The Age of Extraction
How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 • Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants) explains how we can reclaim control and create a balanced economy that works for everyone.
“The magic of Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is its simplicity. Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age—the unaccountable power of tech platforms—into such digestible pieces that the solutions for what to do become dead obvious. Essential reading.”—Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
"It’s not just in your head—your online life is draining your wallet.... [The Age of Extraction is] a sharp and eye-opening introduction to how we arrived at platform capitalism—where no good click goes unmonetized.”—Kirkus Reviews
Our world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?
Tim Wu—the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase “net neutrality”—explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an Internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead. Wu frames our current moment with lessons from recent history—from generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movements—and envisions a future where technological advances can serve the greatest possible good. Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for taking back control in order to achieve a better economic balance and prosperity for all.
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.
