**A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 • Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants) explains how we can reclaim control and create a balanced economy that works for everyone.“The magic of Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is its simplicity. Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age—the unaccountable power of tech platforms—into such digestible pieces that the ...

The pre-eminent exponent of anti-monopoly law explains why we have no option but to break Big Tech’s monopolies, and that doing so would unleash innovation and growth.‘Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age - the unaccountable power of tech platforms - into such digestible pieces that the solutions for what to do become dead obvious’ KAREN HAO, author of Empire of AI'Tim Wu is a titan . . . a must-r...

**From the author of the award-winning The Master Switch, who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time."Dazzling." —Financial Times**Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking liv...

A New Yorker and Fortune Best Book of the Year"A must-read for all Americans who want to remain the ones deciding what they can read, watch, and listen to.” —Arianna HuffingtonAnalyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information powers—Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T—Tim Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire.It is easy to forget that e...

Winner of the 2011 Business Book of the Year AwardThe Internet Age: on the face of it, an era of unprecedented freedom in both communication and culture. Yet in the past, each major new medium, from telephone to satellite television, has crested on a wave of similar idealistic optimism, before succumbing to the inevitable undertow of industrial consolidation. Every once free and open technology has, in time, become centralized and closed; as corporate power has tak...

We're three decades into a global experiment: what happens when the major nations of the world weaken their control on the size and power of corporate giants and allow unrestricted expansion?In The Curse of Bigness Tim Wu exposes the threats monopolies pose to economic stability and social freedom around the world. Aided by the globalization of commerce and finance, in recent years, we have seen takeovers galore that make a mockery of the ideals of competition and economic...

Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the 'attention merchants', contributing to the distr...

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality," comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms—big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist ...

From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term "net neutrality”—a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertis...

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality," author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future.We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms -- big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis ...

**A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 • Tech platforms manipulate attention, extract wealth, and deepen inequality. In this new book, Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants) explains how we can reclaim control and create a balanced economy that works for everyone.“The magic of Tim Wu’s The Age of Extraction is its simplicity. Wu deftly breaks down one of the greatest challenges of our age—the unaccountable power of tech platforms—into such digestible pieces that the ...

The pre-eminent exponent of anti-monopoly law explains why we have no option but to break Big Tech’s monopolies, and that doing so would unleash innovation and growth.Today’s dominant tech platforms – the places where we exchange information and buy things online – could be the most powerful engines of prosperity ever invented. Instead, they are the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever created and a grave threat to our societies.Here the pre...