the tech or economics of it all to understand the issues. There’s also a stray section on private equity which one could argue isn’t really needed for this book but I found super enlightening. I read this one after “En$hittification” by Cory Doctorow, which is also very good. I would start with “The Age of Extraction” first and then if you want a deeper dive, read Cory Doctorow’s book.

[Mike Hartnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and coherent theory but I wish he would have gone deeper on solutions. Really didn’t do much to expand on regulatory frameworks which seem like the most obvious next steps.

[Igor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternate title: "A centrist's argument for not rocking the Big Tech boat."

Wu has worked in politics, and it shows. He refuses to call out specific present-day policies, to the detriment of his own arguments. He pretends that the current Big Tech system can be solved with the right amount of economic incentives and "just do the right thing"-ism that would make even Aaron Sorkin gag. He takes at face value the claims of tech CEOs (particularly Sam Altman) and Big Business such that it's hard to take him seriously if you're not a billionaire.

I thought this book would be a good segue from Wu's "pal" Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification", but the tone and message are worlds apart.

Wu draws on examples that ignore important details, like when he says the US had close to an "equalitarian" society in the 1800s (as long as you ignored Black and Native citizens) or when the small OpenAI (which got funding from the world's richest man) beat Google to the AI market. Wu has some decent points, and I liked the history he provides in the first half of the book, but he's unwilling to take risks or think outside the box, which will lead us nowhere in late-stage capitalism. He's one sentence away from telling us to "write to your Senator" or sign a Change.org petition.

If you liked "Enshittification," skip this one; it's written like it's intended for policymakers who want to sound smart without losing their jobs or cracking down on Big Tech. If you thought "Enshittification" was too wild, then you may like this book, which essentially encourages the current status quo.

[Ja Quan · Rating 4 out of 5]

To preface, I had the opportunity of listening to Tim Wu speak at the Texas Book Festival and managed to get my copy signed by him. I was excited to inform him that I was working in Antitrust partly because of reading his previous book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, which I had also brought my copy of, which he signed "Keep fighting the Good Fight".

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity serves as a cautionary tale about the optimism of the early internet as a democratizing force, one in which "small is the new big" for business organization. With the clairvoyance of hindsight, this idealism was rather misguided, as the internet soon came to be dominated by an oligopoly of tech behemoths. How could this happen?

To understand, Wu explains what is the platform, a facilitator of interactions, be they economic, social, or other. To illustrate this, he alludes to the town square. Think of the agoras of Greece or the forum of Rome. These platforms were not owned per se, but drew together buyers and sellers and catalyzed transactions. The internet is much like these ancient platforms at a much greater scale. Problems may arise when these platforms are privately owned.

Take Amazon for example, the grand marketplace of the internet. It connects multitudes of buyers and sellers and allows sellers to outsource the complexities of logistics, shipping, web design, and advertising to the company, initially at much less cost than retail (~19% of sale price vs. ~50%). This allowed many entrepreneurs to fulfill their dreams, and served to promote the promise of an internet which serves the small. Unfortunately as Amazon entrenched itself as a necessary product (~90% of some small business' sales were through the Amazon Marketplace), it proceeded to hike up prices and fees knowing that its customers would not be able to switch away from the product they have come to depend upon (see Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It).

Wu argues that by promoting a balanced economy, one based on predistribution rather than redistribution, is the key to fulfilling the true potential for the internet. Taxation alone will not solve the problem in his view. He advocates for means like strong antimonopoly law and price neutrality laws to ensure no one platform can be able to extract value at no recompense. Wu spends one chapter talking about these solutions and explains to the reader that he is not going to offer a full economic program for that would need another book on its own. I honestly do not know why he did not expound upon concrete solutions, the book is only 177 pages long, any additions would not exactly turn it into a tome.

Overall, I feel the book serves as a good introduction to the dangers of these platform monopolies, though it does not manage to present any new ideas to the table. It felt like most of the footnotes directed the reader to read Wu's previous work, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. I do not know if that means I should or shouldn't read it considering most of the ideas are touched on in this book and clear to many. Wu also expounds on the idea that these platforms' modes of extraction are akin to feudal estates, an idea elaborated by Varoufakis in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism last year. That being said, I enjoyed reading this book and look forward to reading other works regarding the dangers of tech monopolies.

[Steve Brock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have selected this book as Stevo's Business Book of the Week for the week of 11/23, as it stands heads above other recently published books on this topic.

[Hugh]

Tim Wu's books have done as much to shape my understanding of the modern web as anything. He's able to connect dots in an unexpected way, teasing out ideas and themes about modern technology, business and law in a consistent way that no other writer does. Each book he publishes becomes my go-to for thinking about that subject. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires was prophetic in its vision of an internet dominated by a few corporate giants. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads is the a history of advertising, both offline and on.The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age shaped my understanding of antitrust law, both as intended and as used through the post-Bork years and into Lina Khan's trustbusting approach.

So when Wu writes about platform power, and the extractive economy, I'm in. And The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity is another banger. I opened the book expecting a more technical, nuanced and practical treatise about enshittification. I got that, but his reach is so much grander and sophisticated than (Wu's childhood friend) Cory Doctorow's shorthand. Platforms, Wu argues, are the antithesis of innovation. Online and offline, 'platform thinking' dominates modern business investment and threatens any future growth. Platforms enable extraction, enriching a narrow class at the expense of the lower class, increasing inequality.

In this NYPL discussion with Lina Khan, he describes platforms this way:

...the main buying and selling places and the main speaking places are all privately owned, sometimes by one person, sometimes corporations. They are all profit-seeking, they all have an incentive to try to extract as much fees and data and attention from you as possible, and they all just basically have an agenda of a kind that would seem so weird for, like, an ancient Greek or...someone from another civilization.

Wu doesn’t limit this thinking to tech platforms: he starts the platform concept with that of toll bridges and railroads, where a single operator controls the sole direct route between two points, with inelastic demand granting the operator the ability to raise the price astronomically. It's the same monopolistic thinking that tech companies engage in, from Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp, to Amazon squeezing, then illegally competing with their sellers, to Google buying Waze. Wu goes even wider, into how private equity firms extend the concept offline: a large property management company buying up rental housing stock and using algorithms and scale to raise rents without materially improving living conditions, or in healthcare, increasing rates for insurance companies, governments and patients, burning out healthcare providers and doing nothing to increase outcomes. 

The offline examples were the ones that stunned me. I didn't expect this book to be a refutation of Abundance, or to get so close to Megan Greenwell's Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream in its indictment of the role of private equity in the housing market.

As for solutions? Wu breaks out the antitrust lens again, as he has in the past: strong antimonopoly regulation (along with a more nuanced vision of what constitutes monopolistic power), a government that isn't beholden to capital. The timing is unfortunate — lots of this feels almost quaint with Trump in the White House, and tech companies going essentially unchecked.

