Disintermediation
The very promise of the digital revolution. A distributed network whose design cleaves to the end-to-end principle promises its users the ability, never before possessed, to reach one’s clients, friends, relations, countrymen, lovers, fighters, haters — in short, anyone — costlessly. Suddenly, a generation of frustrated novelists could publish their bildungsromane direct to the colossal cruel indifference of a world suddenly drowning in the sodding things, without the reality-dosing filter of a publisher to save them the bother of those wasted months. From nowhere Middle-aged men, resentful of their own profligacy with the productive years of their lives could compose, record, mix, master and distribute their dreary pop songs to the studied indifference of every man-jack on this barren crag of rock, including their own immediate families, not that they’re bitter or anything, and have them at least sound like real pop music. Suddenly maverick reality TV hosts could hot-wire their self-absorbed political aspirations into the consciousness of a nation, unfiltered by the agency of advertising, or the mediation of a traditional political party.
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For those at the wrong end of the agency problem — a class of people generally called “clients” — this seemed for a moment a time of beautiful liberation, until it became clear that the same barrier whose collapse allowed them into the beautiful lush meadow of direct market access allowed every other bastard in too. This turned said beautiful lush meadow into a tragic digital commons.[1] Chris Anderson’s long tail morphed into a ghoulish chem-trail of worthless pap that no-one wanted to buy.
Agents were suddenly back in style again. In financial services, As Jane Seymour might have put it, they never went out.
But now we find financial services firms, whose only role on God’s green earth is to intermediate, desperately trying to reduce their own hideous operational burden by flexing that very same power of the digital network to disintermediate. And, lo, businesses have sprung up from the fertile soil of that lush meadow, to intermediate the disintermediation. Software as a service dudes: we’re looking at you.
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References
- ↑ There wasn’t meant to be any “tragedy” in the digital commons, of course. But it turns out the scarce resource is not supply-side bandwidth — the good people at Amazon Web Services have got our backs on that — but demand-side attention and money.