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

Start with the promise: "The internet initially promised the empowerment of the little people." The book spends its first half tracking how that promise inverted, until a handful of platforms sat on top of the economy siphoning wealth from everyone underneath. "Platforms, Wu argues, are the antithesis of innovation," an admirer writes, and the argument refuses to stop at Google and Amazon: it follows the same extraction logic into housing and into private-equity outfits squeezing doctors' offices, which is why "a stray section on private equity" keeps coming up as the part nobody expected and everybody remembers. All of it in 224 quick pages, with endnotes for anyone who wants to check the receipts. One reader's entire review: "We need Lina Khan back like yesterday!"

He ran tech and competition policy from inside the White House, which makes the punch-pulling hard to forgive: he knows which officials and policies let the platforms win, and declines to name them. The remedies rest on getting incentives right and trusting platforms to reform, a faith one detractor says "would make even Aaron Sorkin gag." His verdict on the whole book: "A centrist's argument for not rocking the Big Tech boat." The chapters assert where they should argue ("He does a lot of 'announcing' and I felt the chapters were extremely brief") and stand alone instead of stacking into one case. Even the copyediting needed another pass: "Wu needs an editor who knows that the Yankees and As could never meet in the World Series."