Wu is a terrific thinker, and his strength lies not in coming up with new concepts, but in combining patterns and trends in new ways. The Age of Extraction is a striking example of this, a natural progression of Wu’s work that will have several 'aha' moments for those who’ve read his previous books.

It feels a little like a synthesis of the big data thinking of The Attention Merchants and the antitrust history of The Curse of Bigness, combined with the extractive technology thesis of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power and the depressing predictions of a closed, corporate internet in The Master Switch.

But even if you've never heard Wu's name before, this book is eye-opening and has the potential to transform the way you see the world.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed part one, which covered the rise of platforms and how they accumulate power. I had no major objections to the rest of the book, but it didn't feel as closely linked to the book's thesis.

Apparently Tim Wu and Cory Doctorow are long-time friends, and I think their books are fittingly complementary to each other. Extremely different vibes, but I understood each book more having read the other.

We must see that the problems of technological and economic marginalization are entwined. Technology has never been neutral, but rather reflects ideology and what it is designed to do. Today’s great tech platforms are impressive, entertaining, and convenient, but also designed to be some of history’s most advanced tools for extracting wealth and resources from the broader economy. Consequently, as they become essential to everything, we are at risk of building an economy that is perpetually unfair for most of humanity.

[Anshuman Swain · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 rounded down to 4.

A thought provoking book about the history and role of platforms and their impacts on our economy and society. The book is very well researched and focuses primarily on the tech platforms that have become prominent parts of our lives, and how they link to monopolization of business and economic power. The author then connects these themes back to what people have or have not done in the past to deal with such situations, and how we can learn from these instances to make the future better for everyone.

[Katelyn Eng · Rating 5 out of 5]

An econ-centered approach to the dominance of tech platforms in today’s economy. Very well organized and easy to follow as an audiobook. It was interesting to learn about how platformization impacts healthcare and housing as well. I also appreciated the section focused on antitrust policy solutions / historical examples of successful governance

[Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a really coherent and clear-eyed look at the polycrisis facing technology and the economy right now. I think it functions as a more erudite take on Doctorow's "enshittification" (which Wu name checks explicitly), and maybe points at a clearer path out of the woods. Ultimately I think this book makes the case that the solutions are "easy," if we can muster the will, and that the problems are catastrophic if we can't.

[Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.2

[Tanja Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title says it all! The tech platforms undermine democracies and prosperity. They want to squeeze the very last drop out of us all, whether it's business owners or consumers. Regardless of whether you are paying for it or not, you are the product.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Wu is the Jeremiah of our age. For twenty years, his has been one of the very few nuanced voices attacking concentrations of economic power as destructive of a flourishing society. Yes, others also attack such concentrations, but they are mere looters, and Wu instead wants a stronger society. His message has struggled to gain traction, however, because most Americans who are educated enough to hear his insights spend their days enjoying the fruits of our bogus stock market, fake GDP, and debt-driven consumption, and see few practical problems, rather they see benefits, in their lives resulting from a handful of entities controlling much of our economy. But they are wrong, and Wu is right.

To be sure, Wu has thus far avoided the fate of Jeremiah (being thrown into a cistern). People listen to him respectfully, then ignore him. He ran a somewhat quixotic campaign in 2014 for Lieutenant Governor of New York State, losing to the odious Kathy Hochul, currently the Governor (who certainly does deserve to be thrown into a cistern, or preferably a sewer or volcano). It was quixotic because he refused to pander, instead focusing on the politico-economic matters that are his main concern. “The most pressing issue of our time is . . . inequality and the excessive concentration of private power.” He listed his favorite politicians as “Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Zhu Ge Liang [a Chinese statesman of the second century A.D.], John Adams, and Marcus Aurelius.”

Sure, he’s a man of the Left—his campaign website also attacked Hochul, ironically given how she has governed, for being too conservative on immigration and gun grabbing. (Wu was born in America to a Taiwanese immigrant father and a Canadian mother; he grew up in Canada and Switzerland.) He occasionally evinces the tics of a conformist leftist, such as the bizarre claim that Hungary is “an authoritarian semi-democracy,” when it is undeniably freer and more democratic than any other country in Europe. But at least he’s smart and interesting (he clerked for Stephen Breyer, and for a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the latter as it happens immediately after I did, though I was not cool enough to clerk for the Supreme Court). Such men are not successful politicians in these latter days of “democracy,” but maybe he will find a councilor’s position in the Vance Imperium.

Wu has written three earlier books (two of which I have discussed): The Master Switch; The Attention Merchants; and The Curse of Bigness. All of them revolve around concentrations of economic power and the ill effects flowing from them. In earlier books, Wu focused on concepts such as net neutrality (a term he coined), and on the history and future of antitrust law, through the lens of his heroes Louis Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt. In The Age of Extraction, Wu has fleshed out his earlier works with a specific focus on technology platforms as they have developed to the present day, and a specific claim that inequality and other ills resulting from centralized economic power lead to mass resentment, which leads to autocracy.

We begin with a clear outline of “platform power.” All civilizations have platforms, mechanisms for reducing the frictions of buying and selling. The Greeks, for example, had the agora; medieval Europe had the town marketplace. All platforms are a “catalytic space,” which by their existence facilitate transactions among people. They match buyers and sellers; they allow the transmission of information enhancing trust; they allow transactions to occur at smaller scale. And they are tolerant of, or even encourage, innovation, by being neutral as to uses.

The Internet Age has created many new platforms, but twenty years ago, the common wisdom was that those platforms would function like the agora, offering low friction interaction among the populace that was earlier impossible. Their size and scope, however, would, it was thought, also fulfil the promise of the internet to hand a great deal of power over to the little people, by creating national or global decentralized opportunity to reach and interact directly with others. The new platforms would allow anyone with talent to bring that talent to the fore, and if he wished, to monetize it directly to his own benefit while also benefiting others—the entire point of a platform. Tools quickly emerged to this end—many early blogs, for example, used Blogger. You didn’t have to use it, but it made it extremely simple to start writing a blog, while other platforms allowed more complicated but more powerful setups, such as using your own domain. Thus, where before you had to physically mail Xeroxes of your thoughts to a mailing list, now the costs of speaking to those interested in your thoughts had plummeted. The same platform-reduced friction was thought to be the future of finding information (search engines); social interaction (social networks); and the buying and selling of goods (online merchants).

