This article appears in the December 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
By Tim Wu
Knopf
When the British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee first imagined a network of interlinked documents in the late 1980s, he envisioned something as vast as the cosmos and as open as the sky—a medium in which knowledge would circulate as freely as air. “This is for everyone,” he typed during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies in London, reaffirming the principle that had guided him from the start: universality. (It’s also the title of his new book.) The early web was public infrastructure, not private property, an experiment in what he called “intercreativity,” the ability of groups to make things together.
That aspiration is the distant mirror of the world Tim Wu, Joe Biden’s lead adviser for competition policy in the first two years of his presidency and now a law professor at Columbia, surveys in The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. He addresses the gnawing sense that everything online, from shopping to streaming to socializing, has been designed not for us but against us. The book follows Wu’s earlier works like The Master Switch, The Attention Merchants, and The Curse of Bigness, offering an accessible genealogy of how societies have built, depended on, and been constrained by systems that mediate access to daily life. Digital platforms hoard personal data, degrade their own products, and devise ever more insidious ways to hold our attention; The Age of Extraction chronicles the loss of control that accompanies this destructive capacity.
Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality” and helped shape the modern case for tech regulation, released his book just as Big Tech’s political power grows—its top oligarchs flanked President Trump at his inauguration—and as the backlash to their dominance and what it has done to daily life fortifies and expands. Just two months ago in these pages, the Prospect reviewed author and internet activist Cory Doctorow’s streetwise, uncommonly lucid account of the perils of the platform giants: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. It’s not surprising that the two worldviews are similar: Wu and Doctorow attended the same elementary school in Toronto.
Doctorow’s observations are lacerating, and he has a gift for the grotesque analogy. Yet his argument in Enshittification never feels doctrinaire. Beneath his pamphleteer’s fury is a technologist’s love for what the web once promised and might still become. He reminds us that the internet’s decline wasn’t inevitable—it was policy-driven. Antitrust law atrophied. Venture capital rewarded growth over governance.
Where Doctorow rages from the barricades, Wu lectures from the front of the seminar room. His book, though slimmer and less acrobatic, carries the weight of a seasoned antitrust scholar. Yet he doesn’t avoid gut-level revulsion: In a section about Amazon, he likens the company’s ad racket, which charges third-party sellers premium fees for high placement in search results, to a “Tony Soprano school of business” shakedown.
More than a decade ago, Astra Taylor observed in The People’s Platform that the internet’s architecture has a built-in bias toward monopoly: As network effects take hold—making a service more valuable the more people use it—a few dominant platforms tend to emerge, crowding out the rest. Wu laments how that reality drifted from Berners-Lee’s original aspiration, and what ends it serves: to take more and more from business partners, workers, and consumers in the name of maximizing profits.
IT WASN’T ALWAYS THUS. Wu reminds us that platforms are not inventions of Silicon Valley but ancient social technologies. The Greek agora, the Middle Eastern bazaar, the ancient Chinese market town—all were platforms in the original sense: shared spaces that facilitated encounter and exchange. They were, for the most part, neutral. The agora belonged to everyone and to no one; merchants, entertainers, and citizens depended on its openness to trade, argue, and circulate. Over centuries, platforms evolved from civic institutions into physical infrastructures—bridges, ports, rail lines, telegraph networks—whose owners discovered that control over access could be a source of profit.
This shift from hosting to harvesting, in Wu’s telling, marks the start of capitalism’s extractive turn. The Charles River Bridge, a private toll bridge connecting Boston and Charlestown, epitomizes this pivot. Constructed in 1786 and fully paid off by the 1820s, it kept collecting tolls long after its investors had recovered their costs. Those who owned the means of passage could demand tribute from all who crossed, turning the bridge into an “extraction machine.” Railroads later repeated the pattern, transforming farmers and shippers into supplicants who paid for permission to participate in economic life.
What Tim Berners-Lee once envisioned as a universal commons has become a rentier’s paradise.
In the digital age, the tollbooth has been reborn in algorithmic form. Amazon, Google, and Meta have built the 21st century’s dominant platforms—but instead of civic squares, they more resemble private plazas ringed with turnstiles. For Wu, the familiar metaphor of “walled gardens” no longer suffices. Today’s firms, he writes, “aspire to be fully spun cocoons of life and living,” designed to enclose not only our digital activity but our social and emotional worlds. Meta’s metaverse, Amazon’s home devices, Apple’s app ecosystem—all share this totalizing impulse. The endgame isn’t to sell products but to capture existence itself.
For example, when Google bought Waze, it wasn’t merely acquiring a traffic app; it was absorbing the very information ecosystem that gave a competitor a chance to exist. The purchase showed that the company’s true aim was not innovation but integration—folding a rival service into its own expanding web. Wu laments that the acquisition “marked the end of the era when the Internet was seen as the great equalizer.”
Wu’s prose is more measured than Doctorow’s, sometimes to a fault. Where Doctorow calls Amazon’s sponsored results “enshittification,” Wu rather limply describes them as “a pure example of valueless wealth extraction.” His tone is that of a patient diagnostician, noting how once-innovative platforms “stop innovating in terms of quality and begin innovating in ways to cleverly charge more for the same product.”
The process by which companies metastasize from creators into extractors goes something like this: First, they make their platform “essential to transactions”; next, they hobble or buy rivals; then, they clone winners, lock partners in, and finally ratchet up fees for both buyers and sellers. The convenience we prize—our one-click orders, our autoplay queues—becomes, in Wu’s mordant phrase, “a long slow bet on laziness”: a wager that users will tolerate almost any indignity rather than face the costs of leaving.
