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.
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Suddenly, a generation of aspiring novelists could publish their bildungsromane direct into the colossal, cruel teeth of a world suddenly drowning in the sodding things, without the reality-dosing filter of a publisher to save them from those wasted, sequestered months. From nowhere middle-aged men, could atone for the profligacy with which they wasted their own productive years by composing, recording, mixing, master and distribute their dreary pop songs to the studied indifference of every soul 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.
This was, for those at the wrong end of the agency problem — a class of people generally called “clients” —a moment of beatific liberation, until it became clear that the same barrier whose collapse allowed them into this lush meadow of direct market access allowed every other bastard in too. This turned said 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, only now branding themselves as “software as a service” and similarly unintuitive things. In financial services, as Jane Seymour might have put it, they never went out.
But now 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 that the digital network offered to amateur musicians: to disintermediate. Outsource! Automate! Send our KYC team to Bucharest!
But, sir, how shall we disintermediate?
And, lo, businesses sprung from the fertile soil of that lush meadow, to intermediate the disintermediation. Legal process outsourcers; management consultants, providers of software as a service, and a secondary wave of specialisms to police this new brand of intermediaries: more management consultants, more negotiators, professional advisers, internal auditors, procurement specialists, negotiators, software as a service providers to help implement software as a service: we’re looking at you.
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- ↑ 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.