A key difference between earlier and modern platforms arose very early, however, without much real notice from anyone. Pre-internet platforms were invariably highly regulated. In pre-modern times, the local lord, for his own benefit and for the benefit of the people, ensured that weights and measures in the town marketplace were accurate, and while he might take a cut, offered security and order in return. In more recent times, financial markets have long been extremely tightly regulated, at least to the extent their services are available to the general public. Internet platforms, however, were from the very first not regulated at all—Congress was convinced early that competition would make them self-regulate to the benefit of users, and that interference might strangle the baby in the cradle.

This hands-off approach was new, even in technology platforms. The history of such platforms began in the 1960s, with IBM opening to third-party offerings the proprietary, customized software which ran on their mainframes. The platform was the mainframe; buyers and sellers could now use it to create and sell software to operate the mainframes. IBM would only set the hardware architecture, and make its specifications available to all. IBM’s action was not its voluntary choice, however; it was the direct result of aggressive antitrust pressure over decades on the company, but this was par for the course, not some special example of enforcement. Wu outlines how, from the late nineteenth century until the 1980s, antitrust laws in the United States were rigorously enforced—earlier, as exemplified by Roosevelt, because of fear of concentrations of economic power as anti-American, antithetical to broad-based private enterprise and dispersed political power, and continuing after World War II, with the added rationale that such concentrations were seen as easing the path to fascism or Communism.

The specific antitrust violation at issue with IBM and its software was “tying”—the long illegal practice of conditioning the purchase of one type of product on the purchase of another type of product from the same seller. European mainframe manufacturers did not face the same legal pressure; rather, they were subsidized by their governments to further a closed system, and you have never heard of their mainframes, or of their software industry, because relative to the United States, their market share is miniscule. This is the direct result of antitrust enforcement opening software as a platform. Regulation ensured it was open to all, and that was enough to create a huge industry, dominated by the United States.

Mainframe software, of course, is only a small component of today’s software industry. The bulk of the industry was created through another instance of antitrust enforcement—the requirement that AT&T, which at one point owned one hundred percent of the telephone lines in America, allow other traffic on its network, that it not be permitted to place strictures on network traffic, and that it not itself be allowed to engage in “electronic publishing,” leaving that to new entrants. The result was, at first, totally open platforms, as many entrants appeared on the scene. The golden age of software platform openness lasted until the 2000s—while platforms such as Google and Amazon, and later Facebook, gradually gained scale, they were largely open and they competed with others, focusing on growing and improving their offerings. But the seeds of future problems had been sown. (I note in passing that I was disturbed to observe that Wu felt it necessary to drop a footnote explaining to his readers what a DVD was, “a disc-shaped form of digital storage widely used from the 1990s to the 2000s to hold films and other video content.”)

What matters for where we are today is that all these platforms turned to maximizing revenue, very successfully, through advertising and related monetization. At one point it was possible to build a business on Facebook while not paying Facebook a dime; I personally know a company that did this and sold for $150 million. Not any more; now Facebook extracts almost all value for itself. The platforms’ prime mechanism for keeping their new revenue flowing, rather than being competed away, was eliminating competition, through purchase of any possible competitor at as early a stage as possible as well as through other anti-competitive devices, including tying. They received zero regulatory pushback. In an earlier age, such actions would never have been permitted. But in the 1980s, the University of Chicago school of antitrust enforcement, or rather non-enforcement, championed by Robert Bork, became totally dominant under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Thus, Google was able to buy competitors: the mapping app Waze; YouTube; and the advertising powerhouse DoubleClick, among a vast number of others. Facebook snapped up Instagram and innumerable others. Amazon didn’t so much buy competitors; rather, it made smaller merchants totally dependent on it, and then extracted all the value created by its platform. It began by offering a low-fee Amazon-hosted exchange, the Marketplace, on which merchants could sell their products much more easily than by having their own website. Then Amazon jacked the fees it charged from twenty percent of a merchant’s revenue to up to seventy percent, while stealing proprietary information from merchants to create competing products sold directly by Amazon, and imposing rules to keep merchants selling on their site, such as forbidding them selling more cheaply elsewhere—they could maintain their own sales channels, as long as they never actually competed with Amazon, which they now needed because most of their buyers shopped there.

All the new platforms prioritized revenue over all other goals (except political goals, as we will discuss). Consumer satisfaction was and is unimportant, as long as the user, that is, the ad target, could be kept on the platform by some other mechanism. Amazon, for example, manipulates search results so that paid search results, rather than the results buyers actually want, are the majority of those seen by buyers. As a result, the company’s advertising revenue, $56 billion, is twice that of all newspapers in the world (and its total Marketplace revenue from third parties, the rest from taking a huge cut of every transaction, is $185 billion), and has only nominal expenses for Amazon (resulting in advertising being more profitable than Amazon Web Services, often viewed as the main driver of Amazon profit). “In short, sellers (and users) are spending nearly $56 billion to make the buying experience worse. It is a pure example of valueless wealth extraction.” Thus, “With these changes something else has disappeared: the prospect of Amazon’s platform serving as a catalyst of significant independent wealth creation, or the rebalancing of economic power.” That is, the promise of the early 2000s for online buying and selling has entirely vanished.

Wu’s summary term for all these activities is “extraction.” The primary mechanism of extraction is scale. We all know about economies of scale, that bigger enterprises can be more efficient, and therefore both more profitable and better able to serve their customers. But just as real are diseconomies of scale, so at some point “What’s left after a firm has grown too big may not be any great efficiency but just the capacity to bully.” A firm that scales enough is able to simply eliminate competition, if not constrained by some external force. Google spends $30 billion every year “to keep its competitors locked out of distribution channels,” as in by paying Apple to effectively require the Google search engine (which, as has been extensively documented, has been deliberately been made far worse over the past several years by Google in order to maximize advertising revenue—one of many examples of what is aptly called “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow).

The same process has taken place over every platform—extraction from smaller value creators, and their loss of any ability to function independently (as well as the ending of any need or interest by the platforms in innovating or permitting innovation). By the mid-2010s, “The main tech platforms had emerged as the dominant tool for harnessing the economic and social energies made possible by an interconnected nation and world.” Their chief focus turned toward extending their successful extraction indefinitely into the future. To continue capturing revenue, platforms must command both loyalty and attention; they must become, as much as possible, all things to all people. This task is made easier by that most people are lazy, and in practice prioritize avoiding pain and inconvenience, even if, when asked, they say they prefer other solutions. They say they want carefully-brewed artisanal coffee, but they in practice consume nasty plastic Keurig cups. Thus, if switching costs are increased, the platform can dig its hooks ever deeper into those who use the platform, totally aside from its simultaneous use of methods to eliminate competition. The result is dependency, and an enervated populace.

