The Age of Extraction
How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
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- 14,99 €
Publisher Description
Today’s dominant tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth and deepen inequality – we must take back control, if we are to create a balanced economy that works for everyone.
'A must read' FINANCIAL TIMES
'Insightful' CORY DOCTOROW, author of Enshittification
'Essential reading' KAREN HAO, author of Age of Empire
Our world is ruled 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 tech and AI could enrich us, yet it could also 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 way? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too late?
Tim Wu, the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase ‘net neutrality’, tells the story of an internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy, only to aid the spread of autocracy instead. From generative AI and predictive social data to antitrust and cryptocurrency, Wu frames our current moment within key lessons from recent history. And, perhaps most importantly of all, Wu envisions a future where technological advances serve the greatest possible good – for everyone.
Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for reclaiming control to achieve better economic balance and prosperity for all.
'A passionate call for a fairer economy' DARON ACEMOGLU, co-author of Why Nations Fail
'A how-to book on how we can achieve liberty' MATT STOLLER, author of Goliath
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Big tech is rapidly consolidating its economic power, according to this unsettling study from legal scholar Wu (The Attention Merchants). Unlike the internet's first prominent platforms, which brought together buyers and sellers, sparking innovation and reducing costs, today's dominant tech firms, Wu contends, have turned to extraction—data mining and selling, and building systems designed to maximize data-assisted targeting of users. Along the way, they've relied on time-tested monopolistic schemes like buying up competitors. The result, Wu explains, is a system that's hard for upstarts to crack even as services degrade and prices rise. While much of this has been covered by others, Wu takes an alarming extra step, showing how the monopolistic, extractive logic of the internet economy is invading the economy at large as more industries adopt (or are targeted by) new technologies. Examples include the housing market and, most startlingly, the medical industry, which is undergoing a wave of concentration under private equity firms that have implemented onerous new "practice platforms" for doctors. Wu asserts that these industries' capitulations to tech are canaries in the coal mine, signaling an emergent "platform capitalism" that threatens to create a two-tiered economy with extractive platforms on top and everyone else below. Wu (the original coiner of "net neutrality") outlines some canny legal means to avoid this bleak future. It's an urgent wake-up call.
