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, Politics, Economics, Social, Audiobook

278 pages, Kindle Edition

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

[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.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

We need Lina Khan back like yesterday!

[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.

[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.

[Khan · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.2

[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/...

[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.

[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?

[Di Xu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book to enlightenment.

I came to know Tim Wu from his book Curse of Bigness, which is also a fascinating book. Curse of Bigness focus on the historic stories from Gilded Age, he presents a very convincing arguments on the virtue of anti-monopoly policy. I worked in tech industry for my entire career, before I read this book, I thought that companies like Google really hold a natural monopoly, and it really helped to have a better margin to invest more on innovations, but now, I'm more convinced that we should do more to prevent monopolistic acts. Great book, very sharp view and lucid explanation.

[Rachit Kansal · Rating 3 out of 5]

The framework the author offers around platforms - what function they play, why they're critical, and how when they work they let us flourish - is the most useful and interesting part of the book. As are some of the solutions he proposes towards the end.

[Audrey Kalman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. Super digestible writing about big tings.

The explanation (in the Introduction, I believe) of how the NFL handles different size markets was particularly interesting.

[B Dog · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5. I appreciate that the book was short and sweet rather than being filled with jargon to make up page count

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightening explanation of the oligarch platform economy of the modern U.S.