I remember sitting in a Chicago diner in 2018 watching a food delivery driver argue with the cashier about missing fries. The customer paid $14 for a $9 burger, the restaurant kept $6 after platform fees, and the driver earned $3 for 40 minutes work. The only happy participant was the app silently skimming 30% from everyone involved. This isn't innovation, it's digital feudalism with better branding.

The promise of disintermediation died with Web 1.0. When eBay first let people sell Beanie Babies directly to collectors, we assumed the future meant producers and consumers holding hands across digital campfires. Instead, we got platform capitalism's bait and switch. New intermediaries popped up faster than mushrooms after rain, each taking bigger bites of our transactions than the brick and mortar middlemen they replaced. Remember when we laughed at travel agents taking 10% commissions? Now we pay 30% to app stores for the privilege of accessing customers we already marketed to ourselves.

What strikes me most isn't the existence of middlemen, but their audacity in disappearing their own footprints. When my neighborhood bookstore closed last year, the owner showed me his Amazon seller reports. His $30 cookbooks generated $27 for Amazon between fulfillment fees, referral fees, and advertising costs just to appear in search results. The cruel joke? Customers paid $35 thinking they'd 'cut out the middleman' by avoiding his storefront. The modern intermediary thrives on this exact illusion of efficiency.

Consider pharmaceutical benefit managers, America's most anonymous extortionists. While everyone screams about insulin prices, these shadow brokers between manufacturers and insurers invent rebate schemes so convoluted that even CEOs can't explain who profits. It's no coincidence that PBMs multiplied like roaches after Obamacare banned insurer profiteering. When we regulate one intermediary, three smarter ones emerge wearing loophole proof vests.

I saw this coming twenty years ago covering the Microsoft antitrust case. We broke up the OS monopoly only to birth bigger beasts. Google and Apple now control 98% of mobile app stores, charging developers the same 30% vig that made us rage against Standard Oil's railroad kickbacks. History's lesson? Middlemen don't vanish. They just rebrand their toll booths.

The human cost manifests in my Uber driver's eyes when he explains why he sleeps in his Civic between shifts. He shows me his earnings screenshot: $182 in fares, $74 to Uber, $38 in gas. The platform claims he makes $23/hour before expenses. His reality? $11/hour in a city where parking tickets cost $65. Yet when California tried forcing benefits for gig workers, these companies spent $200 million convincing voters that 'flexibility' was worth more than healthcare. As if choosing between kidney stones and rent payments constitutes worker empowerment.

Meanwhile in agriculture, Tyson Foods perfected the art of the captive supplier. Chicken farmers invest $2 million in coops meeting Tyson's exact specs, financing equipment at Tyson approved banks under Tyson written contracts. When feed prices spike or demand drops, Tyson simply cuts what they'll pay per pound. Farmers cant switch buyers because no one else uses their custom coops. It's sharecropping with RSS feeds.

Regulators keep falling for the same three card monte trick. We scrutinize Amazon's treatment of warehouse workers while ignoring how its $31 billion seller fees strangle small businesses more effectively than any workplace violation. We debate whether Uber drivers are employees or contractors yet ignore how the platform's 25% take rate makes the employment classification irrelevant by ensuring nobody earns living wages either way.

The solution isn't nostalgia for mom and pop shops. I don't want to haggle with twenty farmers for weekly groceries like my grandparents did. But we must question why Europe caps food delivery fees at 15% while American apps charge restaurants 30%. Why South Korea forced Apple to accept alternative payment systems while US developers still pay the 'Apple tax.' The answer lies in lobbying disclosures showing these intermediaries spent $800 million last year convincing politicians that their rent seeking is innovation.

This shapes our economy more than interest rates or trade policies. When DoorDash takes 35% from restaurants already operating on 5% margins, that's not business. That's a private sector VAT where Congress gets no say in the rate or how proceeds get used. Every dollar siphoned by opaque intermediaries is a dollar not spent hiring workers, improving products, or lowering consumer prices.

Twenty years from now, historians will marvel at how we normalized corporations taxing commerce without democratic oversight. They'll compare Visa and Mastercard's duopoly over payment routing to medieval bridge trolls charging peasants for market access. They'll laugh at how we called gig workers 'independent contractors' while algorithms controlled their every move. Unless we peel back the curtain on middlemen masquerading as marketplaces, the only thing disintermediated will be our own economic dignity.