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

by Tim Wu

An excerpt from The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu, published by Knopf and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category.

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.

The Age of Extraction has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below comes from the book's Introduction.

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In the spring of 2024, Apple briefly ran an extraordinary advertisement. It depicted various instruments of cultural achievement—books, a record player, an upright piano—all being crushed by a giant press. A trumpet, on its end, was twisted and bent; a piano collapsed, and paint cans exploded. By the end, everything had been magically reduced into a single device—an iPad—which was described as “the thinnest Apple product yet.”1

“The only thing that could have made it more dystopian,” wrote one commentator, “would have been if actual human beings had been playing the instruments, reading the books, or wielding the paintbrushes.”2 Apple quickly announced that the advertisement was not intended to send any larger message. But as Freud once said about jokes, advertisements often reveal uncomfortable truths. And the truth referred to in that advertisement is one we all know: that we live in a time where human experience has been transformed. The spectacle of human achievement crushed into a tiny device, possessed of its own intelligence, resonates with something we are all experiencing—a sense that as we augment humanity, we may, at the same time, have come to marginalize actual humans. 

It was at roughly the same time that the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI debuted a new voice that sounded strikingly similar to actress Scarlett Johansson.3 Johansson had previously refused offers to license her voice, but apparently the firm went ahead and created a replica anyway. She is in a better situation than the golfer Jack Nicklaus, however, who sold the rights to his name and likeness and has been unable to control the conduct of an AI-replica named “Digital Jack,” operated by a firm named Soul Machines.4 It speaks to the apparent replaceability of even the most famous of humans. 

The fears of our diminished importance arrive at a time when  many Americans have come to feel a parallel sense of economic marginalization. Over the last quarter century, even when the economy has been healthy by traditional indicators, a great majority of Americans remain doubtful about their economic future. Many younger Americans went to college, worked hard, and still cannot afford decent housing. They fear being worse off than their parents, something once unheard of in this land. The contrast with corporate citizens is stark; many American corporations seem to have escaped any usual orbit and blasted off into an outer space of perpetual profit, bringing their executives along for the ride. 

We must see that the problems of technological and economic marginalization are entwined. Technology has never been neutral, but rather reflects ideology and what it is designed to do. Today’s great tech platforms are impressive, entertaining, and convenient, but also designed to be some of history’s most advanced tools for extracting wealth and resources from the broader economy. Consequently, as they become essential to everything, we are at risk of building an economy that is perpetually unfair for much of humanity. 

The phrase “wealth extraction” is the key to this book. It refers to the ability to take money from everyone else and is born of being essential and unavoidable. As the tech platforms have grown and evolved over the last decade, they have focused their attention on refining their methods of extraction. In return for an undeniable and unescapable utility, they are fine-tuned to take as much as possible—data, attention, profit margins—from everyone else. 

We remain in the early days of platform capitalism and commercially relevant artificial intelligence. But we risk falling into a two-class age, where many industries become divided into two groups: the extractors and their agents on the one side; dependent businesses, consumers, and employees on the other. There is every reason to fear living in a future with a technologically armored wall between the haves and have-nots. We should also fear a future in which the private power and wealth aggregated in the tech platforms comes to influence and combine with the public powers of government. 

The main goal of this book, then, is to help readers understand the emergent form of economic power in our time—the artificially intelligent tech platform. You may already work in an industry deeply influenced by platforms or have had your life affected by them in other ways. If not, you should know: they are probably coming for you. 

This book also aims to answer a question: Just what happened to the broad spread of prosperity and democracy many expected to follow the Internet revolution? Back in the 1990s and 2000s, many believed that the popular Internet would make everyone better off in an evenhanded manner while spreading democracy around the world. That was wrong: a handful of platforms and owners have taken the lion’s share of the new cash, and it is autocracy, not democracy, that is on the rise. If we are to imagine a better future, we need to understand what happened and why those prophecies did not come to pass. 

To that end—in order to understand our past and our future—this book begins by explaining the origins of platform power. The power of the tech platforms relies on ancient economics: there have been essential platforms in every civilization. Platform power also bears some similarity to other historic forms of economic power, such as land ownership and the industrial power of manufacturing. But platform power is distinct from both of these, as its power does not lie in production but rather in catalysis. It resides in the hosting of economic activity and the extraction of value, including the harvesting of specialized assets like data and human attention. As we shall explain, the tech platforms have combined old principles and new technologies to become the ascendant economic powers of our time. That’s why few can ignore what it will mean for the ongoing transformation of the United States and the world.

 

Excerpted from Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity by Tim Wu, published by Knopf Publishing Group, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Tim Wu. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

Tim Wu is Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School. He worked in the White House as special assistant to the President for technology and competition policy. The author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, he lives in New York City.

 

Endnotes
1. Apple, "Crush! | iPad Pro | Apple," YouTube, May 7m, 2024, 1:08, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntjkwIXWtrc
2. Juilan Sanction, "Apple's 'Soul-Crushing' New Ad: Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?" Hollywood Reporter, May 8, 2024, https://hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/apple-soul-crushing-new-ipad-ad-dystopian-1235893898/
3. Bobby Allyn, "Scarlett Johansson Says She Is 'Shocked, Angered" Over New ChatGPT Voice," NPR, May 20, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-voice-that-was-compared-to-scarlett-johansson-in-the-movie-her
4. James Colgan, "Meet Digital Jack Nicklaus, Golf Legend's Metaverse 'Twin' Featured on BBC." Golf, December 13, 2022, https://golf.com/lifestyle/digital-jack-nicklaus-metaverse-avatar/.  
 
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A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 - Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu (The Attentio...
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