“The more you allow wealth to accumulate unequally, the more unbalanced the economy becomes—and the harder it becomes to take it away. Economic power consists of the ability to resist redistribution. That’s why a policy focused on only growing the pie was also likely, on a systemic basis, to have prevented it from being cut in the first place.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

Wu makes a good argument against relying too heavily on redistribution as a plan to combat extreme wealth inequality. His point is that it depends on the willingness—or enforcement—of the upper class to keep paying out. I am absolutely a proponent of wealth taxation; however, I appreciate what he is saying here about it not always being so easy or simple to get those with wealth to part with it. They are skilled at finding ways to keep it for themselves. Wu's suggestion seems to be to build a system that more evenly distributes wealth to begin with and using redistribution primarily for caring for those who most need it.

“The structure of industry and the balance of economic power matter. The worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution were eventually countered by a labour movement demanding that workers be treated better and receive more of the proceeds. Where employees have no power, they can expect to be squeezed or displaced. Where workers are more important and understood as essential and better represented, AIs may be deployed or developed in an augmentative fashion.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

This past week, Meta laid off another 8000 employees who found out via 4am emails. AI was cited as the reason. Yesterday, Webflow laid off a significant portion of their workforce, many who seem to report being locked out of their laptops with no explanation. Again, AI was cited as the reason. Cisco announced earlier this month that despite year-over-year revenue being up 12%, they were letting go of 4000 employees. Because AI.

The year isn't even half over and the tech industry has already seen around 150,000 layoffs in 2026. Amazon, Pinterest, Paypal, Intuit, Dell, Oracle, Cloudflare, Salesforc—the list goes on and on. And while AI might not have been the stated reason for all of these layoffs, it's certainly being used as a justifying reason for many of them. What was once thinly veiled as 'efficiency cuts' are now being outright touted as the result of companies going all in on AI. But whatever you want to call it, the point is that these companies do not care because they have no reason to. The only thing that matters to them is shareholder profit.

White collar workers have long resisted the idea that we need unions because we wanted to see ourselves as more important—more valuable to the companies we worked for. We told ourselves that we weren't just labourers, we were co-creators with the companies. It's all bullshit.

Tech workers need unionization and AI platforms need government regulation. These things need to be non-negotiables in our societal participation in AI.

“I would suggest that convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial." — Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction

This is an interesting argument about what is driving the takeover of tech in our lives. The platforms that win the attention game are the ones who make things easiest. Wu describes the concept of 'couch lock,' a stoner term for the inability to move once you get comfortable, as a way of understanding this. Shifting your attention off of a platform, let alone leaving it altogether, becomes a chore.

This makes me wonder about the things that are intentionally slower and more deliberate, things that maybe take a bit more effort. How do you get people to choose inconvenience?