The primary daily tool of platforms for this goal is the enormous amounts of data they have accumulated. We all know how, or think we do, how much data Google, Facebook, and Amazon keep on us and use to their benefit—but it much more than most of us believe. To take another example Wu does not use, but which particularly irritates me, Roku’s very inexpensive “boxes” cannot be activated without entering a credit card, despite that there is no subscription and no ongoing payments. The real reason for this, never stated by Roku, is so they can precisely identify who is using a Roku device, and collect, use, and sell extremely granular data on that person’s (and his family’s) viewing habits, which is where they actually make their money. All this data is monetized and used to keep us on the platforms. (I looked up Roku’s financials. They have $3.2 billion of “platform” revenue, with $1.9 billion of gross profit, and $590 million of “device” revenue, with gross profit of negative $2 million.)

Wu then detours to an interesting discussion of the history of so-called artificial intelligence, with an eye to evaluating whether AI will extend platform dominance. No surprise, and accurately enough, he concludes it will be controlled by the platforms and will reduce the power of, and increase the dependency of, all of small firms, employees, and consumers. AI will not undermine, because it will not be permitted to undermine, the platforms, although it may create new platforms. (I personally think AI won’t do much of anything beneficial for most people that is materially different from today, though I am in the minority.)

However, platforms are not limited to technology platforms, and here Wu turns to excoriating one of my favorite targets, private equity, a pernicious force and one of the main drivers of platformization. Healthcare, a considerably bigger industry than technology in the United States, is rapidly becoming platformized, through the mechanism of private equity rollups. Vast pools of money (cheap because of interest rates kept artificially low, which rates are not available to small businesses) are used to buy small physician practices, turning them into one larger entity with claims of efficiency, and then services are reduced and prices raised (and the physicians abused as dependent, if somewhat wealthier, employees). Voila, platform extraction. Similarly, private equity has been buying vast amounts of single-family housing, and performing the same trick. Every so often a few politicians try to stop this; they are defeated by either being bought off, or more pliant politicians being funded and elected in their place. And across our entire economy, credit card companies, also a type of platform, levy a private tax of three to four percent on every credit transaction (whereas in Europe their fees are capped at 0.30%). In other words, every possible economic activity in America that can be turned into a platform is being turned into a platform to extract money from you and me, because smart men with power can get away with it.

Why, however, is platformization of an economy resulting in extraction bad? One obvious reason is . . . [Review continues as first comment.]

[Jung]

“The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity” by Tim Wu explores how digital platforms that once promised openness, efficiency, and shared opportunity have gradually evolved into systems that concentrate power and wealth at the center. The book begins by recognizing how deeply embedded platforms have become in everyday life. From online shopping and search to social media and digital advertising, these privately owned spaces now mediate how people discover information, earn income, and make choices. They present themselves as neutral helpers, increasingly enhanced by artificial intelligence that guides decisions automatically, yet behind this convenience lies a structure that quietly reshapes who captures value and who merely supplies it.

At their core, platforms are not mysterious. They are places designed to connect different groups so exchanges happen more easily. By lowering barriers to participation, they make it simpler for buyers to find sellers, creators to reach audiences, and services to scale. Historically, similar roles were played by marketplaces and town squares. Digital platforms amplified this idea by using software to remove friction at enormous scale. When such systems work well, activity multiplies, innovation flourishes, and participation broadens. This early promise led many to believe platforms would decentralize economic power, allowing countless small producers to thrive alongside one another.

However, the reality diverged from that optimism. As platforms expanded, they retained the benefits of friction reduction while steadily consolidating control over the surrounding ecosystem. The same design that enabled exchange also gave the platform owner a privileged position at the center. Over time, neutrality faded. The platform could see all transactions, shape rankings, set fees, and rewrite rules. What began as an enabling environment gradually turned into one that redirected a growing share of gains toward the host itself.

A clear pattern emerges in how extraction takes hold. First, platforms attract users with low costs, ease of use, and helpful tools. As participation grows, alternatives weaken or disappear. Once dependence sets in, the platform begins adjusting terms. Fees rise, visibility increasingly requires payment, and data gathered from participants is used to steer outcomes in the platform’s favor. Sellers and creators find that success inside the system often invites competition from the platform’s own offerings, which enjoy preferential placement. Leaving becomes costly because outside options no longer offer comparable reach or convenience. People keep working and producing, but more of the value they generate flows upward.

Scale plays a crucial role in locking this structure in place. Initially, growth improves efficiency, but beyond a certain point size translates into authority. When most activity in a market runs through a single venue, that venue effectively governs the market. Network effects make large platforms self-reinforcing, while aggressive expansion and acquisitions prevent rivals from reaching meaningful scale. Even when large organizations become internally inefficient, their strategic advantage persists because control over data, rankings, and access does not require operational elegance. As a result, platforms extend their influence beyond tech into any sector that can be organized around a central hub.

Nowhere is this more visible than in attention-based platforms. Social media and content-sharing sites depend on user activity to generate advertising revenue. Creators supply the content and attention, but the platform packages and monetizes both. Algorithms are tuned to maximize engagement, ads increase, and organic reach declines unless visibility is purchased. While a small number of influencers manage to earn substantial incomes, most creators experience unstable earnings and constant pressure to adapt to opaque rule changes. The system rewards continual labor under conditions set by someone else, with ownership remaining firmly at the center.

Convenience deepens this dependence. Platforms compete to be the easiest place to accomplish everyday tasks, gradually bundling more services together. Shopping, payments, entertainment, communication, and identity merge into a single ecosystem. Over time, using alternatives feels inconvenient or even risky because leaving threatens routines, social ties, and past investments. This bundling strategy turns habit into lock-in. The more aspects of life a platform covers, the harder it becomes to imagine exiting, even if the terms grow less favorable.

Behind convenience lies data. Repeated behavior generates detailed records, and platforms use these to build increasingly accurate predictions about what people will do next. Prediction becomes profitable when paired with persuasion, especially in advertising. The ability to target messages precisely makes ad space more valuable, reinforcing the platform’s dominance. Crucially, this predictive power remains private. Data, methods, and insights rarely leave the platform, creating feedback loops where success funds better tools and attracts more talent. Advances in artificial intelligence, including large language models, extend this logic further by turning massive collections of human behavior into forecasting engines that guide decisions directly.

As platforms evolve from gateways to guides, the question of governance becomes unavoidable. The book argues that leaving regulation to chance allows extraction to intensify. Instead, rules should aim to preserve what made platforms valuable in the first place while preventing abuse of gatekeeper power. Continuous competition enforcement can stop dominant players from neutralizing threats through acquisitions or exclusive deals. Neutrality requirements can ensure that essential platforms do not discriminate unfairly among participants. In cases where a platform functions like unavoidable infrastructure, targeted limits on fees or business practices can curb pure rent-seeking without halting innovation. Where gatekeepers use their position to expand into adjacent markets, structural separation can prevent self-preferencing and preserve openness.

