Disintermediation: Difference between revisions

Unexpectedly, self-absorbed reality TV hosts could hot-wire their political aspirations into the nation’s deplorable consciousness, unfiltered by taste and undeterred by the cost of advertising or the mediated probity of party-political machinery.  

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, for 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> {{author|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.

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