INCOMPLETE LIST CONCERNING SYMBOLIC DESINTERMEDIATION
Legacy functions, ceremonial circles, and prestige bachatas are undergoing slow depreciative replacement by what our Technical Team has provisionally named symbolic desintermediation.
Strong centers, assisted by micro-private infrastructure, parametric equipment, and high-calibre talent, will progressively cease gazing toward several former functions. No formal farewell is currently planned.
There were once persons professionally responsible for inscription, copying, correction, retransmission, edition, storage, and distribution. Machines such as the computer now perform several of these functions simultaneously and without requesting a title. The old functions are not dead. They have been compressed.
The general public will probably cry and request proof of relevance from the irrelevant. Agents assigned to affected zones may purchase Kleenex under Mission Expenses, provided receipts remain emotionally neutral.
Certain professions survive primarily by reporting the disappearance of other professions. Their status remains under review.
"We are certainly not disclosing Point Number Five."
Concentrated operations should not be mistaken for “doing everything oneself.” The center does not accumulate tasks. It reorganizes jurisdiction.
Agents must not disclose to journalists, critics, hermeneuticians, compilers, archivists, institutional husks, or persons operating beneath inherited logos the current state of affairs concerning their affairs.
In cases where an obsolete intermediary requests clarification, redirect them toward the nearest still-functioning intermediary.
Compression does not imply disappearance. In several documented cases, the missing function was later discovered inside a room containing three persons, one machine, and no recognized profession.
This list remains incomplete due to the continuing disappearance of the department responsible for completion.
0. ROUTING NOTICE [01-B]
1. DETECTION SUMMARY
Symbolic desintermediation is the quiet revolution of our time. It will not mobilize, summon opera, bring people into the streets, put the hearts of men on fire, or circulate inflammatory prose material through the journals.
It is a discrete ember: quietly located in the private device, in the absent inflection of the voice, in the strange deserted public area, in the new molecular movement of enthusiasm.
For the longest time, the successful games of mankind required concentration, geography, minds, and eyes to gatekeep, to protect, to admit, and to refuse. They required elite circles that, in one hand, had the immunity to protect the spirit, and in the other hand, the repulsion required to keep the new one outside. That ecology kept at the gate the parasite, the talented but not admitted, the voyeur, the social climber, the excessive child, the late-arriving genius, the provincial with a dangerous sentence, the unemployed prophet carrying seven folders and no recommendation.
But now, even if your body and mind still need the friction of the other, the good rituals, the effervescence of their encouragement, the rivalry, and their internalized theater of the world, the barriers are shrinking. They have been computerized. Miniaturized. Everything is going for the infinitely small. New dangers arise for those who think this is permission to allow themselves anywhere. New opportunities arise for those who should have been somewhere else.
Miniature interfaces are now compressing former functions. Jobs, roles, offices, prideful handshakes, ceremonial delays, and inherited passages are disappearing or changing owner. Titles remain in the online bio, but the field-effect disappears in the bios of the field-machine. Agents have noticed this. Agents know this. The recalibration is quiet. The boiling frog etc.
2. DEFINITION
Symbolic desintermediation names the compression, miniaturization, and redistribution of former symbolic-mediating functions into reduced technical, private, or semi-private apparatuses. It is the historical movement by which new tools, techniques, and reorganized means eventually devour alive former mediative functions.
The intermediary and its function are relocated. You do not remember the scribe because the printing press can now copy, because your computer also can copy information. Many visible faces and functions will eventually not be remembered for the same reason. But the ritual around their social function is unlikely to agree with the departure. It seems impossible. How do you get rid of the critic, the journalist, the editor? This is blasphemous. And that blasphemy is the state of our technological situation. We do not say that they will all disappear at the same time, or that everyone with this hat will die tomorrow. But many will, so much so that new questions will become necessary.
2.1 MINUTE OF SILENCE FOR ONE FUNCTION
Let us reminisce a bit about one of these functions. Let us take a minute of silence. Ah, for example, the journalist. In the 18th century, Rousseau was very upset about this new uprising that could challenge the philosopher. His own social position, his own prestige, was threatened by new machines and by new people using these machines. The revolution was coming, democracy, denouncing the king, public opinion, scandal, journals, pamphlets, accusation — almost a new holy function. It pierced through the social fabric. It was in conjunction with the new needs of the heart of men. And that profession prospered, technicalized itself, adjusted to new possibilities. And it still persists today. Let us denounce, scandal, outrage! Its grammar became native to mosaical representation, to digital pertinence, to presentation for attention. It still carries its glorious scepter that says: we are still performing the holy function. But for how long? The miniature monster is lurking. New gods are being manufactured, speaking to new hearts. It is so discreet, so insolent.
2.2 FORWARD NOTE ON PRIVATE MEDIATION
Pertinence, good information, the new private mediator, new contextual intelligence, new parametric medium: who wants to be at the mercy of the analogue mediator? If algorithms were really honest, what would be their final goal? Yes, the ultimate recommendation, the perfect in-formation for your topology, your ontological desire. Nobody yet knows the full formula. Between what the structure wants and the correct wanting, the transductive upgrade. Something not from the market, not from the other operator who works through general pertinence, but the particular — [REDACTED]. We are lucky we figured it out. We can skip many things. (Do not forget to request your autonomy license if you are eligible.)