“The Age of Extraction” by Tim Wu ultimately reframes how we understand the modern digital economy. Platforms did not become harmful because they lowered friction or scaled participation; they became extractive when indispensability allowed them to shift gains inward. Recognizing this pattern explains why fees climb, ads crowd out organic reach, and data becomes leverage rather than shared benefit. The book closes by emphasizing that the goal is not to dismantle platforms, but to rebalance them. By keeping their catalytic role intact while limiting their ability to extract, societies can protect choice, earnings, and innovation, ensuring that the digital economy remains open, competitive, and broadly beneficial rather than narrowly controlled.

[Thomas Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, Tim Wu, 2025, 206 pages, Dewey 338.7, ISBN 9780593321249.

Terrific insight into recent history and how Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and their ilk have been eating everybody's lunch.

ANTI-MONOPOLY

Like boxing champions who lack suitable opponents, companies deprived of rivals become soft and flabby. --George Romney (American Motors) p. 35.

A giant firm might be broken and inefficient inside--quite bad at what it does. Yet like a dinosaur it may have enough weight to stomp on any arising rival and scare off others. p. 64.

PRO-MONOPOLY

George W. Bush's, Obama's, Trump's, and Biden's Wall-Street-serving Federal Trade Commissions abdicated their duty to enforce antitrust law, standing aside as big platforms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft fortified their monopolies by buying up their rivals. pp. 46-47, 52, 62-63, 71, 74, 94, 98-99, 161.

PLATFORM PLAYBOOK

1. Hook buyers and sellers with low prices.

2. Eliminate rivals by acquisition and subsidized pricing.

3. Clone the most successful independent businesses.

4. Seal the exits for buyers and sellers, with both carrots and sticks.

5. Extract wealth by raising prices and fees for buyers and sellers, increasing ad load, mining data and attention. pp. 56-57.

Goliath social-media platforms have gained armies of unpaid-servant Davids, who make Goliath rich. pp. 66-67. Including goodreads reviewers. First, own the user population. Later, harvest it. p. 75.

And not only tech platforms: physician practices and housing are succumbing to monopoly ownership:

PHYSICIAN PRACTICES

UnitedHealth and private equity firms have been acquiring local monopolies in physician practices by buying them. pp. 103-109. Physicians become employees of private-equity firms, which demand long hours from doctors, and charge ever-increasing rates to patients and insurers. p. 167. Federalist-Society judges rule in favor of the interests of concentrated wealth. p. 108.

HOUSING

Residential housing has begun to be platformized: Invitation Homes and its ilk have semi-automated the buying of hundreds of thousands of homes, renting them out at ever-increasing rents plus junk fees, with no maintenance. They began after the housing bubble burst in 2008, and millions of homes were foreclosed. The platforms got the homes for 30% to 50% of their value. No one offered to sell the homes instead to the foreclosees at these prices. No politician has suggested a law to the effect that the lender can't charge the borrower more than the /current/ value of the home: the amount the lender could sell it for if it foreclosed. Such a law would mean never any underwater mortgages, disincentive to offering junk mortgages, less wealth transfer to banks and brokerages, millions fewer people forced out of their homes, and fewer spoils for private-equity jackals to consume. pp. 109-115.

THE REAL ROAD TO SERFDOM pp. 122-124

1. Businesses gain monopoly power.

2. The owning class and its managers extract wealth from everyone else, in low wages, high prices, lack of opportunity.

3. Mass resentment.

4. Democratic failure. Government permits the powerful to plunder the rest.

5. People raise up a strongman who promises to lift them up, and instead rules as a dictator.

WHAT TO DO

Break the inequality.

In feudal agriculture, give peasants land ownership. The (northern and western) U.S. offered immigrants cheap land in the 1800s. It created a middle-class society. pp. 126-127. Denmark loaned its peasants money to buy their land in the late 1700s. This exploded grain yields and led to a middle-class society. pp. 127-129. Russia kept the screws to the serfs, resulting eventually in violent revolution and an even-more-violent government. pp. 129-130. The U.S. pressured Taiwan to grant land ownership to one million families. Taiwan championed small businesses. Taiwan's GDP exceeds Japan's, in 2025. [Notice that these successful land reforms, championed by the U.S. and West, are what the U.S. unleashed a bloodbath to prevent in Guatemala. https://www.goodreads.com/review/list... ]

ERRATA

Wu tells us that workers' wages and working conditions have recovered, from the industrial revolution in textile production. pp. 59, 96-98. That's only if you ignore the people who are still making clothes for us. Wu and the rest of us can ignore them because they're in Bangladesh and other out-of sight, out-of-mind places. Garment workers' lives are still grim, 250 years on.

More broadly, where he opines that "there have been periods in which the economy really did work for most of the population," p. 175, he forgets that he's focusing on most of a privileged /part/ of the population. In the war and postwar years, the U.S. economy worked OK (not great) for white male U.S. citizens employed in skilled occupations, not enlisted in the military. The U.S. economy was unkind to women, blacks, people who are unemployed or working "menial" jobs, and noncitizens. The various wars destroyed even U.S. soldiers. Residents of weak countries with coveted resources were and are treated savagely.

And even that golden 1942-to-1981 period of government enforcement of labor law and antitrust law, and relatively-progressive taxation, meant only that the top .01% took "just" 165 times the average U.S. family income (see Thomas Piketty's World Inequality Database, https://wid.world . It's hundreds of times now, as it was in the early 1900s.) That level of inequality was always enough to continue concentrating wealth and power ever more narrowly, until the owning class could again throw off government restraints.

[All that said, it's true that governments can and have enforced antitrust law and labor law, and taxed more progressively. We /can/ have a better world. Hope is step one.]

Wu says that Google's monopoly trial in 2024 ended the period of nonenforcement of antitrust law. pp. 161-162. If only.

Wu says that the fact that some young people have made money in cryptocurrency is a positive thing. p. 151. He ignores the fact that any real money anyone gains in cryptocurrency, someone else loses. Who loses? Not the rich.


TIM WU

Wu is a law professor. https://www.law.columbia.edu/faculty/...

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wu argues (at times poorly) for a return to anti-trust powers against the internet giants of the modern age. Really an extended op-ed that cherry picks facts, elides his own public sector experience and connections, and struggles to present anything beyond - more unions and government but not too much - a rather disappointing book.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Age of Extraction is a small but mighty volume whose title is a nod to the style of "what we talk about, when we talk about" non-fiction. Tim Wu talks about tech platforms, but what he's actually talking about is the economics of monopolies, and builds on (from what I've read of its summaries in Cory Doctorow and Wu's book) Yanis Varoufakis' concept of technofeudalism. Discussions about the "missing middle" in class distinctions are made whole through this important concept. What used to be the middle class is now akin to a serfdom wherein employees, with about as much power as 19th century factory workers (given income to cost of living differences widening in favour of cost of living rather than workers) are faced with an insurmountable socioeconomic condition. We do not live in a bootstrap economy, and in many ways society is waking up after the narrative delusion of "The American Dream" being more of a kleptocracy, or having been "enshittified" (courtesy of Cory Doctorow). Wu delineates this beautifully, including a historical overview of how we got here. I would still however, highly, highly recommend reading Cory Doctorow's book Enshittification as they are like the extended, director's cut of one another.

