The Age of Extraction

“Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is a must-read. This is a book for anyone—from senator to student—who seeks to understand our digital economy and why we need common sense rules of the road. Wu shows us how to protect consumers, workers, small businesses, and even our democracy from dominant platforms that have inserted themselves into nearly every aspect of our lives.” —Senator Amy Klobuchar

“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 for anyone looking for the recipe to rebalance the vast inequality in our society and to create a thriving economy that works for everyone.” —Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

“An intelligent and useful guide to a dispiriting present. . . . Wu has been writing critically about information technologies and monopolies for some time now. The Age of Extraction can be read as part of a trilogy that began with The Master Switch (2010) and The Attention Merchants (2016). His little book The Curse of Bigness (2018) warned about the dangers of ballooning corporate power. (Wu helped the Biden administration craft its antitrust policies.) Reality has since caught up to a future he has long warned about.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review

“A must-read.” —Diane Coyle, Financial Times

“Large tech companies are set to be the main beneficiaries of a new economy based on data and artificial intelligence. But neither the lopsided present of tech nor the future direction of technology is our destiny. Tim Wu’s readable, passionate call is for a fairer economy where the benefits of AI can be for all of us, and he proposes principles, laws, and regulations for how to achieve this.” —Daren Acemoglu, author of Why Nations Fail

“The paradox of the platform: without middlemen, we’d all be stuck, but those same middlemen are forever working to declare themselves to be our bosses. Wu’s characteristically insightful book cuts to the core of these world-consuming, usurping enshittifiers, and tells us how to stop them.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

“The Age of Extraction is remarkably astute and timely. Wu brilliantly analyzes platform power with great clarity, insight, and moral force, laying out the material stakes for people’s lives as well as a roadmap for achieving broad prosperity and economic fairness. A vital book for these troubled times.” —Lina Khan, Former Chair, U.S. Federal Trade Commission

“Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is a how-to book on how we can achieve liberty once again. Wu describes why so much in our society feels unbalanced, that the convenience and scale of platforms masks a hidden creeping power over our lives and communities. But he also shows how platforms in one form or another have always been part of human society, and the key is to govern them properly.” —Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

“Big tech is rapidly consolidating its economic power, according to this unsettling study from legal scholar Wu… [This book shows] 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.” —Publishers Weekly, starred

“An engaging argument for anti-monopolization. Recommended for readers interested in the economics of technology.” —Library Journal