Intermediation

2024-10-04

This is entry 4 of 100 for #100DaysToOffload.

A lot of big business nowadays seems just to be about intermediation.

Let me just give some examples:

Cars act as an intermediary between the origin and the destination; they monetise the driving data, etc. as well as being unnecessarily expensive.
Google intermediates between the user and information; they monetise the data for advertising.
Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, etc. intermediate between the content generated by people, and the people to see the content.
Netflix intermediates movies and series; Spotify intermediates music.
Visa intermediate between the customer and the seller, whilst taking an amount of the actual transaction as fees.
Generative AI is intermediation too: it functions as a 'virtual mind', producing new (if often terrible) content from existing (often stolen) content.

All of this is backed up by proprietary software, and the power of defaults, as well as the lack of viable competition. This is why there is such a push to make everything contactless and cash-free: it consolidates the power of Visa, as there is a lack of competition, and contactless payments have become a default (under the guise of convenience).

Disintermediation

I've seen the idea of disintermediation before, but I don't really think that would the solution to this. Each of these businesses actually do offer something: cars have a value in getting from place to place, search engines are necessary to find information on the internet. But they problem is, they are consolidated and hold too much power, and so get around selling terribly suboptimal solutions to the problem. For instance, the auto industry (and oil/gas companies) make their money from a suboptimal solution: they had enough money to affect the infrastructure to be car-centric, when the optimal solution would be public transport, or a bike. But we do need to get from place to place! So there is a market for the intermediary, but just... we need a better one.

As an example, we have content feeds that intermediate between the actual content and the people watching the content. But, because the companies are only after profit incentives, the feeds are not actually there to put worthwhile content in front of people's eyes: it's just to get "content", however pointless, and however deleterious to the person, that generates the maximum profit.

Yet: there does need to be a way to distribute information. Now, I don't know if the concept of a traditional social media "feed" is the best way, but RSS feeds do the same thing, really. It is useful.

So, I think that for each of these, what we need is a solution that is in the middle. For instance, I think that in the realm of travel, bicycles are the best mode of transport for urban places - for longer journeys, trains and buses and trams are the best mode. Likewise, it is clear that Google (and all the rest too: Bing, Duckduckgo, etc.) have all failed in the quest to make a good search engine. I've been trialling @@[Kagi][https://kagi.com], and from what I can see it really is much better. It is not corrupted by the profit motive, as it is paid-for, and instead, it simply focusses on providing the best search experience it can.

I wonder if there is an alternative to Visa that intermediates payments without the problems that it has. For instance, perhaps a non-profit that only takes fees as required to provide the service, and not to turn profits.

In terms of Netflix and Spotify, I suppose disintermediation could actually work here. Of course, there is still the record label that acts as an intermediary and siphoning off, so the problem seems bigger.

AI is mainly a terrible intermediary because... it's inefficient. Painfully inefficient. In this way, it sort of has the same problem as cars do, only so very much worse.

Conclusion

I haven't really got anything else, but I wonder if there is a market for replacement intermediaries, which have better incentives, or a more efficient structure...