One thing I will note is that while he is writing about these issues, "The Squad" (Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar) in Congress, most visibly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have long been espousing policies that would accomplish the ends that Wu is talking about. AOC was talking about monopolies affecting working conditions, as well as the need for something like a New Green Deal that would in tangential ways have wrested the grip of The Big Four on the economy, and their behemoth counterparts across industries. Wu modernizes this for a 2025 audience, and includes some of the insights he gained while working in the White House. A mild observation, but important to note that AOC is an actual politician in office and took so much heat from Democrats and others for her views, but Wu is writing about similar concepts and seems to be met with a more receptive audience. It could be that we are at a point where more people are willing to hear it but I thought it interesting that his book is lauded while AOC, Bernie Sanders, and others were derided. It makes the book no less important, however, because Wu is bringing these notions to the mainstream in a powerful way by penning it. Much has happened since these policy imperatives came to the fore in 2018 so it merited another look, which Wu does justice to in spades.

Economics books can be accessible or wholly unapproachable depending on their language. Wu writes for everyone, and ensures that economists, tech leaders, politicians, policymakers, working class folks who were limited in the education they had access to, and simply those who want to learn more are able to approach the subject with ease. He writes with the awareness of where to stay on the surface of a topic, and when to dive deeper that comes with experience in politics (and no doubt, policy briefs). In this sense, readers benefit from a writing style crafted in the halls of the White House, and corridors of Silicon Valley; Few would be able to tell this story like Wu.

Technology is moving faster than anyone can reasonably write about it to help everyone make sense of it. Wu contributes a significant chapter in the story of generative AI as an economic force rather than a technological one. It is easy to be wowed by the prowess of the technology, but the monopolistic forces at work behind its curtain dull the sheen of incomprehensibility. Making sense of the world as it is is no easy feat. Wu manages to clear the smoke from the dumpster fire of the present to help us see that we have the power to put it out using policy levers, better politics (for every way this could be applied), and perhaps most importantly of all: democratic participation in collective decision-making. Definitely worth reading!

[Myles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Wu's Age of Extraction I felt was a welcome antidote to the stream of books about the failures of liberal democracy even though technically the book is about the failures of society to deal with the concentration of economic power in the hands of tech hegemons.

It is in the more optimistic tradition we find Acemoğlu & Robinson of The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty where the democratic institutions have a chance to pull us away from the forces of autocracy.

You know who we're talking about: Meta/Facebook/Instagram, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft,X/Twitter, Apple, Bytedance/TikTok, Netflix, nVidia, Amazon.

Wu crosses over into the political prescriptions of such books as Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick J. Dineen, and The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Edward Luce. If you'd only read these books you'd come away with a nostalgia for Roman Catholicism.

Wu's book is about the meaning of the tech platform monopolies and, more generally, the impact of the platformization of other businesses undertaken by American private finance. Professions such as funeral homes, medical anesthetists, pet shops, and others are being bought out by Wall Street to extract the "value" -- read $$$$ -- out of these business and levy fees.

I call this the rise of the accountant and the elimination of the entrepreneur. Whereas accountants used to be the slave of capitalism, they are fast becoming the pharaohs of global finance in private equity, and in what's called alternative asset management funds. In my opinion it is the inheritance of the Boone Pickens corporate takeover era takeover mania of the 1980's.

You can hardly find a business these days that isn't infected with private equity. Blackstone, Apollo Global, KKR & Co., and Carlyle Group being the biggest.

But the story in this book that most resonated with me was the platformization of the American home. It is well documented that many, many American homes were snapped up after the fallout of 2008 real estate crash by vulture capital firms and turned around into leased units with ever-mounting fees.

My favorite recounting of this story is the somewhat over-the-top Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, by Aaron Glantz.

In Wu’s book my favourite story is of the woman who leased one home where she’s required to pay a fee of $43/month for each of her three cats!

Wu ably documents the monopolistic behavour of Meta, Google, and most egregiously, by Amazon. But this has been done elsewhere. Extraction is nice way of saying "They're robbing us blind."

Wu's prescription for the future is government intervention to slim down the monopolies, neutrality provisions in public utilities, the countervailing power of organized labour, rules and caps on egregious profiteering, and quarantines or line of business restrictions on the hegemons.

One of his key points is that technology -- and increasingly obvious to the rest of us -- AI helps the platforms maintain control. I couldn't agree more.

Wu could have taken the argument a step further with the rise of so-called platform cities arising in Arizona, in the hills beyond San Francisco, on the Honduran island Roatan, Nevis, Nigeria, and even Greenland! In these locations, big investors -- including the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Laureen Powell Jobs, and many billionaire financiers, are building self-enclosed self-governing cities of opulence.

They want the technology to moderate every facet of living, from crypto economies to utility management, to self-governing constitutions beyond the control of the analogue states to which they presently owe fealty. They want energy development and biotech hubs. They want golf courses -- maybe not in Greenland! -- and resorts.

Here comes the brave, brave new world.

[Cgallozzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Wu begins by tracing the 'line' from the original promise of the Internet - which touted decentralization and (because of the entreprenurial spirit of the audience) - widespread individual prosperity------> transitioning to what he calls "platform capitalism" - which is the current situation where a few colossal tech companies (Google, Meta and Amazon) - dominate this space.

In Wu's telling Google, Meta and Amazon - evolved from their origins that of facilitating commerce and information transfer ----> towards having immense (economic and financial) power; and becoming instruments that extract $'s, data and attention from its users, workers and small business suppliers in amounts greater than any 'common garden variety' platform would and should be able to extract.

There doesn't seem to be much question that Amazon for example includes Fees for people to 'be noticed' on the Amazon website - and Amazon's supplier fees are raised 'at will' irrespective of market conditions.

Wu spends a small amount of time on the issue (excuse) used by some that "markets are self-regulating" - this is the usual defense for the aggregation of market power. It has not historically shown itself to be correct. Market power can only successfully be opposed by another power.

Wu lists but does not delve into (how one would implement) some solutions to this problem. Some solutions offered include:

Return to Anti-Monopoly focus -awaken DOJ's of both political parties so as to guard against increases in market power.

Net (and other) Neutrality rules - all traffic on the internet/commercial transactions are to be treated equally.

