The Middle-System

Efficiency In All Things

Middle market games, middlemen, and the middle class – it seems that all of the middles are getting taken out of the way these days. Journeys are sidelined in favor of destinations, or the journey itself is becoming the focus. The road trip is chosen for its affordability – to enjoy the journey is more the function of the cruise ship, to maximize the destination the privilege of air travel. One of these makes the middle a part of the journey, while the other simply cuts out the middle to get to where you need to go. The growth of the latter, in lieu of the former represents our growing desire to increase accessibility and affordability by removing steps from the process – the ability to move more people, farther, and let them stay longer than they could with a road trip, at the expense of driving through all the towns and freeways between them and their destination.

The process of purchasing airline tickets themselves is a perfect example. I still remember a time when you would have to first have a passport from your country and then go to the embassy of the country you want to go to in order to obtain a visa that allows you to stay there – usually requiring the provision of many documents – bank statements to prove your income, citizenship papers from the country of origin, hotel reservations to prove your intent in the foreign country are pretty standard practice. Once that’s done and your visa’s in process, you had to get yourself over to the airline’s ticketing office, buy a ticket, and then wait for your visa. On the day of your flight, you’d have to go early, check in your bags, and make it through immigration.

While the processes are the same today, many of the steps have been made both more efficient and more varied than ever.

Passports can be applied for digitally, and all you have to do is to bring your requirements and payment with you on the day itself, before it’s couriered right to your door. Many visas don’t even require you to go to the embassy anymore – they usually have an online portal to put in your details, which are then shipped off to the local visa office partner, like VFS Global. They handle the business of actually receiving your documents and ensuring everything is alright, before you’re transferred over to the actual embassy to be evaluated.

Buying a ticket is even easier – pop onto your airline’s website and book the flight you want. This flexibility has made tickets more varied – beyond the traditional first, business, and economy classes, you can now specifically choose premium economy seats, aisle seats, seats by the emergency doors where you’ll be face to face with the flight attendant. You now have a wide array of options for baggage allowances – handcarry only, a single 25 kilo bag, two 25 kilo bags, and so on. You also have the option of shipping your baggage, if you have things you don’t need right then and there.

Rather than having to go out and do it physically, everything is online now – streamlined for maximum efficiency, accessibility, and affordability. In order to make this possible requires a legion of new workers. VFS staff who handle inquiries and process data, web developers to build the websites these new methods use, backend marketing who decides what promotions to run and what people need, payment processors to let people use their credit cards. If you think about it, the middleman isn’t really gone – they’ve just been hidden, given agency, or otherwise abstracted away.

You never deal with Visa, Mastercard, or American Express – you deal with your local bank.

You don’t deal with Airbnb – you deal with the property owner.

You don’t deal with VFS – they’re simply an agency hired by the embassy to handle that work.

The middlemen are simply part of the process now, in the form of middle-systems, routinized flowcharts that allow us to scale systems and efficiently process far more people than we ever could before, powered by energy density and computing power our ancestors did not possess. These middle-systems exist to cut out the middleman and their discretion, their non-standard ideas and decisions, and make sure that every box is checked, every i is dotted, and every t is crossed. These middle-systems are the same as World-Systems, attempts to prepare for situations that have not yet occurred – counterfactual situations – that must systematically redefine as many phenomena as possible into clearly delineated, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories that allow for processing-by-category, rather than ruling on a case-to-case business.

The proof of the growth of the middle-system is in the massive growth in the size and value of intermediary professions. Intermediary roles such as lawyers, accountants, management consultants, shippers and transporters, gig economy platforms, and most of all, banks and financial institutions, have only grown in prominence in contrast to the others. Regulatory, supervisory, and advisory bodies have grown in number and scope, international standards offices and best practices bringing everyone into alignment on how to do what needs to be done.

This worldwide harmonization is the leading edge of standardization and efficiency – reached by controlling inputs and outputs. Standard inputs allow standard processes to produce standard outputs, standardly increasing productivity by exchanging individual, unique cases for rote ones. This has been, overall, a boon – starting from physical machines with operational routines, to computers with digital routines, and now to people, with process routines. These routines take away variance from processes, allowing each successive step in the process to rely on the standardized outputs of the previous, and so on, and so on.

For a stark example of this process, think of your own education. Kids are put in a classroom by age, and regardless of their interests, personalities, or circadian rhythm, ending in the usual madness that is seen in the modern public school classroom. Doesn’t matter who you are or where you were – you took the standard examinations, you followed the criteria laid down by the education bureau of your country, and you went through all the years of schooling. By contrast, previous generations often had stories of whiz kids who were advanced a grade, studying with fellow students years older than them. Not everybody went to college, with technical-vocational schooling and simply dropping out and going straight to work being options in the general gestalt. Not so today – everyone has to go to finish high school, go to college, and get a paying corporate job, or so we’re told.

The Standard Model of Happiness. Doesn’t count if it doesn’t reach the eyes.

Even happiness has a standard model now.

That reduction of variance naturally includes the reduction of the agency and judgment required to produce process variances. By standardizing the processes we use in real life, we are being trained to follow what we’re told to do, rather than equipped to learn and fail on our own. The Middle-System has taken over, telling us what, when, how, and why things need to be done, rather than allowing us to decide for ourselves.

Here, I think, is the greatest generational divide, particularly among the educated classes. These days everything comes with tags, categories, and descriptions, telling you beforehand what it is and why you should pick it. Doing research easily removes any sense of mystery or adventure in an endeavor, forcing those of the Internet Generation to deliberately avoid research or spoilers to get the experience of our forebears. Pursuing efficiency, with its strict control of inputs and outputs, removes our ability to be surprised. Everything is done with the next step in mind – the next mountain to climb, the next promotion to earn, the next milestone to reach.

Planning and preparation and the quest for efficiency, via standard inputs and outputs, has branched out of the professional sphere and infected our whole lives, grinding the fun out of everything.

And people wonder why everyone seems so worn-down these days.