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

Big tech is rapidly consolidating its economic power, according to this unsettling study from legal scholar Wu (The Attention Merchants). Unlike the internet’s first prominent platforms, which brought together buyers and sellers, sparking innovation and reducing costs, today’s dominant tech firms, Wu contends, have turned to extraction—data mining and selling, and building systems designed to maximize data-assisted targeting of users. Along the way, they’ve relied on time-tested monopolistic schemes like buying up competitors. The result, Wu explains, is a system that’s hard for upstarts to crack even as services degrade and prices rise. While much of this has been covered by others, Wu takes an alarming extra step, showing how the monopolistic, extractive logic of the internet economy is invading the economy at large as more industries adopt (or are targeted by) new technologies. Examples include the housing market and, most startlingly, the medical industry, which is undergoing a wave of concentration under private equity firms that have implemented onerous new “practice platforms” for doctors. Wu asserts that these industries’ capitulations to tech are canaries in the coal mine, signaling an emergent “platform capitalism” that threatens to create a two-tiered economy with extractive platforms on top and everyone else below. Wu (the original coiner of “net neutrality”) outlines some canny legal means to avoid this bleak future. It’s an urgent wake-up call. (Nov.)