Two market experts deconstruct the drivers & inhibitors to innovation in the digital economy, explain how large tech companies can stifle disruption, assess the toll of their technologies on our well-being & democracy, & outline policy changes to take power away from big tech & return it to entrepreneurs.Silicon Valley’sgenius combined with limited corporate regulation promised a new age of technological innovation in which entrepreneurs would create companies that would in turn fuel unprecedented job growth. Yet disruptive innovation has stagnated even as the five leading tech giants, which account for approximately 25 percent of the S&P 500’s market capitalization, are expanding to unimaginable scale & power.InHow Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation—& How to Strike Back,Ariel Ezrachi&Maurice E. Stuckeexplain why this is happening & what we can do to reverse it. While many distrust theBig-Tech Barons, the prevailing belief is that innovation is thriving online. It isn’t. Rather than disruptive innovations that create significant value, we are getting technologies that primarily extract value & reduce well-being. Using vivid examples & relying on their work in the field, the authors explain how the leading tech companies design their sprawling ecosystems to extract more profits (while crushing any entrepreneur that poses a threat). As a result, we get less innovation that benefits us & more innovations that surpass the dreams of yesteryears’ autocracies.TheTech Barons’technologies, which seek to decode our emotions & thoughts to better manipulate our behavior, are undermining political stability & democracy while fueling tribalism & hate. But it’s not hopeless. The authors reveal that sustained innovation scales with cities not companies, & that we, as a society, should profoundly alter our investment strategy & priorities to certain entrepreneurs (“Tech Pirates”) & cities’ in