This incarnation of the Internet — roiling with strife, anger, dejection, spite, malaise, dread — is the only one I’ve ever known. I’ve listened to my friends bemoan Instagram and TikTok feeds overrun with AI slop and micro-influencers, even as their screen time climbs ever higher. Everyone I know disparages Jeff Bezos’s politics and Amazon’s labor practices even as they rely on the platform’s speed and convenience. The same is true on the national scale, as social media and other platforms worsen political polarization; harm children’s mental health; collect and exploit sensitive personal data; and extend their dominance into ever more aspects of our culture, politics, and economy.

We all, it seems, deplore digital technology’s grip on our lives, but can neither imagine nor implement an alternative. In this light, the brief era of tech optimism that Tim Wu describes in The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (2025) is difficult for me to picture. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Wu writes, “the Internet seemed to offer a tool for unlocking the latent creativity and passion within every soul.” Tech critics and everyday users alike saw in the Internet the potential for wealth redistribution and democratic self-expression, and the opportunity for small companies and decentralized creators to bring “the age of the corporate dinosaur” to a close.

In the third decade of the 21st century, we know that this is not how the history of the Internet unfolded: “Only rarely,” Wu writes, “have so confident a set of predictions been so wrong.”

Wu’s project in The Age of Extraction is to unwork that knot of lofty aspirations and frustrated expectations: to chart how the open Internet of the turn of the century gave way to the tech behemoths that govern our lives online today, to interrogate whether new technology might challenge or entrench that power, and to propose solutions that would aid in returning wealth and agency to the American people. But the book’s 175 pages are a poor container for such an ambitious goal, and Wu skitters haphazardly from one concept to the next in chapters that end before they’ve fully expanded on a phenomenon or emphasized its consequences.

Wu’s diagnosis of our contemporary blight turns upon the hardly disagreeable notion that today’s biggest tech platforms — Meta, Google, OpenAI — are “designed to be some of history’s most advanced tools for extracting wealth and resources from the broader economy.” The stakes? That we are “building an economy that is perpetually unfair for much of humanity.” Wu’s chapter on Amazon’s extractive business model — in which the company maximizes its own value at the expense of both buyers and sellers — provides the most compelling evidence for this claim, alongside the description of tech firms’ use of scale to crush competition and monopolize their sector. Importantly, the critique of financial exploitation and big companies’ unearned market dominance, introduced here, recurs throughout the work.

But when he turns to aspects of platform extraction that are not strictly economic, Wu strikes much more feebly. In a chapter entitled “A Long Slow Bet on Laziness,” Wu cites a chief aim of today’s tech giants: “to make life sufficiently comfortable and easy such that switching platforms” feels nigh impossible. He continues, “The battle to be the most convenient is really the battle for industry dominance.”

The convenience Wu describes is primarily one of inertia — why leave Instagram when I already have an account? Why not just order from Amazon since I have Prime? He leaves unturned, however, the convenience of calling an Uber or streaming on Netflix — frictionless services that certainly help platforms’ bottom line, but which few users would regard as extractive. The chapter has no room to examine such nuances, though; by the eighth page, we’ve transitioned to the topic of Big Data and left the critique of convenience behind, undiscussed for the remainder of the work.

This example is emblematic of the sort of bait and switch of ideas — where quandaries are introduced and abandoned at a dizzying clip — that threads through the work. One of the book’s most striking unanswered questions lies at its center: “Might artificial intelligence, or cryptocurrency, make an unfair economy fairer?” In a work that seeks viable paths to economic rebalancing, a mere three pages after he poses this question, Wu relents: “the AI solutions to economic challenges of the future are actually even more vague and unbaked than those centered on crypto.” So, he decides to “[leave] AI to one side” and solely consider cryptocurrency’s role in today’s economy.

Wu has an honorable and ambitious project, and his work comes at a decisive moment in platform history, as social media giants face lawsuits across the country. The work is bursting with useful and intriguing trivia that sharpened my knowledge of technology and economics — but it ultimately neglects to tightly link the many concepts it pursues. The result is an impressively slim survey of tech monopoly that boasts diversions into IBM and AT&T’s business strategies, the history of artificial intelligence, 18th century Danish land reform, private equity buyouts of housing and health clinics, and the invention of cryptocurrency, to name just a few of the book’s supporting details — but that sacrifices real depth for a scattered breadth of ideas.

The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu (2025) | Penguin Random House