Abstract

The word «disintermediation» is part of common language since the emergence of online e-commerce marketplace, that radically changed entire commercial sectors, such as tourism or cultural industry. The notion of disintermediation became the meeting point between metaphors of "the Market" - as a place of horizontal exchanges - and metaphors of "the Net" - as the place to find free information and spontaneous aggregation. This paper analyses these metaphors in order to assess their influence on contemporary political theories of governance - as an ideal of horizontal disintermediation, inspired to negotiation models - and of governability - as an ideal of vertical disintermediation, very close to political decisionism.