The Age of Extraction Audiobook By Tim Wu cover art

The Age of Extraction

How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

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The Age of Extraction

By: Tim Wu
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About this listen

Tim Wu explores how today’s dominant platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality—urging us to recognize their influence and reclaim control to create a balanced economy that works for all.

"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.

©2025 Tim Wu (P)2025 Random House Audio
Economic History Economics Politics & Government Public Policy Science & Technology

Critic reviews

“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

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