Keen On

Last time the anti-monopoly crusader Tim Wu appeared on the show, he was warning broadly about the road to serfdom. But in his new book, The Age of Extraction, Wu gets much more specific. The real road to serfdom, he warns, runs through Silicon Valley. Forget for a moment about surveillance capitalism, Wu suggests, and imagine that the most existential threat to 21st century freedom and prosperity is the “platform capitalism” of tech behemoths like Google and Amazon. These multi-trillion-dollar companies, he argues, have transformed the very places where we do business—digital marketplaces that once promised democratization—into sophisticated extraction machines. Like the robber barons of the late 19th century, today’s tech platforms have concentrated unprecedented wealth and power, creating an economic system that lends itself to the most Hayekian of medieval metaphors. The Silicon Valley business model is turning us into digital serfs, he warns starkly. That’s the extractive goal—the ‘Zero to One,’ as its m