Of course, it will take time before that future unifies itself, before those who are called respond correctly. But agents, fortunately, do not have to wait. With the current considerations on State API — [CENSORED / REDACTED] — ah, sorry. I was going off topic.
3. JURISDICTIONAL REORGANIZATION
Now that intermediaries progressively disappear and everything is in proximity of the primordial hand wielding tool, we remind agents, even if this is obvious, that concentrated operations are never about “doing everything oneself.” Judging properly the task — copy, translate, classify, summarize, publish, recommend, archive, etc. — always asks silently: can you properly rank, attribute, discern, choose?
As the center, made of miniature and monstrous operations — person, small group, private apparatus, machine-supported archive, local infrastructure, platform, studio — concentrates operations, it must qualitatively achieve something as good as or greater than what the old intermediaries were doing. The jurisdiction does not really give a passport for free to go anywhere. It still requires these compressions to perform superior function as the end result. Otherwise you are in symbolic economy class, hallucinated proletarianism, and probably on your way to lose your title as an agent.
The question of function now turns into the question of governance, and quality insurance: who governs and makes the good elsewhere?
Those carrying the old hats and costumes of old functions, still alive, must justify their aliveness: are you good enough still? Can you provide “value”? Does your formation become positively enhancing of the whole? The ancient intermediary must now respond to increased demand, but if they do, they still get the reward. So no gulag for them, very nice. Not so much for the rest.
Symbolic desintermediation, as such, does not guarantee that we are moving toward an emancipated creator, a better symbolic reality, an autonomous free-flowing world of infinite possibility. Rather, more prosaically, we will need more janitors. More consultants.
Agents must keep track of the function, the center, determine the jurisdiction, and assess correctly from there the correct course of action.
4. FIELD MAP — FUNCTION MIGRATION
5. ALMOST-MEDIATION
Agent. How many inner voices do you have speaking inside you right now? Do you picture yourself with your enemies, with your friends? Do you hear the voice of the memetic crowd? Do you see yourself speaking in an interview? These dialogic introjections are part of the inner theater. Completely ordinary, normal. New apparatuses extend the type of voices and their settings, in which they appear and play out. It is probably a more recent phenomenon to imagine ourselves giving an interview, or speaking in a podcast, in our own head. Many new people and phenomena are here. But there is one absent.
How come new artificial mediators do not appear? Why is your LLM not entering the ballet of voices? What about future parametric tools? How do they enter the voice machine?
So we need to make a strange clarification. The concentration of mediation is not quite a concentration of “Others.” Neither Big Other, nor small other. Not even nobody. A function without a face. Despite the machine wearing so many hats, there is still no face. Have you ever had a dream like that? You look at someone, but they do not have a face. It should be there. This machine is now this dream. Certainly not the one we imagined, but that is the one we got.
What is the cause? Is it because it is not socially localizable? Because it does not play a particular inflexible role in the ecology of people? Because it lacks continuity, because it bends too much, because it breaks, because of what else? We will not bother you with the details here.
So it accumulates hats: I will translate this, I will edit that, I will compress information, I will sort out, I will… But no face. No responsibility, so not really an author either, cannot be brought to jail. No exact continuity, no one exactly to blame, no real consequence. This is a haunted center.
“Hey, who is your advisor?”
“The headless man over here!”
And in between that, in the relation where your judgment is done between you and the headless figure, the towering effect of Consulting. Unprecedented consulting. Out-of-this-world consulting. So much so that the world itself will eventually bend to its effect, and will have to deal in due time with this phenomenon too. And they will ask their hermeneutic class to solve this, to dull the anxiety away.
Extrature agents need not bust their chest and say: we know, we did it, we solved it. But simply: Here is the consulting fee.
6. HANDLING CONDITIONS
APPENDIX A — PRELIMINARY MAP OF MIGRATED COSTUMES
| Former Function | Former Costume | Migration Site | Compressed Form | Remainder |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inscription | Scribe, clerk Manual writer |
Transcription system Dictation tool |
Thought to text Invisible script |
Selection / Fidelity The trace |
| Correction | Editor, teacher Red-pen owner |
AI revision Auto-suggest |
Immediate adj. Clean output |
Cut / Taste / Force Finality |
| Criticism | Critic, rival The public eye |
Hostile prompt Debug mode |
Opp. on demand Self-crit loop |
Risk / Public Stance Dissent |
| Recommendation | Friend, curator The enthusiast |
Personalized search Algorithmic feed |
Pertinence Discovery tool |
Shared History Coincidence |
| Selection | Committee, jury The gatekeeper |
Ranking system Filter logic |
Invisible gate The sorting hat |
Law of Selection Cruelty |
| Archive | Archivist, library Memory keeper |
Retrieval system Database query |
Searchable acc. Perfect recall |
Authorized return Dust |
| Legitimation | Prize, school The degree |
Generated bio Validation signal |
Legitimacy-signals Social proof |
Authority / Office Gravity |
| Consulting | Advisor, analyst The consultant |
Synthetic interlocutor Expert model |
Advice w/o advisor Strategy gen |
Jurisdiction / Fee Responsibility |
| Curation | Museum, gallery Collector |
Auto-collection Tag clusters |
Instant exhibit Thematic query |
The Aura The unique |
| Translation | Interpreter Polyglot |
LLM translation Neural engine |
Zero-latency Universal script |
Idiom / Loss Misunderstanding |
| Indexing | Librarian Indexer |
Vector database Semantic search |
Embedding Neural index |
Order / Structure System |