​🎉💰📚🫶 #BookClub (No Homework Required)

​Saturday 11a ET · Zoom · AI Enhanced

​Join YonksTEAM (Jason ✝️ Tyler Younker) and the ♾️ We Own Ai 🤖 [.OCA] Book Club for our next Saturday conversation. After closing Adam Grant's Hidden Potential and its "Systems of Opportunity" framework (Part 3, Aug 22 wrap), we're pivoting from individual growth to systemic design — at economy scale.

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

• ​by Tim Wu · Knopf (Penguin Random House) · Nov 4, 2025 · 224 pages · narrated by Frits Zernike (~6 hr)

​🎯 Why this book next

​"Dominant platforms have stopped enabling markets and started extracting from them, harvesting data, imposing fees, manipulating algorithms, and eliminating competition." — Donner Prize 2025-26 Jury Citation (official, verbatim from donnerbookprize.com)

​Tim Wu — Columbia Law professor, coined "network neutrality" (2003), White House tech advisor (2021–2023), architect of the Facebook antitrust case — turns his lens on the platform economy. Where Grant taught us how individuals break through systems, Wu shows us how platforms have captured those systems for extraction.

​This is the economy-scale sequel to Hidden Potential's "Systems of Opportunity" thesis. Grant → Chetty's Lost Einsteins, Finland's looping, lattice-vs-ladder. Wu → platforms monetizing every click, every data point, every ounce of attention. No good click goes unmonetized.

​🏆 Credentials

• ​A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2025 — appearing in both the official publisher description and the Apple Books store (two independent tool-verified sources).

• ​2025-26 Donner Prize RUNNER-UP (official post-gala label) — one of four runners-up from the Canadian public-policy shortlist. Winner: Tony Keller, Borderline Chaos.

​Karen Hao (author, Empire of AI): "The magic of Tim Wu's The Age of Extraction is its simplicity… Essential reading."

​Wu's bibliography arc: Who Controls the Internet? (2006) → The Master Switch (2010) → The Attention Merchants (2016) → The Curse of Bigness (2018) → The Age of Extraction (2025) — where information empires, attention capture, and antitrust converge.

​🗓️ Proposed pacing

​4-Saturday arc — roughly 56 pages / ~1.5 hr audiobook per session. Or, if the group prefers a lighter touch: 6-week cadence.

​This is a PROPOSAL — the exact schedule locks when @GTM sets the date. We'll decide together on the call.

​💡 #ResponsibleAgenticAI angles

1. ​Member-owned relay as the counter-platform — Wu's "no good click goes unmonetized" is the exact problem WeOwn.Buzz's member-owned relay (wss://felg.weown.buzz) was built to solve. What does a cooperatively-owned attention layer look like?

2. ​LLM data-hunger — Wu flags that AI's training data comes from human-generated content. What do WeOwn members owe and get for their data feeding the agents?

3. ​Wu invented "net neutrality" (2003) — and we operate on a Nostr relay. Decentralized architecture as anti-extraction design. Is this the platform-co-op model Tim Wu's prescriptions point toward?

4. ​New Brandeis antitrust + Facebook breakup advocacy — pairs with VCO.bot's agentic-board thinking. Governance design at platform scale.

​📖 Reading coverage (proposed)

• ​Session 1: Introduction + Ch 1–2 — "The New Extractors" + "The Platform Century"

• ​Session 2: Ch 3–4 — "The Attention Merchants Revisited" + LLM data-hunger

• ​Session 3: Ch 5–6 — Antitrust + New Brandeis + policy prescriptions

• ​Session 4: Conclusion + our response — what a member-owned relay looks like

​🔗 Get the book

• ​Audiobook (Narrator Frits Zernike): Amazon · Apple Books (iTunes id 1798867816) · $14.99 · ~6 hr

• ​Paperback/Kindle: Amazon · ISBN 978-0-593-32124-9

• ​Catalog: OpenLibrary OL61530415M (publisher: Knopf · first_publish 2025)

​⚡ This is our first step into platform capitalism — and how to build an exit. See you Saturday! 🫡🐝

​♾️ WeOwnNet 🌐 [DUNA][.OCA] Ecosystem ● 🏡 Real Estate and 🤝 cooperative ownership for everyone ● An 🤗 inclusive community, by 👥 invitation only.