Disintermediation: Difference between revisions

{{A|devil|

[[File:Seymour.jpg|450px|thumb|center|“They say disintermediation is back in style. I say it never went out.”]]

}}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 wild-west of mediocrity. The world is knee deep in the stuff, yet — yet — amongst all those swine, the faint hope remains of a pearl or two, which keeps our hearts beating.

The digital revolution was, for those at the wrong end of the [[agency problem]] — a class of people generally called “[[client]]s” —a moment of beatific liberation — but only a fleeting one. It became clear that the same barrier whose collapse allowed ''them'' into this lush meadow of direct market access allowed ''every other bastard'' to rush in, too. This turned said lush meadow into a [[Tragedy of the commons|tragic]] [[digital commons]].<ref>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''.</ref> Chris Anderson’s [[The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More|long tail]] of hopeful aspiration — a supply for every demand; a demand for any supply! — morphed into a ghoulish chem-trail of worthless pap that ''no-one'' wanted to buy. The world was at once awash with quadrophonic noise.

We need someone to help sort this out for us!

And, lo, [[agent]]s were back in style again, branding themselves now as providers of “[[software as a service]]” and similarly unintuitive things.  

Agents were back in style: in [[Financial service|financial services]], as Jane Seymour might have put it, they never went out. But now these firms, whose only role on God’s green Earth ''is'' to [[Look, I tried|intermediate]], began to get in on the act. However they could, desperately shedding their own hideous operational burdens by flexing the very same power that the digital network offered to amateur musicians: to ''disintermediate''.  

But unlike your forty-something dads with their home studios on the Mac and self published novels in the kindle store, the [[Interdisintermediation|''interdisintermediation'']] of [[Financial service|financial services]] has not been quite the same roaring success.<ref>On a ''personal'' level, you understand.</ref> At least the dads have an MP3 to show for it, never mind that no-one will ever listen to it.  

Where now are the MP3s of financial services? Where, indeed, are the business change managers who so assiduously costed out of existence that handful of quiet negotiators that were once parked in a corner of the compliance floor, now that they are replaced by an dispersed undertaking spanning three continents, four corporate service providers and a permanent operations and procurement infrastructure?  

Onto the next project.

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