Well, it says that we have now, and actually have always had, a problem of putting sustenance together with appetites in a socially accepted manner. In fact, social ecosystems are significantly driven by this requirement. With the expansion of social ecosystems beyond the smaller grouping structures, a single marketplace became ineffective as a mechanism through which to bring together consumers and providers within a specific appetite and sustenance subsystem. More abstractly, we consider these mechanisms under the guise of market supply and market demand and we recognize that under the constraints of the physical ecosystem these two concepts exist within a state of tension which resists legal (policy) conformance in favor of price elasticity and changes in equilibrium. In such a marketplace, the concept of matching these two ends of a sustenance loop elicits the actions of a broker; an entity whose purpose is to match specific needs to available content, hopefully within the constraints of the appropriate policy infrastructure. When policy restrictions place an artificial dislocation on the supply-demand relationship, then new mechanisms may be brought to bear as a means to bring them back into equilibrium: drug dealers, rum-runners, bootleggers, gun runners, and conflict diamond smugglers come immediately to mind. In other words, the space between the legal and illegal supply-demand curves becomes the playground of the illegal broker. When presented in the form of a person, a broker, whether legal or illegal, is one who is typically well known in a particular domain as a trusted third-party. Consumers with needs of a particular type can seek the services of the broker to find a provider to fulfill that specific need. When presented in other forms, a Web portal for example, the same constraints hold true. To be trusted, the broker should be well known in a particular domain.

In a decentralized, market driven economic system, the role of broker is a central feature of the policy infrastructure. Consider a rather simple consideration of what today we would view as retail sales; more specifically, retail food sales. In order to put meals on the table, I need groceries in the pantry. So, I need to locate a store from which to buy the quantities of food that I can reasonably store in my pantry. I don’t have a lot of space, and certain foodstuffs won’t keep for a long period of time, so I need to be able to purchase them at periodic and predictable intervals in predictably small amounts. Our societal solution to this type of need has been the creation of retail grocery stores. The term retail in this regard refers to the sale of relatively small amounts of various items directly to the consumers of those items. The retail store from which a consumer makes such purchases has a corresponding need to acquire the materials for resale in small quantities. In order to meet the needs of many individual consumers, the retail store seeks to purchase larger quantities of foodstuffs, and in wide enough varieties to satisfy the varying appetites of those different individuals. This entails garnering material from many different producers. To facilitate this level of content acquisition a special type of merchant termed a wholesaler came into being. A wholesaler is essentially a broker who serves to connect the wide variety of content producers with the similarly wide variety of food retailers. Producers know about such brokers and retail stores know about such brokers. Hence, one goes to the broker to sell wares in large quantities, while another goes to buy product, also in large quantities, for subsequent resale. In the case of wholesalers, the broker may actually buy from a producer and sell to a retailer. In other sustenance loops, the broker might simply put the buyer together with the seller, thereby enabling a transaction, for a small fee of course.

From what we might view as the more classical perspective of a broker that we’ve described above, the concept has evolved through a number of significant extensions over the years. A relatively recent example introduces the forerunners of the current secure cores we find in various personal electronic devices; that is, credit cards. The story, fully recounted on the Diner’s Club Web site (www. dinersclubus.com), we sketch here:

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