Disintermediation
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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.
Hence, the great, grand, disintermediation.
Suddenly, aspiring but ungifted novelists could publish their bildungsromane direct into the teeth of a cruel world suddenly drowning in the sodding things, circumventing the galling disinterest of publishers who until then had guarded the gates of acclamation. From nowhere, dreary middle-aged men could atone for the profligacy with which they wasted their own youths by recording, mixing and distributing their own dreary pop songs to the studied indifference of every soul on this barren rock, including their own families, not that they’re bitter or anything,[1] and have them at least sound like real pop music. No recording studio or record label required. Suddenly, 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.
Suddenly, a wild-west of mediocrity. Yet amongst all those swine, a pearl or two.
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.[2] Chris Anderson’s 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, agents 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 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 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.
The cry rang out: “Go at once and outsource! Automate! Send the KYC team to Bucharest!”
“But, sir, how shall we disintermediate?”
“If you can’t work it out for yourself, find someone to help you.”
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 then a second wave of intermediating specialisms to police the first one: more management consultants, more negotiators, professional advisers, internal auditors, procurement specialists, negotiators, software as a service providers engaged implement the SAAS solutions bought in the first wave.
But unlike your forty-something dads with their home studios on the Mac and self published novels in the kindle store, the interdisintermediation of financial services has not been quite the same roaring success.[3] 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.
See also
References
- ↑ I refer to none other than Dangerboy, of course.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ On a personal level, you understand.