Policies that encourage countervailing power - unions, employee organizing, etc.

Utility Rules and Caps - one model would be to take a certain area 'bound it' and declare it to be a 'utility like' entity - where the price/fee level would be monitored by an external board so as to guarantee a reasonable profit within its space. A la electric/gas utility.

Quarantines and Business Restrictions - do not allow Amazon as an example to grow outside its core business so as to use its influence in an associated business. Pharmacy, etc. as an example.

This is an important subject area.

Wu raised this issue - but it has been raised before (see Shoshana Zuboff - "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism") - but there does not seem to be any public or political consensus that this is an issue that needs addressing. With the advent to "beat the Chinese with A.I." - I'm not sure if and how any public or political consensus could be generated that could constrain the 'Magnificent 'N'' in any meaningful way.

Wu raised the issue - pointed to existing solutions - no road map to implementation however.

Should be of interest to those who follow technology, economics and U.S. Public Policy.

Carl G.
Cgallozzi@comcast.net

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Tim Wu a lot. He is smart and writes well, and I almost always agree with him. One of my biggest frustrations in reading non-fiction is when I find writers who I agree with, but who I sense are jerks or who have the argument all wrong or who write poorly. Sometimes a bad ally can feel worse than an enemy. Not a problem with Mr. Wu.

Mr. Wu starts by discussing the concept of a platform. Roughly speaking it is a marketplace. Users gather like flies on a stinking piece of rotten meat and feed, feed, feed, while the platform owner puts a small (or sometimes not so small) tax on every bite. Everybody in tech has wanted to build their own platform at least since the days when Microsoft claimed ownership of the PC with MS-DOS. Probably half of the people I deal with who have start up business ideas are having platform wet dreams.

The platform has several beautiful features for its owner. First, he doesn't have to do the work. His users are like the boys painting the fence for Tom Sawyer. Second, once he hits critical mass, it becomes hard for users to leave the platform, so that he has a defensible position against competitors, and it becomes his mission to drive their addiction and to increase the cost of departure. Finally, with his monopoly position established and with the capitalist mandate to drive profits in a market that he already owns, the process of taking more and more from everyone associated with the platform begins and continues beyond the point where the users are screaming for mercy. Cory Doctorow calls it enshittification. Mr. Wu is more sedate with "extraction", but it comes to the same thing.

Another great thing about Mr. Wu - he's very clear about what to do about the problem. First and foremost, we need to reinvigorate the antitrust laws. It looked like that was starting to happen a few years ago, but it's hard with a Republican administration and all of the Republican judges. The funny thing is that the original trust buster, Teddy Roosevelt, was a Republican, and antitrust is the ultimate pro-business concept, but of course it is always opposed by big businesses and billionaires that are the most important campaign donors. Second there is regulation - keep monopoly businesses out of adjacent market areas, create rules for fair access and portability of accounts, require transparency, and, if it is the only way, regulate prices. Finally, there are countervailing forces. Bringing back labor unions isn't just for good for the worker; it's good for everybody in creating a world of greater fairness and limiting monopoly power. And empower users with IP and privacy rights, though again, this is an area where we need to be careful that we aren't giving birth to another dragon that is almost as bad as the one that we are slaying.

[Twain · Rating 3 out of 5]

True neo-Brandeisianism has never been tried but it’s certainly been written about.

It’s a fine book much heavier loaded on critique than solutions. It goes through a history of the internet, once promised as a democratizing tool that the just led to it becoming concentrated at the top like the rest of the economy. I wouldn’t say there’s a lot in here that’s really a new idea a lot of it seems to be fairly common critiques of tech and monopoly. I think I somewhat prefer the Giblin/Doctorow book on monopsony I think that book takes a much more interesting and new approach that gets at a new idea that I haven’t seen touched on much before. None of his critiques of tech or of his hand waving about the need for anti-trust and regulation is really wrong it just seems like we’re operating on relatively familiar and well trodden takes.

I’m reading Jathan Sadowski’s Mechanic and the Luddite and that book seems to be so much more sanguine about the point of a system is what it does and that we shouldn’t really buy into tech idealism pushed by people who will make money off said tech idealism. But in Wu’s book he’s like “the internet promised democracy and decentralization and the return of the little guy and then it turned into these massive monopoly platforms” and it’s like are we sure we shouldn’t have been critical of the original purpose of the internet or unsurprised that Amazon came to dominate online sales the way Walmart did to in person sales. Like he understands technology in and of itself isn’t going to change the way companies grow and accumulate capital if the technology is not accompanied by rules and regulations, but if you get that then you kinda should’ve seen the tech monopolies of the internet coming.

The handful of moments of left punching in this book are a little goofy to me. I know neo-Brandeisians like to preempt all their stuff with “oh I’m not a socialist or communist or anything crazy like that I’m for regulated capitalism” as if that will make centrists take them more seriously or something. But in a moment of right wing ascendancy in America, where no far left movement seems possible, it’s really unclear why you have to put like 6 warnings in the book about how we can’t go too far left when we are in this moment for not going far enough left consistently over the past 50 or so years. It’s just kinda goofy. He also says like oh I’m not as out on AI or crypto as some of my friends but there’s some bullshit there and it’s like ok then I’d like to hear your limited defense of crypto and AI if you’re going to stake out a moderate position on it I’d like to see it defended or justified more.

[Libby Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5

A very very interesting and informational read. Wu is very straight to the point & matter of fact, there’s not a sentence wasted in the entire book, HOWEVER, if you have the amount of respect and prestige as Tim Wu, I expect you take a stance against the evil you’re writing about! Too damn neutral and accepting.

——————————————————————————————

This book is packed to the brim with a concise story of the history of ai, monopolies, platform tech, big data, wealth inequality, and what the future impact of this shit storm is going to bring.

There’s so much in this book I could talk about but what I would say is a really important chunk is intention behind AI and wealth equality.

Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO), also founded WorldCoin. It’s a global identity and currency system using eye scans to confirm humanity? The aim of WorldCoin is to create an equitable economy. The idea around this is that it would distribute wealth ownership as the age of AI and tech continues. In other words- anyone in the world can have digital identity and have a piece of the global economy.

When it comes to OpenAI, Sam Altman also has spoken a lot about how it will help with socioeconomic inequality because people have access to it regardless of how rich or how poor, so they can advance in categories such as health, society, education, etc.

So why are the tech bro gods spewing nonsense about how AI is going to heal the world and rid it of wealth inequality? Because it fucking can. But they won’t let it.

That’s a huge topic that this book explains and I think it’s seriously worth the read.

Some of the evil you’ll learn more about includes:
Amazon

Google (#dontbeevil!)

