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

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 Wus The Age of Extraction is its simplicity. Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our agethe unaccountable power of tech platformsinto 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 Altmans OpenAIIts not just in your headyour online life is draining your wallet.... [The Age of Extraction is] a sharp and eyeopening introduction to how we arrived at platform capitalismwhere no good click goes unmonetized.Kirkus ReviewsOur 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 twoclass 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 Wuthe preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase net neutralityexplores 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 historyfrom generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movementsand 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.