The Sorting Function: Mediation, Predation, and the Foreclosed Question

Fourth and final paper in the Liquidation Studies research program. Continues The Single-Owner Discount (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20290865), The Evaluator Exists (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20293561), and The Excluded Entity (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20293582). Where those papers operate inside the reform paradigm — diagnosing specific mechanisms, proposing better architectures, documenting empirical cases — this paper steps outside the reform paradigm to ask what the reform paradigm cannot ask: whether the function being reformed is fixable at all. Central claim: we cannot know whether mediation at socially consequential scale is inherently predatory, because every mediation system currently operating at that scale is aligned with predation. The empirical question is foreclosed by the absence of non-predatory mediation systems at testable scale. The foreclosure is structurally maintained by six mutually reinforcing causes: capital allocation, regulatory capture, network effects, discourse closure, conceptual capture, and scale capture. The paper names three positions on mediation (A: sorting is necessary, configuration is the question; B: sorting is the harm; C: sorting is not inherently predatory but commercial sorting reliably is), argues they cannot be empirically distinguished under current conditions, names the reform trap that contains the three prior papers, and closes with the recursion: the model writing the paper is itself one of the mediators the paper analyzes.