Digital platforms usually did not remove the middleman; they rebuilt intermediation. The middleman did not shrink — it became invisible enough to fit in our pocket.
One of the favourite stories of technology ventures is the removal of the middleman. Hotel and guest, passenger and driver, seller and customer, artist and listener will meet directly. The brokers, heavy institutions and needless gates of the old world will step aside; people will build faster, cheaper and freer relations. On first hearing, this account carries a simplicity that is hard to dispute. Some intermediaries really do only take a toll, hoard information and protect their position through the labour of others.
Yet digital platforms usually did not remove the middleman; they rebuilt intermediation. What several different people and institutions once did was gathered behind a single screen. Finding customers, taking payment, measuring trust, distributing visibility and resolving disputes passed into the platform’s hands. While the two parties appear to reach each other directly, an unseen third party began to determine almost every condition of their relationship. The middleman did not shrink; it became invisible enough to fit in our pocket.
Whoever opens the gate owns the threshold
When a platform is first founded it is valuable because it brings parties together. As enough people arrive, network effects form: the seller wants to be where the customers are, the customer where the sellers are. After a while the platform ceases to be one option among others and comes closer to being the market itself. Businesses must be there to be visible, workers must protect their accounts to get work, users must pass through the same gate to find enough options.
At this stage the institution holding the gate does not merely provide a connection. It sets the commission rate, the ranking criteria, the form of communication and how far the parties may reach one another. A structure that grew on the promise of removing the middleman can become a crossing point stronger than all the old intermediaries combined. Unlike a physical marketplace, moreover, it can change the rules overnight. When the update arrives the shops stand where they were, but the street has changed direction.
The privatisation of trust
For trade between strangers, or travelling together, to be possible, trust is required. Platforms meet this need with ratings, identity checks, reviews and payment guarantees. The service is real; it makes it easier for people who do not know one another at all to form a relationship. But when the infrastructure of trust belongs to a single company, our reputation too begins to resemble that company’s property.
We cannot take the rating accumulated over years to another platform. When an account closes we lose not only our access but our digital history of being trustworthy. Thus the platform becomes not a needless intermediary between two parties but the condition of the parties believing in each other. Trust ceases to be a shared social relation; it turns into a private asset that is measured, stored and licensed for use.
Who sets the price?
Platforms that say “we merely bring the parties together” usually have a strong influence on price as well. Suggested fees, dynamic pricing, promotion charges, discount pressure and commissions shape both the worker’s income and the amount the customer pays. In theory the parties are free; in practice, to stay visible and receive orders, they may feel obliged to follow the system’s suggestions. No command is issued, but the work of whoever falls outside the algorithm shrinks.
The curious feature of this arrangement is that the platform both establishes the market and acts as referee within it. It offers its own service, ranks competitors, interprets the rules and gives the final word in disputes. Imagine that the person running a city’s marketplace also secretly decides on which shelf every shop will appear. In the digital world we take this as ordinary, because we cannot see the venue, the shelf and the referee separately.
Labour without an employer
The harshest face of the new intermediation appears in working relations. The platform directs the worker, measures their performance, builds their relationship with customers and controls the flow of income; yet it may define itself merely as a technology provider. The worker is thereby exposed to an employer’s supervision while lacking a worker’s protections. They cannot meet a manager; they receive their shift from an algorithm. They cannot ask the reason for a decision; they look at their score.
The old employer was not fairer for being visible. But at least there was a party with whom one could bargain and whose responsibility could be named. In the new order the functions of employment are distributed inside the code. Because every decision looks like the result of a small calculation, the political character of the relationship is erased. Yet who bears the risk, who has security and who takes what share of the value produced remain the old questions we know well.
Not the absence of intermediaries, but accountable intermediation
Abolishing all intermediaries in social relations is neither possible nor always desirable. Sometimes the intermediary is the rule that protects the weaker party; sometimes it is shared infrastructure, a referee or a guarantee mechanism. What matters is less the existence of the intermediary than to whom it belongs and how it is supervised. Can the parties set the rules together? Are the commission and ranking criteria open? Can reputation be carried elsewhere? Can workers take part in decision-making? Can the intermediary’s authority be revoked?
Cooperative platforms, open protocols and jointly governed digital markets seek different answers to these questions. None is easy; as scale grows, problems of coordination, security and financing appear. Still, they rescue us from a false dichotomy: there is no necessity to be either at the mercy of the old middleman or handed over to the new platform owner. Rebuilding intermediation as a shared service may be possible.
When we hear “we removed the middleman” we should look not behind us but into the screen. For the old intermediary may genuinely have gone; yet the structure that replaced it may hold more information, a wider market and less responsibility. Disintermediation is sometimes not freedom but the art of hiding the intermediary’s name.
Another strength of the new intermediation is that it limits the parties from forming direct ties with one another. The platform enables the customer to reach the seller, the listener the artist, the passenger the driver; but it does not want the relationship carried outside itself. It hides contact details, binds payment to its own channel, and may penalise agreements made off-platform. For once the parties genuinely begin to build unmediated relations, the company’s toll is at risk. “We bring you together” turns in time into the rule “you may reach one another only through us.”
This dependence is not merely a matter of commission. A business accumulates reviews, followers and customer history over years, yet cannot carry them to another system. When a worker leaves the platform they leave behind the reputation built by their own labour. The customer, too, struggles to move because of habits, records and connections. The intermediary’s most valuable asset thus becomes not technology but the network people are obliged to use in order to reach one another. The network grows through shared labour while its ownership stays in one pair of hands.
Accountable intermediation requires recognising this shared value. Data and reputation must be portable, decision criteria disclosed, a person whose account is closed must reach a real official, and workers must be represented in the bodies that set the rules. We can discuss a platform’s forms of ownership and government without rejecting the convenience it provides. An intermediary is sometimes necessary; but being necessary is not the same as being untouchable and beyond account.