The Age of Extraction Quotes

“What technology will do for us depends on how we design it and where economic power resides. That’s why the real challenge for humanity is to design an economic future that works for more people”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“The key is recovering a healthy skepticism of accumulated economic power”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“Previous generations who succeeded in creating more equitable societies sought structural balancing through the division of property ownership”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“The great monopolists are not passive: they actively defend their market position by buying out dangerous competitors”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“But history also tells us that there is a cycle and that over-centralization usually leads in two directions: a crash or long-term stagnation.”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“The initial plan had been for investors to merely flip foreclosed homes at scale and take the proceeds. But after some experience renting”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“The trade-off was a significant loss of control over the doctors’ own practices and”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“The emergence of these groupings by the mid-2010s signified a turning point. The main tech platforms had emerged as the dominant tool for harnessing the economic and social energies made possible by an interconnected nation and world.”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“Medicine has an internal culture of hard work and long hours, particularly in the years while doctors are training. But traditionally, this was understood as something that would, later on, begin to ease—or at least be under the control of the individual doctor. In addition, specialties such as anesthesiology, radiology, and dermatology were also understood by tradition to offer a more balanced lifestyle. Those were precisely the practices targeted by private equity, which saw the lifestyle practices as an opportunity.”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

“the projected triumph of the creative class was a bust. For the millions of “Davids” who flocked to the Web over the 2000s were not challenging the new “Goliaths” in any meaningful way. Rather, they became, in large part, Goliath’s unpaid or underpaid servants. They joined Goliath’s army and made him rich.”
― Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity