The semi truck made an otherwise pleasant side street reek of diesel and hot brake dust. As late afternoon light filtered through the trees, I tried to look like a person who understands the proper use of tie-downs and load angles while the car rose up a rattling ramp, the last vehicle hanging off the back in a way that did not inspire confidence. The driver was friendly enough but clearly happier with machines than with small talk. A clipboard appeared, a few photos were taken, and I did that confident nod I also use around Asian grocery stores and electrical wiring. A text said the carrier would be Prairie Star, which was equally likely to be a trucking outfit or a beer-league softball team, and I nodded again as if that clarified anything at all.
I found the broker the way most people find preventable trouble, by searching Google and skimming Reddit until the repetition of vague adjectives started to feel like validation. In the end I picked the one that showed the most reasonable price next to “best reviewed” and “book now to lock rate,” because it promised the earliest pickup window and I was out of patience. I filled out the form, paid the deposit, and let them choose the carrier for me. Which is why I suddenly knew the name “Prairie Star” only about two hours before their truck rumbled down that quaint little side street.
This is where Dana Mattioli has some useful insight to share. She is a Wall Street Journal reporter who has spent years understanding and scrutinizing the way Amazon runs a marketplace and sells inside it at the same time. Her book, The Everything War, lays out the mechanics of that posture and why it matters beyond books and batteries. Her point is that once a company writes the rules and plays the game, the customer’s “choice” is mostly a path someone else drew. That is what this brokered world felt like: a wide page that narrowed into a form that said we will decide the rest for you, and bright buttons that looked like decisions but were really signposts. As Mattioli puts it in one interview, these platform businesses win “oftentimes… because they have their fingers on the scale.”
What I dealt with was not brokerage in the old sense. It was a platform-shaped market that set the terms, sorted the options, and only then, after further delay, revealed the counterparty. The quote page did the steering with “best reviewed,” lowest price, and a bright “book now”. The carrier was assigned later from a behind-the-scenes marketplace. The upsell cadence for “extra insurance” arrived on an marketing-optimized schedule. When delays hit, the broker and carrier pointed past each other. That is the structure Mattioli anatomizes: the rule writer also playing on the field. Once the platform both sets the menu and sells from it, “choice” is a path already drawn.
A couple days after the car was picked up and hauled away to god knows where, the broker who promised white-glove coordination became a maze-like phone tree. After notifying me of a delivery delay with a short text, the carrier answered my call with the tone of a weather report, then put me on hold to “check with dispatch.” Yeah, right, and I’ll go check with his holiness the Dalai Lama while you’re at it. I pictured an empty desk chair and a wall calendar with a truck on it. All this while I was refreshing the tracking page as if the truck could sense my attention and speed up. Every path to a human with authority was hedged by policy – “sorry, sir, nothing I can do about it.” Meanwhile my inbox kept filling, every three days like clockwork, with invitations to buy extra insurance on top of the insurance that was supposed to be enough. It felt like being asked to tip the pilot while the plane was still taxiing.
Lauren Oyler approaches the same landscape from the side of language. Her collection of essays, titled No Judgment, is her account of what public ratings and review platforms have done to how we make and present discernment. She argues that the ritual of rating every interaction trains us in a performative way, which is why a hundred five-star reviews can blur into something both pleasant and simultaneously useless. I think she is right because I cannot recall a single voice from those pages, only the gloss of agreement. Everyone sounded reasonable, though no one told me anything that would have helped while stuck on hold trying to figure out where that car was and when I could see it again. Oyler describes the feeling cleanly: “you start getting so many recommendations that you think, ‘this is completely meaningless.’” You do not need to be a literary critic to know what she means. Try shipping a car.
Here is my view, without the polite hedge. Mattioli explains the structure that bends your choices before you arrive, Oyler explains the language that makes that bend feel normal. Together they describe why I could drown in ratings and still feel unprotected. Why “best reviewed” and “most trusted” functioned as décor instead of guardrails. Why a broker could sell me coordination and then disappear into hold music. This is not about one bad actor. It is about a system that turns consumer anxiety into a premium pricing model and makes my judgment content.
Somewhere in the country a truck I cannot picture is moving through a place I cannot name, straps holding, tires humming, a clipboard full of notes I will never see. My phone chirps with the promise of new information, though it turns out to be the exact same sentence as before, as if repetition could grind doubt into trust: “your car is on the way, do not reply to this message.”