Mega corps being inspired by and implementing the Blitzkrieg method used by literally nazis in WW2

The founder of replica ai (wtf is wrong with you)

United healthcare and private equity infiltrating healthcare

BLACKSTONE FUCK YOU

Invitation homes

Sam Altman (except Wu lowkey glazes him👎🏼)

——————————————————————————————

P.S Tim Wu is the man who coined the term net neutrality :)

[James Yoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

*The Age of Extraction* is a fantastic and deeply unsettling book that succeeds on multiple levels: as an explanation of how platforms work, as a historical account of extraction-based business models, and as a warning about where these trends are taking us. It is rare to find a book that is simultaneously accessible, intellectually rigorous, and genuinely alarming, but this one manages all three.

At its core, the book does an excellent job explaining the nature and risks of platforms. Rather than treating platforms as neutral pieces of technology, it shows how they are structured to extract value—data, labor, attention, and dependency—from users, workers, and even governments. The author makes clear that the danger is not merely monopolistic pricing or privacy loss, but the asymmetry of power that platforms create once they become unavoidable intermediaries. The clarity with which these dynamics are laid out makes the book especially valuable for readers who sense something is wrong with platform dominance but have struggled to articulate why.

Equally compelling is the book’s historical perspective. *The Age of Extraction* situates modern digital platforms within a much longer tradition of extractive systems, drawing parallels to colonial enterprises, resource monopolies, and financial intermediaries. By showing how extraction models have appeared repeatedly outside the tech sector, the book avoids the trap of treating today’s problems as entirely new or uniquely digital. This broader lens makes the argument more persuasive and more troubling, because it suggests these patterns are structural, not accidental.

Finally, the book’s discussion of the future impact of continued extraction trends is sobering. If left unchecked, the author argues, platforms will increasingly shape markets, labor, governance, and culture in ways that concentrate power and hollow out alternatives. The book does not indulge in easy solutions, but it succeeds in sharpening the reader’s understanding of what is at stake—and why complacency is itself a choice.

[Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The Age of Extraction” is Tim Wu’s latest book on how big tech platforms, as well as a few medical and real estate platforms that have copied this business model, have shifted their emphasis from Attraction to Extraction - i.e., the extraction of time, money, and data, from its users. While these platforms first were attractive to users, now they use their near monopoly powers to extract increasing sums from customers and consumers, acting largely unregulated.

(I listened to the audio version of this book during a drive back from New England. As such, I’m not aware of any charts or visuals in it.)

The book presented a broad history of Information Technology (IT) starting with IBM and Mainframe computers, the unbundling of software from hardware, the rise of the Internet, AI and importantly Platforms. It was a good refresher of the past 30+ years of technology.

That said, I didn’t find much “news” in the book, apart from Blackstone and Invitation Homes – something I didn’t experience in Canada and knew little about. The rest of the book was just how Big Tech and eCommerce platforms came to be, and how they have moved from being attractive and valuable to users to being more extractive.

Arguably the most extractive of these platforms is Amazon, "The Everything Store" that now copies successful products with their own products and squeezes margins from these platforms.

What I found lacking in this book are the efforts to reign in the tech giants and indeed the other platforms. Questions were not asked about Section 230 or the 30% that the App Store charges to those who list and sell using the platform?

Should a company that runs a platform be allowed to compete on it as well? Some arguments were started but very few specifics were mentioned.

The author also did not try to present a case of what would likely happen in the future. In other words, how long will this "Age of Extraction" continue and what will likely change?

To me this demonstrates intellectual laziness on Tim
Wu’s part.

There were some parallels brought up including US Federal Anti-Trust regulations brought up to prevent AT&T from competing in the computing space. But little was done to talk about the recent challenges from Congress against Big Tech, and almost none coming from Europe or Asia.

I would have expected that Tim Wu would have mentioned how the Chinese government reigned in its big tech companies as a potential model for regulation. But almost no insight was given to businesses and regulation outside America.

Overall, I was not impressed with the book. It was well written but contained very little news – at least for me.

Consequently, I don’t recommend it.

[David Partikian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants are two outstanding books that explain the predicament we are all in today: staring at our devices 24/7 while those who control the platforms benefit financially from our addiction. Of course, it didn’t have to be that way, and the best book to elucidate this is Zuboff’s, though its length might deter all but the most intrepid readers.

That stated, I eagerly snap up any offering by Tim Wu, since he explains economic theories in layman terms and has a keen sense of tech history. The Age of Extraction is a necessary read for anyone who claims that Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta are in any way beneficial to common consumers. He clearly outlines how different platforms corner a market and rely on people’s desire for convenience to gain a monopoly. The results are not pretty, as Wu explains in the chapter “Economic Mania” where he shows a timeline how monopolization leads to a “two-class economy,” i.e. the haves and have nots, which leads to class resentment which leads to a democratic failure and the rise of a strong man. If the USA was not suffering from and in the late stages of this exact cycle, with a corrupt kleptocrat strongman in power, one could make an argument that Wu is a prescient genius rather than a plumber who just knows why the toilet is clogged.

As with most non-fiction of this sort, the best writing occurs in the first two thirds of the book when Wu is identifying the problem and explaining how the situation became so dire. The proposed solutions, the last third of the work, feel empty and weak. The USA is too far along for this to end well.

I write this review knowing full well that I am posting it on a site owned by Amazon. But what are the options? I'd also like to sell books on ABE, also owned by Amazon, but the fees are excessive. Guess why?

[Ruth Mahoney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Going to do reviews for my book club books (maybe) to help get my thoughts in order. Overall I found myself engaged with this book throughout, despite listening to the audiobook, which can be hit or miss for me. It’s very short and accessible. I enjoyed the historical narrative (which was most of the book) detailing the rise of tech platforms, from the first computers to Amazon and much of what came between. Wu did a good job of detailing how our political systems have influenced the way tech has developed, and I do feel that I learned a lot here. He uses various real life examples which makes everything feel pretty tangible.

My biggest challenge was that the book promises solutions, and the solutions offered were disappointing (but not surprising) to me. They’re also not provided until the last chapter or two, and pretty underdeveloped, which made them feel a bit like an after thought. I think ultimately Wu and I have different perspectives about the underlying cause of this issue. Wu focuses on the need for regulation, particularly in the form of anti-trust policies. His perspective boils down (in my opinion) to the sentiment that we’re just not doing capitalism “the right way”. Wu’s take is ultimately centrist, with some overt injection of red scare propaganda to make it clear he thinks we “shouldn’t go too far in either direction”.

He made little attempt to analyze the inherently exploitative nature of capitalism, and how this system might just be necessitating the monopolization of wealth and power he wishes to eliminate. Obviously this fell super flat for me, but I can’t deny that I learned some stuff and was pretty entertained. Our next book will be Enshittification, so to my 9 Goodreads friends, stay tuned!