When I started The Occasional Learner’s Book Club on Substack, I wanted to put a focus on books that help ordinary people “learn more about the way the world works and how systems of power direct the lives of ordinary people.” For the first entry, we read Tim Wu’s ‘The Age of Extraction.’
Wu is a law professor at Columbia University. He worked on antitrust in both the Obama and Biden administrations and is also the author of numerous books. His latest work argues tech companies have made once useful platforms into engines of gobsmacking wealth extraction. Giants like Google, Amazon and Apple follow a pattern of making themselves essential to commerce and even daily life, but then scale to outgrow competition and systematically use their position to extract wealth, data, and attention from both users and businesses trapped within their ecosystems.
This novel use of the platform, Wu argues, has now spread beyond Big Tech. Housing firms, healthcare companies and even professional sports organizations have borrowed the model to extract enormous sums. The upshot is an Internet that betrayed the early promise of its democratizing power and an economy built on widening inequality and economic concentration. Wu believes the latter helps fuel a political cycle that ends in dangerously authoritarian governments.
In this conversation, we discuss what makes platform monopolies uniquely pernicious, when companies should be broken up versus turned into ‘public callings’, how’s Wu optimism about tech has changed over time and so much more.
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