January 14, 2026 — Make the Most of the Middle

“Disintermediation” was a hot buzzword during the early days of disruption thinking, but it never really occurred. Instead, the platform era ushered in new forms of intermediation based on advertising incentives and deregulation, making the current environment far less accountable and far more about exploitation.

Markets depend on middlemen, as do information economies. The health of markets and information spaces often depends on how well those middlemen function, the rules that define their scope of action, and the incentives that guide their choices. As Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth (Brookings Institution Press, 2021):

Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability — everywhere from scientific journals to Wikipedia pages — there is no marketplace of ideas; there are only cults warring and splintering and individuals running around making noise.

Compared to the intermediation of yore, with editors, editorial boards, and publishing staff listed on mastheads, platforms have no such obvious pathways to accountability. Section 230 has been used to provide them with the kind of legal cover that allows them to make their own rules and behave with near impunity. Attention is the new commodity, and stealing yours is the goal. The new middleman is a thief, not an ally.

We discuss these issues, the black boxes of platforms, the role of LLMs as new black box intermediaries, the long-forgotten Fairness Doctrine and its relevance, and more.

We also touch on recent news (the new STM report, PISS, and more).

Joy’s post about velvet ropes: https://www.the-geyser.com/bring-back-the-velvet-ropes/

This podcast gets a nod:

Also, this draft paper (labeled as such, thank you authors) is a critically important read because of the ideas: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5870623

• Some background on how it came about: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-generative-ai-is-destroying-society

We finish with our “Discoveries of the Week.”

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