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Disintermediation: Difference between revisions
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{{A|devil| | {{A|devil| | ||
[[File:Seymour.jpg|450px|thumb|center|“They say disintermediation is back in style. I say it never went out.”]] | [[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. | }}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'' — effortlessly and ''costlessly''. | ||
Hence, the great, grand, ''[[disintermediation]]''. | Hence, the great, grand, ''[[disintermediation]]''. | ||
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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. | 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” | 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. | ||
We need someone to help sort this out for us! | 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. | ||
The cry went up: ''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. | And, lo, [[agent]]s were back in style again, branding themselves now as providers of “[[software as a service]]” and similarly unintuitive things. | ||