The Age of Extraction by Tim Wu – new book recommendation

Back in 1994, the US media theorist Douglas Rushkoff wrote a fun book called Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. Very, very much of its time, in an era of cyberpunk, William Gibson, Technopaganism and the joy of staring at fractals at 2am while blitzed out of your gourd, it’s an insanely optimistic, alt-world vision of where this new-fangled World Wide Web might be taking us. 

As Rushkoff recalled for Wired a couple of years ago, “I was pretty freaking excited in the ’90s about the possibilities for a new kind of peer-to-peer economy.” Back then, the internet seemed like a liberating wave – ushering forth an amazing digital utopia in which power was decentralised, marginalised voices heard, and the little guy might finally wrest some control back from the calcified elites.

The internet now

Fast forward 30 years, and to state the, er, obvious, the internet didn’t quite turn out to be the great equaliser Rushkoff, and many others hoped for. Today, that liberating wave feels more like a riptide pulling us under. As an older and wiser Rushkoff told Wired, “I attributed the blame to capitalism – while absolving technology itself of any wrongdoing … it made a bunch of billionaires, and a whole lot of really poor, unhappy people.”

That real-world story – how a handful of unaccountable tech giants have captured the digital economy, our attention, and indeed the world – is the subject of Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

Market domination

Here, the man who coined the phrase ‘net neutrality’ serves up a simple, and succinct yet unflinching critique of how platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Meta recklessly dominate the market – while hoovering up staggering amounts of the world’s resources, our data, and our cash. 

In doing so, says Wu, they’re widening the wealth gap, marginalising entire industries and risking social upheaval – all but threatening to strangle democracy itself. We’ve come an awful long way from those cyberian dreams. “Only rarely,” writes Wu, echoing Rushkoff, “have so confident a set of predictions been so wrong.”

It’s one to place on the shelf alongside Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by former Silicon Valley giant-turned-repentant seer Jared Lanier; Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a whistleblower memoir about Facebook / Meta; or Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. 

For while (horribly) convenient, these platforms have exploited a system in which addiction is engineered, complacency fostered, and competition swallowed like Jonah. Yet in growing ever bigger and greedier, it’s also leading to their inevitable decay – or “enshittification,” as Wu’s former schoolmate Cory Doctorow put it.

Tech regulation

Wu, a law professor, who once served as a Biden White House adviser on competition, argues it’s time to treat today’s tech giants more like utilities – essential services that must be regulated, as IBM once was, held accountable, and made to work in the public interest, rather than purely for shareholder profit. A world in which AI, for example, can work for all of us.

“Prosperity, fairness and growth are not incompatible,” says Wu. And he believes that with the right political will and legal momentum, this change is actually possible. And, well, whether or not you consider that to be as optimistic as the kind of visions summoned up in Cyberia remains to be seen. Here’s to electric dreams.

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, by Tim Wu, is out now, published by Penguin.

Ali Catterall is an award-winning writer, journalist and filmmaker whose writing has featured in the Guardian, Time Out, GQ, Film4, Word magazine and the Big Issue, among many others. Ali is also the writer and director of the 2023 film Scala!!!

Further reading

The Seven Rules of Trust - the new book by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

Mary Portas lifts lid on the 90s rebrand of Harvey Nicks in her new book

Empire of AI by Karen Hao: A powerful, troubling exposé revealing tech giant OpenAI’s secretive rise