Platform gig labor bypasses the mediating firm just as immediacy fiction bypasses mediating form.

Evidence

The syncing of logistics and investor systems in platform startups deliver the new “sharing” economy, the disintermediated infrastructure of immediacy style. In this gigification of labor, companies and jobs are on the wane, while services sold by the unit are on the rise. The resulting conditions for both workers and consumers bypass the firm as middleman to facilitate direct contact and instant fulfillment, begetting an image of the economy as consentingly intimate independent contractors: Mutuality, Inc., immediacy’s in-firm form. In constant pursuit of reputational capital to shore up their contractor profiles, individual laborers are rendered “auto-entrepreneurs,” self-employees who charismatically radiate their intrinsic value. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes her causal claim throughout: economic disintermediation (Uber-ization) and aesthetic anti-mediation share one logic. Ties to gig-economy scholarship like Kessler or Srnicek.
• DEFINE: Coins the parallel ‘Mutuality, Inc.’ and ‘auto-entrepreneur’ by which brokerage-free exchange inside firms models immediacy’s rejection of mediation.