Cutting Out the Middleman Is How You Meet the Next One

There's a particular kind of American frustration that comes with opening a restaurant receipt and finding a delivery fee, a service fee, a small order fee, and a tip screen — all from a company that owns none of the food, employs none of the cooks, and drives none of the cars. We keep promising each other we'll cut out the middleman. We keep failing.

The historical record is blunt about why: the middleman isn't a person. It's a position. And positions get filled.

Ur Had Brokers Before It Had Wheels That Worked

Head to the clay tablet archives of third-millennium BCE Mesopotamia and you'll find merchants — the Sumerians called them damkar — who bought grain from farmers near harvest, when prices were low, and sold it to city dwellers months later, when prices were high. Farmers resented them. City dwellers resented them. Kings occasionally taxed them out of pure spite.

Nobody eliminated them.

Because the damkar wasn't stealing value, exactly. He was absorbing risk. The farmer needed cash now and couldn't wait for the buyer. The city needed grain in February and couldn't wait for the harvest. The middleman sat in the gap between two people who both needed something earlier than the market could provide it — and gaps are where the money lives. As long as the gap existed, someone would stand in it and charge rent on the crossing.

Venice: The Original App Store

Fast forward a couple thousand years and the gap got geographic. Venetian spice traders didn't grow pepper. They didn't sail to India — mostly they bought from Egyptian intermediaries who bought from Arab intermediaries who bought from Indian producers. By the time a peppercorn reached a Frankfurt kitchen, four or five hands had touched it, and each hand kept a margin.

The Venetian state did what modern platforms do: it made itself the chokepoint. All spice trade through Venice, all contracts on Venetian terms, all fees on Venetian ledgers. When you hear a tech founder talk about 'owning the marketplace,' understand that the Doge wrote that business plan in the 1200s.

And when Portuguese ships finally rounded Africa and broke the chokepoint — genuine disintermediation! Spices direct from the source! — what happened? Lisbon became the new chokepoint. Then Amsterdam. Then London. The route changed. The toll booth did not.

The Scalper Is the Oldest Job Title in America

Ticket resale might be the purest modern expression of this. The artist sets a price. The venue caps a price. The fan will pay more. That gap — between the printed price and the desperate willingness to pay — is a standing invitation, and someone always answers. Ancient Rome had resellers working the Colosseum's entrances for gladiatorial games, and the Roman satirists complained about them in nearly the same words we use about StubHub.

Regulators keep trying to close the gap with caps and bans. The gap just moves — to the bots, to the 'verified reseller' platform that charges its own fees on top, to the platinum 'premium' tier that's just legalized scalping run by the venue itself. The middleman didn't die. He got a corporate rebrand and an API.

Why 'Cut Out the Middleman' Always Fails

Every disintermediation wave of the last twenty years promised the same thing: connect producers and consumers directly, take a small cut, everyone wins. And for a while, it works — which is exactly the pattern.

Here's the sequence history keeps running:

1. A new intermediary undercuts the old one. Farmers' markets beat grocery chains. Craigslist beat classified ads. Ride apps beat taxi medallions.
2. The new intermediary grows until it is the market.
3. The small cut becomes a large cut, because at that point the middleman isn't standing between you and what you want — he's standing on it.

Uber and DoorDash both ran losses for years to reach step two, then discovered step three. So did Amazon with third-party sellers, and so did Etsy, which started as an anti-Walmart craft fair and now charges listing fees, transaction fees, payment processing fees, and an 'Offsite Ads' fee you can opt out of only if you opt out of being found.

The old middleman got replaced by a newer one with better software and a bigger appetite.

What You Can Actually Do With This

You can't abolish the position. But you can learn to read it. When evaluating any platform, marketplace, or broker, ask the damkar question: what gap is this filling, and who else could fill it? If the answer is 'a real risk I can't absorb myself' — the grain dealer warehousing your harvest, the insurer pooling your catastrophe — the cut is probably earning its keep. If the answer is 'the gap between a printed price and what people will pay,' congratulations, you've found a toll booth, and toll booths only get more expensive.

The Sumerian farmer couldn't opt out of the grain broker. You can't opt out of the app store. Five thousand years of data says the only real choice is knowing which kind you're paying for.