If the platform extraction model has become the dominant template of 21st-century capitalism, Wu emphasizes that it is by no means confined to technology. Since the 2008 financial crisis, investors have begun platformizing entire industries and reorganizing them around centralized ownership and predictable revenue streams.
In health care, private equity firms have taken their cues directly from Big Tech, rolling up small- and medium-sized practices into regional networks whose profits depend on cutting labor costs, increasing volume, and raising rates for patients. An “anchor investment” in a large medical practice typically serves as the foundation for the platform, onto which smaller acquisitions are annexed. One study found that private equity acquired more than 1,000 medical practices between 2012 and 2021, and invested hundreds of billions of dollars in health care. Doctors and nurses become nodes in an optimized workflow, squeezed to deliver more services in less time; patients receive “surprise bills” and dwindling attention; and the gains accrue to the platform’s investors—those who now own the bridge between sickness and care.
Wu observes a similar logic in housing. Corporate landlords, backed by private equity and data analytics, have begun to treat homes not as dwellings but as housing platforms—networks of properties managed as financial instruments. The goal is not to provide shelter but to extract rent in its most literal and dynamic sense. Rents rise not because maintenance improves but because algorithms say the market will bear it. Fees proliferate: application fees, pet fees, turnover fees, “utility management” fees, even—in the case of one single-family-rental company—“air filter” and “smart home” fees. The platform mentality converts every point of human necessity into a microtransaction.
The refusal to treat extraction as purely a digital pathology is provocative. Perhaps what distinguishes the digital realm from the physical world boils down to scale and extractive velocity. Another part of his book traces “the road to serfdom”—a grim progression that begins not with government overreach, as the 20th-century philosopher Friedrich Hayek once warned, but with monopolization, which leads to extraction, and then to mass resentment, democratic failure, and eventually the rise of the strongman. When a few companies control the digital infrastructure of daily life, they also control the channels of speech, commerce, and coordination. A government aligned with those interests can wield the same levers to consolidate political power. The result, Wu warns, is a feedback loop between corporate concentration and political autocracy.
READING THE AGE OF EXTRACTION after Enshittification can feel like stepping from a punk show into a policy forum. The decibels drop, but the argument remains urgent. When Wu turns, in the latter half of his book, to artificial intelligence, his restraint gives way to unease. He wonders whether AI will “fortify the platforms or displace them”—whether it will serve as their new moat or their gravedigger. Either outcome, he implies, risks deepening the logic of extraction by automating it. The danger isn’t necessarily that AI will replace us; it’s that it will perfect the systems that already exploit us.
Wu proposes some familiar remedies: break up monopolies, restore competition, regulate essential platforms as public utilities. “An anti-monopoly program does not ‘create’ competition,” he writes. “Instead, it takes away the most convenient tools for killing it.” He envisions hard caps on how much value a platform can skim from the economy, setting rules that prevent dominant platforms from exploiting their indispensability—requiring, for instance, that they treat all participants equally and refrain from favoring their own products—as well as stricter separations between tech giants and ownership of AI infrastructure. “Prosperity, fairness, and growth are not incompatible,” he insists.
The stirrings of a modern antitrust movement may yet offer the most credible path out of digital feudalism. While Wu does not dwell at length on the cultural fallout of extractive capitalism, there’s a strong case to be made, as Kyle Chayka has in his book Filterworld, that our algorithm-driven platforms have also transformed culture into a flattened, homogenized feed. Any cultural democracy worthy of the name should foster a diversity of perspectives rather than churning out predictable content and rewarding mimicry. This is not nostalgia for a pre-internet order but a way to make the future livable—to restore competition, and with it, a measure of public power.
Yet it’s fair to wonder how realistic these prescriptions are in the second Trump administration. According to a recent report by Public Citizen, Trump’s return to power has brought a bonanza for Big Tech. Of the 142 federal investigations and enforcement actions against technology corporations inherited from the previous administration, at least 45 have already been withdrawn or halted. The beneficiaries read like a who’s who of Silicon Valley: Meta, Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal, eBay, and a constellation of cryptocurrency and financial technology firms.
Since the 2024 election cycle began, tech corporations and their executives have spent an estimated $1.2 billion on political influence—$863 million in political spending, $76 million in lobbying, and a further $222 million in payments to Trump’s own businesses. The return on investment has been immediate: a sweeping “AI Action Plan” directing the Federal Trade Commission to review and, where possible, rescind consent decrees that “unduly burden AI innovation.” Among the cases at risk are investigations into OpenAI and Snap for generative AI harms and antitrust cases against Microsoft.
When enforcement collapses, platforms don’t just grow, they metastasize. What Berners-Lee once envisioned as a universal commons has become, under this new regime, a rentier’s paradise. The web’s open protocols have been fenced off; the promise of “intercreativity” has given way to the logic of extraction. We may be waist-deep in the era of the Enshittocene—swiping, scrolling, and tithing to our digital landlords in the form of our attention—but to identify this scourge of platformization is not to say it must stay that way, or that its fate lies entirely in corporate hands. If we are to achieve something like Berners-Lee’s vision of an open, user-driven web, the future will depend less on better algorithms than on better politics. The coming revolution won’t necessarily be digitized; if it comes at all, it will probably arrive in the old-fashioned guise of laws with teeth, regulators who regulate, and a public finally willing to pull the plug on its own exploitation.
This article appears in Dec 2025 Issue.